Category: 3-SometimeTechTalk

Emily Ferris, Director for What Works Cities at Results for America joins the show to discuss how artificial intelligence is impacting cities and what to expect in the future.

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Darryl Lyons, co-founder and Chief Rainmaker at Rainstick, joins the show to dive into advancements in AgTech and how Rainstick is using bioelectricity to enhance agricultural productivity. They discuss how Rainstick mimics natural thunderstorms to create electric fields and frequencies that promote plant growth, challenges and breakthroughs in their research, and their participation in the AWS Compute for Climate Fellowship.

Episode notes:

Rainstick uses electricity to mimic the natural effects of lightning to grow crops bigger, faster, and more sustainably. 

Want to learn more about the Compute for Climate program? Check our podcast with Lisbeth Kaufman, Head of Climate Tech at AWS.

Ryan wrote about how software is being applied to agriculture a few years ago. 

Connect with Darryl on LinkedIn.

Congrats to Lifeboat badge winner WestCoastProjects for their answer to Test accuracy is greater than train accuracy what to do?.

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

Ellen Huet is a features writer at Bloomberg and the author of Empire of Orgasm: Sex, Power, and the Downfall of a Wellness Cult. Ellen joins Big Technology to discuss how Silicon Valley, a place that prides itself on independent thinking, keeps falling into powerful forms of groupthink. Tune in to hear how group houses, self-help programs, and “high agency” ideology create fertile ground for cult dynamics, and how that same psychology shows up in today’s AGI and AI-safety worlds. Hit play for a wild, revealing look at the stories and belief systems quietly shaping the tech industry’s biggest bets.

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Emmanuel Straschnov grew up in rural France, which is interestingly enough where he started doing computer stuff (he mentioned there wasn't much else to do in the 90's). He grew up sailing, as he lived next to the shore in Normandy. He never really thought he would end up coding, but after obtaining his MBA, he ended up doing just that. Outside of tech, he is married with 2 children. He mentions that most of his hobby time is devoted to them, but on occasion, he likes to travel, continue sailing, and to sing.

Many years ago, Emmanuel noticed that there were a lot of people searching for technical founders, and using services to find technical founders. He thought this to be wrong, as many people have product ideas and just need a product to help them build it... so, he created something just for them.

This is the creation story of Bubble.

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• Full Scale
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Links

• https://bubble.io/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/straschnov/

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Ryan is joined by Jared Quincy Davis, CEO and co-founder of Mithril, to explore the importance of efficient resource allocation and GPU utilization in AI, the myth and misconceptions of the GPU shortage, and how the economics of GPU will change with new scheduling and utilization strategies. 

Episode notes:

Mithril’s omnicloud platform aggregates and orchestrates multi-cloud GPUs, CPUs, and storage so you can access your infrastructure through a single platform.

Connect with Jared on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Shoutout to user Razzi Abuissa for winning a Populist badge on their answer to How to find last merge in git?.

TRANSCRIPT

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

Topics covered in this episode:

• PEP 814 – Add frozendict built-in type
• From Material for MkDocs to Zensical
• Tach
• Some Python Speedups in 3.15 and 3.16
• Extras
• Joke

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 #0: Black Friday is on at Talk Python

• What’s on offer:
  1. An AI course mini bundle (22% off)
  2. 20% off our entire library via the Everything Bundle (what's that? ;) )
  3. The new Talk Python in Production book (25% off)

Brian: This is peer pressure in action

• 20% off The Complete pytest Course bundle (use code BLACKFRIDAY) through November
  • or use save50 for 50% off, your choice.
• Python Testing with pytest, 2nd edition, eBook (50% off with code save50) also through November
  • I would have picked 20%, but it’s a PragProg wide thing

Michael #1: PEP 814 – Add frozendict built-in type

• by Victor Stinner & Donghee Na
• A new public immutable type frozendict is added to the builtins module.
• We expect frozendict to be safe by design, as it prevents any unintended modifications. This addition benefits not only CPython’s standard library, but also third-party maintainers who can take advantage of a reliable, immutable dictionary type.
• To add to existing frozen types in Python.

Brian #2: From Material for MkDocs to Zensical

• Suggested by John Hagen
• A lot of people, me included, use Material for MkDocs as our MkDocs theme for both personal and professional projects, and in-house docs.
• This plugin for MkDocs is now in maintenance mode
• The development team is switching to working on Zensical, a static site generator to overcome some technical limitations with MkDocs. There’s a series of posts about the transition and reasoning
  1. Transforming Material for MkDocs
  2. Zensical – A modern static site generator built by the creators of Material for MkDocs
  3. Material for MkDocs Insiders – Now free for everyone
  4. Goodbye, GitHub Discussions
• Material for MkDocs
  • still around, but in maintenance mode
  • all insider features now available to everyone
• Zensical is / will be
  • compatible with Material for Mkdocs, can natively read mkdocs.yml, to assist with the transition
  • Open Source, MIT license
  • funded by an offering for professional users: Zensical Spark

Michael #3: Tach

• Keep the streak: pip deps with uv + tach
• From Gerben Decker
• We needed some more control over linting our dependency structure, both internal and external.
• We use tach (which you covered before IIRC), but also some home built linting rules for our specific structure. These are extremely easy to build using an underused feature of ruff: "uv run ruff analyze graph --python python_exe_path .".
• Example from an app I’m working on (shhhhh not yet announced!)

Brian #4: Some Python Speedups in 3.15 and 3.16

• A Plan for 5-10%* Faster Free-Threaded JIT by Python 3.16
  • 5% faster by 3.15 and 10% faster by 3.16
• Decompression is up to 30% faster in CPython 3.15

Extras

Brian:

• LeanTDD book issue tracker

Michael:

• No. 4 for dependencies: Inverted dep trees from Bob Belderbos

Joke: git pull inception

Topics covered in this episode:

• PEP 814 – Add frozendict built-in type
• From Material for MkDocs to Zensical
• Tach
• Some Python Speedups in 3.15 and 3.16
• Extras
• Joke

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 #0: Black Friday is on at Talk Python

• What’s on offer:
  1. An AI course mini bundle (22% off)
  2. 20% off our entire library via the Everything Bundle (what's that? ;) )
  3. The new Talk Python in Production book (25% off)

Brian: This is peer pressure in action

• 20% off The Complete pytest Course bundle (use code BLACKFRIDAY) through November
  • or use save50 for 50% off, your choice.
• Python Testing with pytest, 2nd edition, eBook (50% off with code save50) also through November
  • I would have picked 20%, but it’s a PragProg wide thing

Michael #1: PEP 814 – Add frozendict built-in type

• by Victor Stinner & Donghee Na
• A new public immutable type frozendict is added to the builtins module.
• We expect frozendict to be safe by design, as it prevents any unintended modifications. This addition benefits not only CPython’s standard library, but also third-party maintainers who can take advantage of a reliable, immutable dictionary type.
• To add to existing frozen types in Python.

Brian #2: From Material for MkDocs to Zensical

• Suggested by John Hagen
• A lot of people, me included, use Material for MkDocs as our MkDocs theme for both personal and professional projects, and in-house docs.
• This plugin for MkDocs is now in maintenance mode
• The development team is switching to working on Zensical, a static site generator to overcome some technical limitations with MkDocs. There’s a series of posts about the transition and reasoning
  1. Transforming Material for MkDocs
  2. Zensical – A modern static site generator built by the creators of Material for MkDocs
  3. Material for MkDocs Insiders – Now free for everyone
  4. Goodbye, GitHub Discussions
• Material for MkDocs
  • still around, but in maintenance mode
  • all insider features now available to everyone
• Zensical is / will be
  • compatible with Material for Mkdocs, can natively read mkdocs.yml, to assist with the transition
  • Open Source, MIT license
  • funded by an offering for professional users: Zensical Spark

Michael #3: Tach

• Keep the streak: pip deps with uv + tach
• From Gerben Decker
• We needed some more control over linting our dependency structure, both internal and external.
• We use tach (which you covered before IIRC), but also some home built linting rules for our specific structure. These are extremely easy to build using an underused feature of ruff: "uv run ruff analyze graph --python python_exe_path .".
• Example from an app I’m working on (shhhhh not yet announced!)

Brian #4: Some Python Speedups in 3.15 and 3.16

• A Plan for 5-10%* Faster Free-Threaded JIT by Python 3.16
  • 5% faster by 3.15 and 10% faster by 3.16
• Decompression is up to 30% faster in CPython 3.15

Extras

Brian:

• LeanTDD book issue tracker

Michael:

• No. 4 for dependencies: Inverted dep trees from Bob Belderbos

Joke: git pull inception

Ranjan Roy from Margins is back for our weekly discussion of the latest tech news. We cover: 1) Sam Altman's admission that Google surpassed OpenAI in some areas 2) OpenAI getting thrown off the mark 3) What happens if Ai models commoditize? 4) Google surpasses Microsoft in market cap 5) Inside Google's rapid-fire comeback 6) Why Google's search business remains strong 8) Google's Gemini 3 marketing strategy 9) NVIDIA's earnings don't save the market 10) Oracle's rough few months 11) Jeff Bezos is a startup co-CEO again 12) Grok glazes Elon 13) AI music is... good? 14) May I meet you??

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Ryan is joined by David Hsu, CEO and founder of Retool, to explore how AI is transforming the role of a software developer into a software architect, the increasing accessibility of coding for non-engineers, and the importance of placing guardrails and higher-level programming primitives on AI coding assistants.

Episode notes:

Retool is an enterprise AI AppGen platform for internal software development, allowing you to create apps, agents, and workflows with any LLM, datasource, or API.

David Hsu previously joined the podcast to complain about maintaining internal tools. 

Connect with David on Twitter.

Today’s shoutout is for user Waseem Wisa, who won a Populist badge on their answer to Sass compiler throws 'undefined mixin' error when mixins are kept in seperate folder.

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

Today, we have a special guest on the podcast, Kate Lowry, CEO coach, author and comedian. She is a long time startup founder, spent time in VC, is leading a values driven coaching and advising firm called Scaleheart, and recently, just published a book. The title of the book is Unbreakable: How to Thrive Under Fear-Based Leaders, and is a tactical guide to help smart, caring people get unstuck to they thrive under fear based leadership.

In our conversation today, Kate is going to enlighten us on what fear based leadership is, how to use the predictability of fear based leaders to your advantage, and why its having (another) moment in the tech ecosystem today.

Questions:

• Tell me about your startup journey as a serial founder.
• You've been around the block in the tech industry. From your vantage point in startups, big tech, and VC, why is this new leadership style hitting now?
• How does this type of culture show up in startups, versus larger companies like Meta?
• How does it manifest in investing?
• Why is fear-based leadership antithetical to innovation?
• If it's so bad for innovation, why do people keep choosing it anyway?
• What makes leaders like this so predictable?
• How can people use that predictability to their advantage?
• How has the type of issues you work on with your CEOs changed as this leadership style comes into vogue?
• What are the most common ways that you help founders in your coaching practice?
• What are three ways CEOs can make sure fear-based leadership doesn't take root in their corner of the tech ecosystem?
• How has the AI boom affected all of this?

Links

• https://www.katelowry.com/
• https://www.scaleheart.co/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/katherinejlowry/
• https://a.co/d/bwmLGAS

Our Sponsors:
* Check out Incogni: https://incogni.com/codestory
* Check out NordVPN: https://nordprotect.com/codestory


Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/code-story-insights-from-startup-tech-leaders/donations

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