Category: 3-SometimeTechTalk

Anthony Aguirre is the executive director of the Future of Life Institute. He joins Big Technology to discuss how AI could fail in the worst case and whether our push toward increasingly autonomous, general systems puts control out of reach. Tune in to hear how agentic systems operating at superhuman speed complicate oversight, and why “just unplug it” is naive. Hit play for a cool‑headed, nuanced conversation with clear takeaways you can use to evaluate AI strategy, policy, and risk.

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Ravi Madabhushi finds that all of the stops along his professional journey were accidental. He grew up in a tiny village in the south of India - so small, it would take you 10 minutes to sprint across it, end to end. His goals back then were common - get a job, get married, etc. - but after he moved to Bangalore post school, he got acquainted with startups... and was hooked. Outside of tech, he is married with 2 kids. He enjoys playing tennis, badminton, and squash. He got introduced to squash when he was playing tennis, it started raining, and they were forced inside to play "inside tennis"... IE squash.

Ravi and his team had a successful exit from their prior company, and decided to give startups another go. They wanted to solve the authentication problem for builders wanting to focus on their product - not building auth. What they found was a new arena in the world of AI, agents, and authentication of everything in between.

This is the creation story of ScaleKit.

Sponsors

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

Links

• https://www.scalekit.com/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/ravibits/

Wenjing Zhang, VP of Engineering, and Caleb Johnson, Principal Engineer at LinkedIn, sit down with Ryan to discuss how semantic search and AI have transformed LinkedIn’s job search feature. They explore the engineering efforts behind transitioning from keyword-based search and the impact of AI models on LinkedIn’s job seekers and employers.

Episode notes: 

LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network with more than one billion members.

Connect with Caleb on LinkedIn.

Connect with Wenjing on LinkedIn.

Congrats to Mattias Larsson, who won a Populist badge for answering Singleton Class which requires some async call.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

• Coverage.py regex pragmas
• * Python of Yore*
• * nox-uv*
• * A couple Django items*
• Extras
• Joke

About the show

Sponsored by DigitalOcean: 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.

Brian #1: Coverage.py regex pragmas

• Ned Batchelder

• The regex implementation of how coverage.py recognizes pragmas is pretty amazing.

• It’s extensible through plugins

  • covdefaults adds a bunch of default exclusions, and also platform- and version-specific comment syntaxes.
  • coverage-conditional-plugin gives you a way to create comment syntaxes for entire files, for whether other packages are installed, and so on.

• A change from last year (as part of coverage.py 7.6 allows multiline regexes, which let’s us do things like:

  • Exclude an entire file with \\A(?s:.*# pragma: exclude file.*)\\Z
  • Allow start and stop delimiters with # no cover: start(?s:.*?)# no cover: stop
  • Exclude empty placeholder methods with ^\\s*(((async )?def .*?)?\\)(\\s*->.*?)?:\\s*)?\\.\\.\\.\\s*(#|$)
  • See Ned’s article for explanations of these

Michael #2: Python of Yore

• via Matthias
• Use YORE: ... comments to highlight CPython version dependencies.

  # YORE: EOL 3.8: Replace block with line 4.
  if sys.version_info < (3, 9):
  from astunparse import unparse
  else:
  from ast import unparse
  

Then check when they go out of support:

$ yore check --eol-within '5 months'
./src/griffe/agents/nodes/_values.py:11: Python 3.8 will reach its End of Life within approx. 4 months

Even fix them with fix .

Michael #3: nox-uv

• via John Hagen
• What nox-uv does is make it very simple to install uv extras and/or dependency groups into a nox session's virtual environment.
• The versions installed are constrained by uv's lockfile meaning that everything is deterministic and pinned.
• Dependency groups make it very easy to install only want is necessary for a session (e.g., only linting dependencies like Ruff, or main dependencies + mypy for type checking).

Brian #4: A couple Django items

• Stop Using Django's squashmigrations: There's a Better Way
  • Johnny Metz
  • Resetting migrations is sometimes the right thing.
  • Overly simplified summary: delete migrations and start over
• dj-lite
  • Adam Hill
  • Use SQLite in production with Django
  • “Simplify deploying and maintaining production Django websites by using SQLite in production. dj-lite helps enable the best performance for SQLite for small to medium-sized projects. It requires Django 5.1+.”

Extras

Brian:

• Test & Code 237: FastAPI Cloud with Sebastian Ramirez
  • will be out later today
• pythontest.com: pytest fixtures nuts and bolts - revisited
  • A blog series that I wrote a long time ago.
  • I’ve updated it into more managable bite-sized pieces, updated and tested with Python 3.13 and pytest 8

Michael:

• New course: Just Enough Python for Data Scientists
• My live stream about uv is now on YouTube
• Cursor CLI: Built to help you ship, right from your terminal.

Joke: Copy/Paste

Ranjan Roy from Margins is back for our weekly discussion of the latest tech news. We cover: 1) OpenAI's launch of GPT-5 2) Whether GPT-5's tool calling ability is its hidden strength 3) GPT-5 is good at 'doing stuff' 4) But GPT-5 is not AGI 5) Do AI models need more than book smarts to thrive? 6) OpenAI's medicine play 7) GPT-5's coding use case 8) We need AI tables for travel 9) Do the big model players now subsume AI startups? 10) Gemini has a breakdown

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

Ryan welcomes Paul Everitt, developer advocate at JetBrains and an early adopter of Python, to discuss the history, growth, and future of Python. They cover Python’s pivotal moments and rise alongside the internet, the increased adoption from transitions like Python 2 to Python 3, and the significant role Python plays in academia and data science today. 

Episode notes: 

JetBrains is improving the developer experience through a rich suite of tools. 

Connect with Paul on LinkedIn and X.

Python is the fourth most-popular language in our 2025 Developer Survey. 

From the archives: Why is the migration to Python 3 taking so long? 

Today we’re shouting out a popular Python question, Fastest way to find the least amount of subsets that sum up to the total set in Python, asked by user Shaun Han. 

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Brad Lightcap is the Chief Operating Officer of OpenAI. Lightcap joins Big Technology to discuss the launch of GPT-5, how it works, what sets it apart from previous models, and whether it's AGI. We also cover scaling laws, post-training breakthroughs, enterprise adoption, health care applications, pricing strategy, and the company’s profitability outlook. Hit play for a front-row seat to OpenAI’s thinking on the future of AI.

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

Trevor Stuart was born in Florida, but raised in Seattle. He was the son of a tech CFO and an Episcopalian minister - so he learned life at many different angles. He graduated from Boston College, and went into investment banking at Morgan Stanley. Beyond that, he worked at RelateIQ prior to being acquired by Salesforce, which then led him to start his own thing. Outside of tech, he's married and expecting his first child soon. He lives in Sonoma, and loves wine - which type depends on his mood and the time of year.

At RelateIQ, Trevor and his team had a core problem - pushing more code, and looking to move faster, but limiting the amount of quality issues. His co-founder built the early workings of a system he had seen at LinkedIn, around gate keeping features. Eventually, post acquisition of this company, they decided to start building this solution on their own... which led them toward their own acquisition.

This is the creation story of Split andHarness.

Sponsors

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

Links

• https://www.harness.io/
• https://www.harness.io/blog/split-joins-forces-with-harness
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/trevorbstuart/