Category: 3-SometimeTechTalk

Check out Shopify’s newest updates on their editions page, including Horizons and their new AI capabilities with Sidekick.

Connect with Glen Coates on LinkedIn and X.

Shoutout to Stellar Question badge winner nouptime for asking Converting string to byte array in C#.

Arnab Deka lives in Vancouver and loves the Pacific Northwest. He was never formally educated in computer science or software engineering - in fact, while he was studying civil engineering, he fell in love with building things and eventually, building software. Outside of tech, he is a family man and loves to sup with them and his dog. He also enjoys astronomy, and is known to attend a star party or 2, with his telescope in hand.

Arnab took a sabbatical from work, and on this journey, he realized that he liked deep work and interacting with customers directly - as opposed to high level strategy and planning. He met with his now co-founder in 2022, walking then Seattle lake front, and realized what podcast junkies they both were - and they decided to build something for it.

This is the creation story of Metacast.

Sponsors

• Paddle.com
• Sema Software
• PropelAuth
• Postman
• Meilisearch

Links

• https://metacast.app/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/or9ob/

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

The discussion also:

• Touches on the role, evolution, and adoption of AI agents, emphasizing their growing integration into systems, while addressing key safeguarding measures to ensure AI agents can accurately use data to reason effectively.
• Explores how Abnormal AI utilizes AI to detect and protect against cybersecurity threats, and how Dan and his team are leveraging AI to drive compounding productivity within their organization.

Connect with Dan Shiebler on LinkedIn and learn more about Abnormal AI.

Y-Lan Boureau is the founder & CEO of ThrivePal, an OpenAI-funded AI startup, and a former Meta AI researcher. Boureau joins Big Technology Podcast to discuss why the next frontier for AI should be science‑backed coaching that nudges us toward healthier habits and deeper real‑world relationships. Tune in to hear how large‑language models can push users to lift weights, regulate emotions, and support their friends’ growth.

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

In this episode of The BlueHat Podcast, host Nic Fillingham and Wendy Zenone share David Weston’s keynote from BlueHat India 2025. David explores the growing role of on-device AI in Windows, the security risks it introduces, and how Microsoft is rethinking architecture to defend against new threats like model tampering, data exfiltration, and AI-powered malware. He also shares insights on innovations like Windows Recall, biometric protection, and the future of secure, agentic operating systems. 

 

In This Episode You Will Learn:  

 

• How AI integration in Windows (like Windows Recall and MS Paint) is evolving 
• Emerging threats from protocols like MCP and CUAs 
• What a “confused deputy” attack is, and how Microsoft is protecting users 

 

Some Questions We Ask: 

 

• What are the biggest security threats in on-device AI—data, model, or runtime? 
• Can AI be used to accelerate post-compromise attacks? 
• What will it take to bring Azure-level confidential computing to the consumer device? 

     

Resources:      

View David Weston on LinkedIn   

View Wendy Zenone on LinkedIn   

View Nic Fillingham on LinkedIn  

 

  

Related Microsoft Podcasts:   

  

• Microsoft Threat Intelligence Podcast   
• Afternoon Cyber Tea with Ann Johnson   
• Uncovering Hidden Risks   

  

  

Discover and follow other Microsoft podcasts at microsoft.com/podcasts   

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Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Rob Woollen lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. He grew up with a Father in IT and management, and his Mother as an English teacher. He has been programming for a long time, since the early days on his Apple 2E (yes, the green screen one). Outside of tech, he is married with 3 boys, all teenagers. He also has a 1 year old golden retriever, and spends a lot of time ensuring he lives his best life. In addition to this, he and his wife enjoy hiking around the Marin area, as they have the best hiking trials.

Rob spent many years at Salesforce, and it struck him that many of the company operations were still done on spreadsheets. When he left the company, he started exploring how to create something to support large scale data sets, within the familiar UI of spreadsheets.

This is the creation story of Sigma Computing.

Sponsors

• Paddle.com
• Sema Software
• PropelAuth
• Postman
• Meilisearch

Links

• https://www.sigmacomputing.com/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/rwoollen/

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

Andrew McClanahan, Senior Director at LexisNexis Risk Solutions for Government Relations rejoins for Part Two of the conversation around government program integrity and he unpacks the increasing state responsibilities for service delivery and the tough financial balancing acts agencies face while grappling with program reforms, fraud prevention, and privacy protection. We also discuss Medicaid work requirements, SNAP eligibility controversies and the politics of data sharing and we tackle the practical realities and policy debates shaping public assistance programs today.

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Contextual AI offers a platform for building RAG agents. Get started with their docs here.

Connect with Douwe on LinkedIn. 

Congrats to Stack Overflow user Smrutiranjan Sahu, who earned a Stellar Question badge by asking How to define type for a function callback (as any function type, not universal any) used in a method parameter.

Topics covered in this episode:

• git-flight-rules
• Uravelling t-strings
• neohtop
• Introducing Pyrefly: A new type checker and IDE experience for Python
• Extras
• Joke

Watch on YouTube

About the show

Sponsored by us! Support our work through:

• Our courses at Talk Python Training
• The Complete pytest Course
• Patreon Supporters

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: git-flight-rules

• What are "flight rules"?
  • A guide for astronauts (now, programmers using Git) about what to do when things go wrong.
  • Flight Rules are the hard-earned body of knowledge recorded in manuals that list, step-by-step, what to do if X occurs, and why. Essentially, they are extremely detailed, scenario-specific standard operating procedures. [...]
  • NASA has been capturing our missteps, disasters and solutions since the early 1960s, when Mercury-era ground teams first started gathering "lessons learned" into a compendium that now lists thousands of problematic situations, from engine failure to busted hatch handles to computer glitches, and their solutions.
• Steps for common operations and actions
  • I want to start a local repository
  • What did I just commit?
  • I want to discard specific unstaged changes
  • Restore a deleted file

Brian #2: Uravelling t-strings

• Brett Cannon
• Article walks through
  • Evaluating the Python expression
  • Applying specified conversions
  • Applying format specs
  • Using an Interpolation class to hold details of replacement fields
  • Using Template class to hold parsed data
• Plus, you don’t have to have Python 3.14.0b1 to try this out.
• The end result is very close to an example used in PEP 750, which you do need 3.14.0b1 to try out.
• See also:
  • I’ve written a pytest version, Unravelling t-strings with pytest, if you want to run all the examples with one file.

Michael #3: neohtop

• Blazing-fast system monitoring for your desktop
• Features
  • Real-time process monitoring
  • CPU and Memory usage tracking
  • Beautiful, modern UI with dark/light themes
  • Advanced process search and filtering
  • Pin important processes
  • Process management (kill processes)
  • Sort by any column
  • Auto-refresh system stats

Brian #4: Introducing Pyrefly: A new type checker and IDE experience for Python

• From Facebook / Meta
• Another Python type checker written in Rust
• Built with IDE integration in mind from the beginning
• Principles
  • Performance
  • IDE first
  • Inference (inferring types in untyped code)
  • Open source
• I mistakenly tried this on the project I support with the most horrible abuses of the dynamic nature of Python, pytest-check. It didn’t go well. But perhaps the project is ready for some refactoring. I’d like to try it soon on a more well behaved project.

Extras

Brian:

• Python: The Documentary Official Trailer
• Tim Hopper added Setting up testing with ptyest and uv to his “Python Developer Tooling Handbook”
• For a more thorough intro on pytest, check out courses.pythontest.com
• pocket is closing, I’m switching to Raindrop
  • I got one question about code formatting. It’s not highlighted, but otherwise not bad.

Michael:

• New course! Polars for Power Users: Transform Your Data Analysis Game
• Apache Airflow 3.0 Released
• Paste 5

Joke: Theodore Roosevelt’s Man in the Arena, but for programming

Jona provides an AI-powered gut biome test for clinicians and patients alike. 

Connect with Tyler on Twitter.