Emily Bender is a computational linguistics professor at the University of Washington. Alex Hanna is the Director of Research at the Distributed AI Research Institute. Bender and Hanna join Big Technology to discuss what their new book, “The AI‑Con," which they describe as the layered ways today’s language‑model boom obscures environmental costs, labor harms, and shaky science. Tune in to hear a lively back‑and‑forth on whether chatbots are useful tools or polished parlor tricks. We also cover benchmark gaming, data‑center water use, doomerism, and more. Hit play for a candid debate that will leave you smarter about where generative AI really stands — and what comes next.
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In this episode of The BlueHat Podcast, host Nic Fillingham and Wendy Zenone are joined by Felix Boulet fresh off his participation in Zero Day Quest. Felix talks about his unique journey from industrial maintenance to becoming a full-time vulnerability researcher, and how that background fuels his passion for hacking and bug bounty work. He explains his method for finding bugs in Microsoft products—particularly in identity systems—and why identity is such a valuable target for attackers. Felix also shares highlights from the Zero Day Quest event, where he focused on building connections, learning from Microsoft engineers, and experiencing the collaborative side of the security community.
In This Episode You Will Learn:
Why identity-based bugs are especially valuable and dangerous in the security world
When breaking identity controls can be the key to pivoting through an entire system
How SharePoint's concept of "virtual files" impacts vulnerability validation
Some Questions We Ask:
What was your first bug bounty experience?
Can you explain what the flash challenges were and what your experience was like?
Do you think sharing bug ideas could cost you a bounty?
Episode overview:
In this conversation, Verto co-founder and CEO Ola Oyetayo shares the journey of building a cross-border payments platform that tackles the unique challenges African businesses face when making international transactions.
Since graduating from Y Combinator in 2019, Verto has established itself as what Oyetayo describes as a profitable and cashflow positive fintech serving multiple African markets. Incidentally, the company recently made headlines after winning the prestigious $1 million Milken-Motsepe Prize in FinTech.
He discusses his team's pragmatic approach to addressing payment barriers in emerging markets, why traditional financial institutions have failed to serve these regions effectively, and how technology can disrupt traditional banking networks that have historically excluded certain markets.
Andile Masuku engages Oyetayo on the evolution of fintech in Africa, the role of privilege and networks in business success, and the future potential of stablecoins to revolutionise cross-border payments in ways that might prove more transformative for emerging markets than developed ones.
Key topics:
- Verto's position in the cross-border payments landscape
- The strategic decision to focus on B2B rather than consumer payments
- The untapped $286 billion trade flow between Africa and China
- Why 96-97% of business cross-border payments still go through traditional banks
- The innovator's dilemma Verto faces with the rise of stablecoins
Notable points:
1. In 2018, Oyetayo launched Verto's business model alongside his co-founder Anthony Oduu after spotting a solutions gap for African businesses making international payments outside of traditional banks
2. Verto has been profitable and cash flow positive for approximately 18 months
3. How a chance meeting with legendary VC Vinod Khosla at YC in 2019 first turned him on to the stablecoin investment opportunity—years before they became mainstream
4. The company operates in Nigeria, South Africa, Kenya, Tanzania and the Francophone region
5. Despite previous experience in institutional finance, Oyetayo admits "ignorance is bliss" helped him tackle a problem others saw as too risky
6. The potential of stablecoins to solve liquidity, volatility and capital control challenges in emerging markets
Listen out for Oyetayo's take on Paystack's B2C play Zap, the fintech ecosystem implications of Moniepoint's "unicornification," and his contrarian insight that stablecoins will revolutionise emerging markets while having minimal impact in developed economies: "This is not a popular opinion... There's just no case for stablecoins in developed markets. People talk about, oh, it's going to disrupt Visa and MasterCard... I don't see that coming anytime soon."
Image credit: Verto
Dynatrace is an AI-powered observability platform. It empowers today’s AI-enabled digital enterprises to understand their systems and data so they can analyze, automate, and innovate faster.
Kevin Hurley grew up in a multi-kid house, which is where he got his competitive nature. He used to play 2 on 2 with his Dad and siblings at home. He went to school for electrical engineering, and funny enough, interviewed for a computer science job by accident, effectively stumbling into the trade. Outside of tech, he spends his free time with his fiancé, planning for the wedding, and visiting Manhattan beach for a good walk .
Kevin was part of the team that attempted to launch crypto at Facebook. Although that didn't work out, they realized that the backbone of the system needed to be built on something more common - and something that was lightning fast.
Python has many string formatting styles which have been added to the language over the years. Early Python used the % operator to injected formatted values into strings. And we have string.format() which offers several powerful styles. Both were verbose and indirect, so f-strings were added in Python 3.6. But these f-strings lacked security features (think little bobby tables) and they manifested as fully-formed strings to runtime code. Today we talk about the next evolution of Python string formatting for advanced use-cases (SQL, HTML, DSLs, etc): t-strings. We have Paul Everitt, David Peck, and Jim Baker on the show to introduce this upcoming new language feature.
PEP 750 – Template Strings: peps.python.org tdom - Placeholder for future library on PyPI using PEP 750 t-strings: github.com PEP 750: Tag Strings For Writing Domain-Specific Languages: discuss.python.org How To Teach This: peps.python.org PEP 501 – General purpose template literal strings: peps.python.org Python's new t-strings: davepeck.org PyFormat: Using % and .format() for great good!: pyformat.info flynt: A tool to automatically convert old string literal formatting to f-strings: github.com Examples of using t-strings as defined in PEP 750: github.com htm.py issue: github.com Exploits of a Mom: xkcd.com pyparsing: github.com Watch this episode on YouTube: youtube.com Episode #505 deep-dive: talkpython.fm/505 Episode transcripts: talkpython.fm
Jay Shah, former Chief Operating Officer of Octo and now Strategic Advisor at Technomile joins the show to explore how small and mid-sized companies can scale effectively and thrive amid federal market shifts. We also unpack his personal journey from helping build Octo from the ground up to navigating multiple acquisitions and get his candid perspective on the evolving landscape of government contracting, particularly the increasing focus on performance-based acquisition, innovation, and the rising expectations for industry to deliver differentiated value. Finally we dive deep into how tools like Technomile’s platform are equipping businesses to capture growth opportunities with precision, optimize resource alignment, and meet the moment of generational disruption in federal procurement.
Ranjan Roy from Margins is back for our weekly discussion of the latest tech news. We cover: 1) OpenAI has another new top executive structure 2) What is Sam Altman's role now? 3) Who is Fidji Simo, OpenAI's new CEO of Applications 4) OpenAI abandons total for-profit conversion 5) Microsoft's demands on OpenAI 6) Could Apple replace Google as the default search with AI? 7) Is it an either or decision? 8) Could Apple make AI companies bid for the default search position? 9) Everyone is cheating using ChatGPT in college 10) Do people need to change or does the education system need to change?
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Alembic is an AI platform that helps organizations see how marketing spend connects to revenue so they can illuminate blind spots and make more informed business decisions.
