Category: 3-SometimeTechTalk

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Lex Fridman Podcast - #112 – Ian Hutchinson: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and Religion

Ian Hutchinson is a nuclear engineer and plasma physicist at MIT. He has made a number of important contributions in plasma physics including the magnetic confinement of plasmas seeking to enable fusion reactions, which is the energy source of the stars, to be used for practical energy production. Current nuclear reactors are based on fission as we discuss. Ian has also written on the philosophy of science and the relationship between science and religion.

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If you would like to get more information about this podcast go to https://lexfridman.com/ai or connect with @lexfridman on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Medium, or YouTube where you can watch the video versions of these conversations. If you enjoy the podcast, please rate it 5 stars on Apple Podcasts, follow on Spotify, or support it on Patreon.

Here’s the outline of the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time.

OUTLINE:
00:00 – Introduction
05:32 – Nuclear physics and plasma physics
08:00 – Fusion energy
35:22 – Nuclear weapons
42:06 – Existential risks
50:29 – Personal journey in religion
56:27 – What is God like?
1:01:34 – Scientism
1:04:21 – Atheism
1:06:39 – Not knowing
1:09:57 – Faith
1:13:46 – The value of loyalty and love
1:23:26 – Why is there suffering in the world
1:35:08 – AGI
1:40:27 – Consciousness
1:48:14 – Simulation
1:52:20 – Adam and Eve
1:54:57 – Meaning of life

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The Stack Overflow Podcast - 25 Years of Java – the past to the present

For this episode we chatted with Georges Saab, Vice President of Software Development at the Java Platform Group and Manish Gupta, Vice President of Global Marketing for Java and GraalVM. 

In the beginning, the nascent Java language project, codenamed Project Green and later Oak, was designed to create interactive televisions. Think of the kind of overlays and interactivity that you see with most flat screen TVs today. Back in 1995, this was brand new territory. There was no hardware or operating system standard for a computing platform within a TV, so the team had to figure out how to create a programming language that could run on virtually anything. Code it once and run it everywhere through a virtual machine. 

Interactive TV was ahead of its time in the early 90s, but Java found a strong foothold for its cross-platform ideas in web applets and WebStart programs that downloaded and ran an application entirely from a web address. This evolved over time, and today it provides a lot of the processing muscle for server-side web apps and cloud-based SaaS applications. Here at Stack Overflow, the Java tag has remained one of the most popular over the years, with 1.7 million total questions on the site. 

When Sun announced Java in 1995, they did so with Marc Andreessen—then cofounder and “rockstar” at Netscape—on stage with them. Andreessen had agreed to integrate Java into the Navigator browser, a major coup for a brand new language. At the time, Navigator was the clear leader in the browser market, taking over 75% of the share. Even before this announcement at the SunWorld conference, the volume of downloads of the language became so great that it overwhelmed the T1 line attached to the java.sun.com web server. 

Today's episode covers the past and present of Java. Tomorrow, we'll air episode two, which takes us from the present and looks towards the future. If you want to learn more, Oracle has put together a wealth of resources to celebrate Java's 25th anniversary.

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Code Story: Insights from Startup Tech Leaders - S3 E2: Dave Zohrob, Chartable

Dave Zohrob has been coding since before he can remember. He is among the crews where their Dad's bought TRS-80's hooked up to the TV and loaded games from tape drives. He loves music, and even ran a small record label in San Francisco. But nowadays, he focuses on his family with two little kids. While working at Angelist, he and his co-founder decided to start another thing together... the problem was, they didn't know what to build. Dave had been a podcast listener for a long time, but never really thought about what was under the hood. After considering a few different avenues, including yet another podcast app, they decided to focus on podcast analytics - some might say the App Annie for podcasting. This is the creation story of Chartable.

 

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Credits: Code Story is hosted and produced by Noah Labhart. Be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, Breaker, Youtube, or the podcasting app of your choice.



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The Stack Overflow Podcast - You down with GPT-3? Yeah you know me!

If you're wondering why GPT-3 matters and how it compares to prior efforts in this area, here is a good summary.

If you want to dive deeper into the effect anxiety has on the interview process and hiring in tech, you can read up on the research here.

This week's lifeboat badge goes to PerformanceDBA, who left an incredbily long and detailed answer, complete with charts and code snippets, on the following question: how to organize a relational data model for double entry accounting? 

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Lex Fridman Podcast - #111 – Richard Karp: Algorithms and Computational Complexity

Richard Karp is a professor at Berkeley and one of the most important figures in the history of theoretical computer science. In 1985, he received the Turing Award for his research in the theory of algorithms, including the development of the Edmonds–Karp algorithm for solving the maximum flow problem on networks, Hopcroft–Karp algorithm for finding maximum cardinality matchings in bipartite graphs, and his landmark paper in complexity theory called “Reducibility Among Combinatorial Problems”, in which he proved 21 problems to be NP-complete. This paper was probably the most important catalyst in the explosion of interest in the study of NP-completeness and the P vs NP problem.

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If you would like to get more information about this podcast go to https://lexfridman.com/ai or connect with @lexfridman on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Medium, or YouTube where you can watch the video versions of these conversations. If you enjoy the podcast, please rate it 5 stars on Apple Podcasts, follow on Spotify, or support it on Patreon.

Here’s the outline of the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time.

OUTLINE:
00:00 – Introduction
03:50 – Geometry
09:46 – Visualizing an algorithm
13:00 – A beautiful algorithm
18:06 – Don Knuth and geeks
22:06 – Early days of computers
25:53 – Turing Test
30:05 – Consciousness
33:22 – Combinatorial algorithms
37:42 – Edmonds-Karp algorithm
40:22 – Algorithmic complexity
50:25 – P=NP
54:25 – NP-Complete problems
1:10:29 – Proving P=NP
1:12:57 – Stable marriage problem
1:20:32 – Randomized algorithms
1:33:23 – Can a hard problem be easy in practice?
1:43:57 – Open problems in theoretical computer science
1:46:21 – A strange idea in complexity theory
1:50:49 – Machine learning
1:56:26 – Bioinformatics
2:00:37 – Memory of Richard’s father

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The Stack Overflow Podcast - Forming new habits with 100 Days of Code

You can learn all about 100 Days of Code on their website.

Alex also published a newsletter about habit forming and self-improvement. You can learn more about that and subscribe here.

If you want to follow Alex on Twitter, you can find him here.

This week's Lifeboat badge goes to Chris, who helped a user understand why ComponentDidCatch was not working in their react-native app.

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Code Story: Insights from Startup Tech Leaders - S3 Bonus: Andrew Smith, Outrider

Andrew Smith grew up playing in the woods of northern New England. In 6th grade, he was given a car and drivers magazine and fell in love with Ferraris, Lamborghinis and Porsches - who didn't? In 7th grade, his science teacher told him they got bad fuel economy, so he was inspired to change that. He currently lives in Oregon, though Outrider is based in CO, he is passionate about mountaineering, climbing and skiing, with whom he does with his friends, colleagues and family any chance he can. He has always thought the largest business opportunity and moral obligation is the commercialization of environmental technologies. Taking a look at the 10 billion tons of freight that is shipped annually.. in the US alone... his perspective was solidified. This is the creation story of Outrider. 


Links


Leave us a review on Apple Podcasts!


Amazing tools we use:

  • If you want the best publishing platform for your podcast, with amazing support & people - use Transistor.fm.
  • Want to record your remote interviews with class? Then, you need to use Squadcast.
  • Code Story uses the 1-click product ClipGain, sign up now to get 3hrs of podcast processing time FREE!


Credits: Season 3 of Code Story is hosted and produced by Noah Labhart. Be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, Breaker, YouTube, or the podcasting app of your choice.



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