Category: 3-SometimeTechTalk

Ranjan Roy from Margins is back for our weekly discussion of the latest tech news. We cover: 1) Alex's unexpected Sergey Brin interview 2) Jony Ive sells his IO device company to OpenAI 3) What this device could be 4) Is Jony + Sam bad for Apple? 5) Could this device work? 6) What the move to ambient assistants could signal for tech 7) Anthropic's first developer event 8) Is Anthropic's move to code and tools a smart one? 9) Claude will blackmail you 10) Sorting through hype vs. truth in a fun game that everyone loves 11) Google's Veo 3 12) Where Google stands vs. before the week started.

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Get the whole rundown of what’s new in this version of Android Developer’s Studio. 

Google I/O just happened, and the Android team announced a bunch of things. 

Connect with Matthew on LinkedIn.

Congrats to Populist badge winner chudo xl for their answer to Android app stuck at "Launching on Devices" or 'device 'DEVICEID' not found' error.

Demis Hassabis is the CEO of Google DeepMind. Sergey Brin is the co-founder of Google. The two leading tech executives join Alex Kantrowitz for a live interview at Google's IO developer conference to discuss the frontiers of AI research. Tune in to hear their perspective on whether scaling is tapped out, how reasoning techniques have performed, what AGI actually means, the potential for an intelligence explosion, and much more. Tune in for a deep look into AI's cutting edge featuring two executives building it.

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Enjoying Big Technology Podcast? Please rate us five stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ in your podcast app of choice.

Want a discount for Big Technology on Substack? Here’s 25% off for the first year: https://www.bigtechnology.com/subscribe?coupon=0843016b

Questions? Feedback? Write to: bigtechnologypodcast@gmail.com

Koray Kavukcuoglu is the Chief Technology Officer of Google DeepMind. Kavukcuoglu joins Big Technology to discuss how his team is pushing the frontier of AI research inside Google as the company's Google IO developer event gets underway. Tune in to hear Kavukcuoglu break down the value of brute scale versus novel techniques and how the new inference-time “DeepThink” mode could supercharge reasoning. We also cover Veo 3’s sound-synced video generation, the open-source-versus-proprietary debate, and what a ten-percent jump in model quality might unlock for users everywhere.

Matt Van Itallie is the son of a math teacher and a coder - so this explains why he now uses code as data. He is a proud Boy Scout, making it of course to Eagle Scout and beyond. After being a management consultant, he found his way to ed tech, and fell in love with improving code. Outside of technology, he is married with 3 amazing kids. He likes to run, play ultimate frisbee, and has a wicked cool collection of minor league baseball hats.

Sitting a room with the head of Sales, Matt noticed that there were systems like Salesforce that were built to assess the state and future opportunity for business. He then thought, where are these systems for the code itself?

This is the creation story of Sema.

Sponsors

• Mailtrap
• Speakeasy
• QA Wolf
• SnapTrade

Links

• https://www.semasoftware.com/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/mvi/

DBOS Transact is a lightweight, open-source library that makes durable execution simple so you no longer need to worry about manually coding retries and recovery procedures.

Connect with Jeremy on LinkedIn.

Connect with Qian on LinkedIn.

Shoutout to Stack Overflow user Vanita L., whose answer to What does the Swift 'mutating' keyword mean? earned them a Lifeboat badge.

• pre-commit: install with uv
• PEP 773: A Python Installation Manager for Windows (Accepted)
• Changes for Textual
• The Best Programmers I Know
• Extras
• Joke

About the show

Sponsored by NordLayer: pythonbytes.fm/nordlayer

Connect with the hosts

• Michael: @mkennedy@fosstodon.org / @mkennedy.codes (bsky)
• Brian: @brianokken@fosstodon.org / @brianokken.bsky.social
• Show: @pythonbytes@fosstodon.org / @pythonbytes.fm (bsky)

Join us on YouTube at pythonbytes.fm/live to be part of the audience. Usually Monday at 10am PT. Older video versions available there too.

Finally, if you want an artisanal, hand-crafted digest of every week of the show notes in email form? Add your name and email to our friends of the show list, we'll never share it.

Brian #1: pre-commit: install with uv

• Adam Johnson
• uv tool works great at keeping tools you use on lots of projects up to date quickly, why not use it for pre-commit.
• The extension of pre-commit-uv will use uv to create virtual environments and install packages fore pre-commit. This speeds up initial pre-commit cache creation.
• However, Adam is recommending this flavor of using pre-commit because it’s just plain easier to install pre-commit and dependencies than the official pre-commit install guide.
• Win-win.
• Side note: No Adam, I’m not going to pronounce uv “uhv”, I’ll stick with “you vee”, even Astral tells me I’m wrong

Michael #2: PEP 773: A Python Installation Manager for Windows (Accepted)

• via pycoders newsletter
• One manager to rule them all – PyManager.
• PEP 773 replaces all existing Windows installers (.exe “traditional” bundle, per-version Windows Store apps, and the separate py.exe launcher) with a single MSIX app called Python Install Manager (nick-named PyManager).
• PyManager should be mainstream by CPython 3.15, and the traditional installer disappears no earlier than 3.16 (≈ mid-2027).
• Simple, predictable commands.
  • python → launches “the best” runtime already present or auto-installs the latest CPython if none is found.
  • py → same launcher as today plus management sub-commands:
  • py install, py uninstall, py list, py exec, py help.
  • Optional python3 and python3.x aliases can be enabled by adding one extra PATH entry.

Michael #3: Changes for Textual

• Bittersweet news: the business experiment ends, but the code lives on.
• Textual began as a hobby project layered on top of Rich, but it has grown into a mature, “makes-the-terminal-do-the-impossible” TUI framework with an active community and standout documentation.
• Despite Textual’s technical success, the team couldn’t pinpoint a single pain-point big enough to sustain a business model, so the company will wind down in the coming weeks.
• The projects themselves aren’t going anywhere: they’re stable, battle-tested, and will continue under the stewardship of the original author and the broader community.

Brian #4: The Best Programmers I Know

• Matthias Endler
• “I have met a lot of developers in my life. Lately, I asked myself: “What does it take to be one of the best? What do they all have in common?””
• The list
  • Read the reference
  • Know your tools really well
  • Read the error message
  • Break down problems
  • Don’t be afraid to get your hands dirty
  • Always help others
  • Write
  • Never stop learning
  • Status doesn’t matter
  • Build a reputation
  • Have patience
  • Never blame the computer
  • Don’t be afraid to say “I don’t know”
  • Don’t guess
  • Keep it simple
• Each topic has a short discussion. So don’t just ready the bullet points, check out the article.

Extras

Brian:

• I had a great time in Munich last week. I a talk at a company event, met with tons of people, and had a great time.
  • The best part was connecting with people from different divisions working on similar problems.
  • I love the idea of internal conferences to get people to self organize by topic and meet people they wouldn’t otherwise, to share ideas.
  • Also got started working on a second book on the plane trip back.

Michael:

• Talk Python Clips (e.g. mullet)
• Embrace your cloud firewall (example).
• Python 3.14.0 beta 1 is here
• Congrats to the new PSF Fellows.
• Cancelled faster CPython
• bsky.app/profile/snarky.ca post

Joke: How To Fix Your Computer