In this episode of Leaders of Code, Dan Lines, cofounder and COO of LinearB; Ben Matthews, Senior Director of Engineering at Stack Overflow; and host Ben Popper talk about why velocity should be a diagnostic tool, not the primary goal of engineering teams. They also touch on the need for cross-disciplinary collaboration to align engineering with business objectives.
They also discuss:
AI's potential to automate repetitive tasks, allowing engineers to focus on more complex work.
The challenges of scaling organizations and the importance of centralized developer experience teams to improve productivity.
How non-technical staff can contribute to engineering tasks through the democratization of technology, enabling more innovation.
Gary Marcus is a cognitive scientist, author, and longtime AI skeptic. Marcus joins Big Technology to discuss whether large‑language‑model scaling is running into a wall. Tune in to hear a frank debate on the limits of “just add GPUs" and what that means for the next wave of AI. We also cover data‑privacy fallout from ad‑driven assistants, open‑source bio‑risk fears, and the quest for interpretability. Hit play for a reality check on AI’s future — and the insight you need to follow where the industry heads next.
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Anurag Goel grew up in New Delhi, but moved to Boston after college for his first job. He worked at Stripe, as the 8th employee, before eventually moving on and launching his current venture. Outside of tech, he is married, living in San Francisco. He likes to read science fiction, especially prior to bedtime. He also enjoys eating Thai food on the regular, though he mentioned he could eat pizza every day.
Post leaving Stripe, Anurag decided to work on an ambitious problem, and he started doing this by building a bunch of stuff in many different domains. After noticing a common problem in building out Kubernetes, he decided to start a new business to abstract these problems, and allow builders to focus on the differentiating factors to their solutions.
Janna Levin is a theoretical physicist and cosmologist specializing in black holes, cosmology of extra dimensions, topology of the universe, and gravitational waves.
Thank you for listening ❤ Check out our sponsors: https://lexfridman.com/sponsors/ep468-sc
See below for timestamps, transcript, and to give feedback, submit questions, contact Lex, etc.
OUTLINE:
(00:00) – Introduction
(00:51) – Sponsors, Comments, and Reflections
(09:21) – Black holes
(16:55) – Formation of black holes
(27:45) – Oppenheimer and the Atomic Bomb
(34:08) – Inside the black hole
(47:10) – Supermassive black holes
(50:39) – Physics of spacetime
(53:42) – General relativity
(59:13) – Gravity
(1:15:47) – Information paradox
(1:24:17) – Fuzzballs & soft hair
(1:27:28) – ER = EPR
(1:34:07) – Firewall
(1:42:59) – Extra dimensions
(1:45:24) – Aliens
(2:01:00) – Wormholes
(2:11:57) – Dark matter and dark energy
(2:22:00) – Gravitational waves
(2:34:08) – Alan Turing and Kurt Godel
(2:46:23) – Grigori Perelman, Andrew Wiles, and Terence Tao
(2:52:58) – Art and science
(3:02:37) – The biggest mystery
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.
A simple CLI tool to help you remember terminal commands.
Examples:
# Find running processes
zev 'show all running python processes'
# File operations
zev 'find all .py files modified in the last 24 hours'
# System information
zev 'show disk usage for current directory'
# Network commands
zev 'check if google.com is reachable'
# Git operations
zev 'show uncommitted changes in git'
What trends and technologies should you be paying attention to today? Are there hot new database servers you should check out? Or will that just be a flash in the pan? I love these forward looking episodes and this one is super fun. I've put together an amazing panel: Gina Häußge, Ines Montani, Richard Campbell, and Calvin Hendryx-Parker. We dive into the recent Stack Overflow Developer survey results as a sounding board for our thoughts on rising and falling trends in the Python and broader developer space.
Ranjan Roy from Margins is back for our weekly discussion of the latest tech news. We cover 1) What an 'AI-First Company' is 2) Aaron Levie's AI-first memo to Box. 3) Luis von Ahn's AI-first memo to Duolingo 4) Tobi Lutke's AI-first memo to Shopify 5) Can non-tech company be AI-first? 6) Apple earnings 7) Apple's federal government issues 8) Microsoft earnings 9) Amazon earnings 10) Meta Earnings 11) NVIDIA vs. Anthropic 12) More on AI consciousness 13) The very handy Mag2
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Questions? Feedback? Write to: bigtechnologypodcast@gmail.com
SambaNova makes a full-stack AI platform and an “intelligent chip” capable of running models of up to five trillion parameters, allowing developers to run state-of-the-art open source models without the time-consuming work of tuning and modeling. See what developers are building with the tech.
Mika J. Cross, Public Sector Workforce Transformation Strategist and former Government Executive joins the show to explore the evolving dynamics of the modern government workforce and together we unpack the critical issues surrounding return-to-office mandates, skills-based hiring, generational shifts in workplace expectations. We also dive into what it truly means to build a resilient, future-ready government workforce PLUS the role of data literacy, the challenges of leadership development in the public sector, and how both public and private organizations must adapt to keep pace with the rapid evolution of work.
