Category: 3-SometimeTechTalk

Shai Ber is 40 years old, living in Tel Aviv. He loves to travel, hike, and eat new kinds of food. He loves to swim at the beach often, but he admits, tech consumes a large amount of his life - and he likes it that way. Elad Ben-Israel is also from Tel Aviv, and is 43 years old - and he jokingly claims that he is the responsible adult in the company. Outside of tech, he enjoys attending burning man, and making sure he gets his workout in,

About year ago, Shai and Elad started a company to make using the cloud easier. As they went about thinking how best to do this, they struck gold in the thought of creating an expressive programming language.

This is the creation story of Monada and Winglang.

Sponsors

• Cipherstash
• Treblle
• CAST AI 
• Firefly
• Turso
• Memberstack

Links

• Website: https://monada.co/
• Website: https://www.winglang.io/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shai-ber-245b1226/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hackingonstuff/

Our Sponsors:
* Check out Vanta: https://vanta.com/CODESTORY


Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/code-story/donations

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Richard Mathenge was part of a team of contractors in Nairobi, Kenya who trained OpenAI's GPT models. He did so as a team lead at Sama, an AI training company that partnered on the project. In this episode of Big Technology Podcast, Mathenge tells the story of his experience. During the training, he was routinely subjected to sexually explicit material, offered insufficient counseling, and his team members were paid, in some cases, just $1 per hour. Listen for an in-depth look at how these models are trained, and for a look at the human side of Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback.

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OpenAI's response:

We engaged Sama as part of our ongoing work to create safer AI systems and prevent harmful outputs. We take the mental health of our employees and our contractors very seriously. One of the reasons we first engaged Sama was because of their commitment to good practices. Our previous understanding was that wellness programs and 1:1 counseling were offered, workers could opt out of any work without penalization, exposure to explicit content would have a limit, and sensitive information would be handled by workers who were specifically trained to do so. Upon learning of Sama worker conditions in February of 2021 we immediately sought to find out more information from Sama. Sama simultaneously informed us that they were exiting the content moderation space all together.

OpenAI paid Sama $12.50 / hour. We tried to obtain more information about worker compensation from Sama but they never provided us with hard numbers. Sama did provide us with a study they conducted across other companies that do content moderation in that region and shared Sama’s wages were 2-3x the competition.

Andrew Louder grew up west of Houston, TX, in a town called Katy. He got into tech during his web mastery class in High School. He's a business graduate from Texas A&M University, and he got a taste of what life would be like as an entrepreneur when he founded a social group of Latin American students. Outside of tech, he lives in Dallas, married with 3 kids, and is enjoying all that life has to offer in that space.

About 6 years ago, Andrew decided to jump out and be on his own, with the hope of making a bigger impact than what he was experiencing. He went the solo consultant right for a while, bringing big firm experience to the table and trying things out. Fast forward to now, he and his team are at the forefront of utilizing AI to help you grow your business.

This is the creation story of Louder Co.

Sponsors

• Cipherstash
• Treblle
• CAST AI 
• Firefly
• Turso

Links

• Website: https://www.louderco.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewlouder/

Our Sponsors:
* Check out Vanta: https://vanta.com/CODESTORY


Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/code-story/donations

Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Nikita Fedorov has been a tech guy all his life. He loves physics, and eventually decided to try out being a developer, starting out with PHP and doing it for 7 years. Eventually, he moved into leadership and management of engineering teams. Outside of tech, he into his side projects and playing video games, of which is favorite is the game Dark Souls.

While he was an engineering manager, Nikita went looking for a good suite of tools to support manual testing. All of the tools he found were archaic, and looked like they came from the days of the mainframe. He decided to start building a tool that met his own need... and people liked it.

This is the creation story of Qase.

Sponsors

• Cipherstash
• Treblle
• CAST AI 
• Firefly
• Turso

Links

• Website: https://qase.io/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nifedorov/

Our Sponsors:
* Check out Vanta: https://vanta.com/CODESTORY


Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/code-story/donations

Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Topics covered in this episode:

• Python's Missing Batteries: Essential Libraries You're Missing Out On
• awesome-polars
• Running Headless Selenium in Python (2023)
• Gracy
• Extras
• Joke

See the full show notes for this episode on the website at pythonbytes.fm/336

Visit Dagna’s website, theMindfulDev.com, to learn more about her coaching process, which is built around understanding what fulfillment looks like for each client. 

Dagna is on LinkedIn.

You can also connect with Ceora on Twitter or her website.

Ryan is also on Twitter, especially when there’s a good AI joke to be shared.

Gold star for Lifeboat badge winner JasonHorsleyTech for rescuing the question Installing PHP 7.3 on a new MacBook Pro with the new A1 chip (Apple silicon).

Nate Ashton, Managing Director for Public Policy at Dcode and Executive Director for The Alliance for Commercial Technology in Government joins the show to discuss what ways he thinks government organizations can see more emerging tech companies engage in a more meaningful manner. We also talk about what lessons he feels the government has learned policy-wise from the pandemic era and the things that are giving him confidence right now that the public sector modernization industry is moving in the right direction.

Ben Smith is the author of Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral. He's also the editor-in-chief of Semafor. He joins Ranjan Roy and Alex Kantrowitz for our weekly news recap show. We cover: 1) New Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino 2) Tucker Carlson's move to Twitter 3) End of the streaming wars 4) Trump's CNN Interview 5) Lessons from Ben's book, Traffic 6) Mark Zuckerberg's jiu-jitsu prowess.

You can find Ben's book here.

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

For weekly updates on the show, sign up for the pod newsletter on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/6901970121829801984/

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