Category: 3-SometimeTechTalk

Ed Zitron is the owner of EZPR, host of Better Offline, and author of the Where’s Your Ed At newsletter. Zitron joins Big Technology Podcast to discuss whether the generative-AI boom is an unsustainable bubble ready to pop. Tune in to hear him debate OpenAI’s multi-billion-dollar burn rate, Microsoft’s leverage, and the economics behind ChatGPT. We also cover Nvidia’s GPU market, SoftBank’s colossal bets, advertiser drift from Google Search, and the hype around “AI companions." Hit play for a sharp, no-fluff conversation about the economics of AI.

---

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

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

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

Buchi Reddy lives in North Austin, having recently moved there with his family. He is originally from south India, and grew up in a farming family before moving to the metro and studying engineering. Post college, he spent many years building high frequency trading systems, before moving to Silicon Valley and joining companies there, just as Cisco and Traceable, which you as the audience are very familiar with. Outside of tech, he is married with a 7 year old son. He and his family enjoy hiking, overnight camping, and living just far enough away from the craziness of downtown Austin to still enjoy it.

While he was interviewing customers at a prior company, Buchi spotted a wide gap for enterprises, where API's were not tested properly before going to production. Baffled by this, he wanted to go bridge the gap, and build something to automate this testing.

This is the creation story of Levo.

Sponsors

• Paddle.com
• Sema Software
• PropelAuth
• Postman
• Meilisearch
• Mailtrap
• .TECH Domains (https://get.tech/codestory)

Links

• https://www.levo.ai/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/buchireddy/

Confluent is an all-in-one, real-time platform that allows you to stream, connect, process, and govern your data.

Connect with Sean on Linkedin, and listen to the Software Engineering Daily podcast, where he co-hosts.

Do you know the answer to Loadrunner lr_get_attrib_string always returns null? If so, you can help out Trncvs and receive the bounty offered on the question.

• * Distributed sqlite follow up: Turso and Litestream*
• * PEP 792 – Project status markers in the simple index*
• Run coverage on tests
• docker2exe: Convert a Docker image to an executable
• Extras
• Joke

About the show

Sponsored by Digital Ocean: pythonbytes.fm/digitalocean-gen-ai Use code DO4BYTES and get $200 in free credit

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.

Michael #1: Distributed sqlite follow up: Turso and Litestream

• Michael Booth:
  • Turso marries the familiarity and simplicity of SQLite with modern, scalable, and distributed features.
  • Seems to me that Turso is to SQLite what MotherDuck is to DuckDB.
• Mike Fiedler
  • Continue to use the SQLite you love and care about (even the one inside Python runtime) and launch a daemon that watches the db for changes and replicates changes to an S3-type object store.
  • Deeper dive: Litestream: Revamped

Brian #2: PEP 792 – Project status markers in the simple index

• Currently 3 status markers for packages
  • Trove Classifier status
  • Indices can be yanked
  • PyPI projects - admins can quarantine a project, owners can archive a project
• Proposal is to have something that can have only one state
  • active
  • archived
  • quarantined
  • deprecated
• This has been Approved, but not Implemented yet.

Brian #3: Run coverage on tests

• Hugo van Kemenade
• And apparently, run Ruff with at least F811 turned on
• Helps with copy/paste/modify mistakes, but also subtler bugs like consumed generators being reused.

Michael #4: docker2exe: Convert a Docker image to an executable

• This tool can be used to convert a Docker image to an executable that you can send to your friends.
• Build with a simple command: $ docker2exe --name alpine --image alpine:3.9
• Requires docker on the client device
• Probably doesn’t map volumes/ports/etc, though could potentially be exposed in the dockerfile.

Extras

Brian:

• Back catalog of Test & Code is now on YouTube under @TestAndCodePodcast
  • So far 106 of 234 episodes are up. The rest are going up according to daily limits.
  • Ordering is rather chaotic, according to upload time, not release ordering.
• There will be a new episode this week
  • pytest-django with Adam Johnson

Joke: If programmers were doctors

Howard Cohen, former Senior Advisor at the Department of Defense's Defense Media Activity and current strategist at CX Studios joins the show to unpack the power of non-kinetic capabilities in modern defense strategy. From web consolidation and cost-saving at scale to safeguarding national security through strategic communications, he shares insights from his work leading digital modernization across the Department of Defense. Together, they explore why public-facing websites are more than just digital real estate—they're mission-critical infrastructure in the information age.

Ranjan Roy from Margins is back for our weekly discussion of the latest tech news. We cover: 1) Can Zuck and Elon buy their way into the AI race? 2) Will scaling laws turn AI progress over to the biggest tech 3) Grok's new AI avatars - Rudy and Ani 4) Grok's Ani AI bot gets steamy quickly 5) Why AI companies are counting on companion/love bots 6) The backlash to Aqui-Hire-Sitions after Windsurf, Scale, etc. 7) Did Big Tech antitrust backfire? 8) OpenAI announces ChatGPT Agent 9) Is Perplexity's Comet browser a player 10) Kimi K2 wows with coding availability 11) Can AI industry apply lessons from coding elsewhere? 12) One last word from Ani

---

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

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

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

Read more findings from the Developer Success Lab here. 

Find John at his website and connect with him on LinkedIn.

Congrats to user Matthieu M. who won a Populist badge for answering the question struct with 2 cells vs std::pair?.

Evan Henshaw-Plath, also known as Rabble, was born in Berkeley while his Mom was a student. His parents were hippies, and he grew up near Silicon Valley, which gave him access to work with startups as early as High School. He founded Odeo, which eventually became Twitter. He got the name Rabble cause it was founded by three Evan's, which didn't work - so he went with his online nickname. He has a cool track record of working not only on Twitter, but Flickr, Palm, and other big names. He lives in New Zealand, enjoying all the outdoor activities, and participates in activism in digital rights and environmentalism. Being a Vegetarian, he admits that his comfort food is Mexican cuisine, which he doesn't get a lot of in the land of the Kiwis.

Rabble was disappointed when Twitter shut down its open app capabilities. He wanted something like Twitter, but built to where someone couldn't take away his access. He started to dig into protocols, and eventually landed in San Francisco to tell his friends that he was going to make social media work like email and messaging.

This is the creation story of Rabble Labs & Verse.

Sponsors

• Paddle.com
• Sema Software
• PropelAuth
• Postman
• Meilisearch
• Mailtrap
• .TECH Domains (https://get.tech/codestory)

Links

• https://www.verse-pbc.org/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/rabble/

Condoleezza Rice is a former U.S. Secretary of State and current director of Stanford’s Hoover Institution. Rice joins Big Technology to discuss whether the United States can hold its technological edge as China races ahead in AI, batteries, and advanced manufacturing. Tune in to hear her candid take on the U.S.–China tech arms race, the ripple effects of chip export controls, and why she believes democracies are safer stewards of frontier technologies. We also cover the squeeze on university research funding, immigration-driven talent pipelines, and tuition-fueled class divides. Hit play for a data-rich, no-fluff conversation on the special sauce for the U.S. tech industry and the risks it faces in our current political environment.