Category: 3-SometimeTechTalk

Ranjan Roy from Margins is back for our weekly discussion of the latest tech news. This week, we do our 2026 predictions in an abbreviated holiday-time episode. Here's what we cover: 1) AI agents start to work 2) ChatGPT hitting 1 billion users 3) AI shopping takes off 4) Ranjan gets a folding phone 5) Apple's best year ever 5) AI love boom arrives 6) AI infrastructure washout 7) 2026 Market and Performance 8) OpenAI's position 9) Does Alexandr Wang stay at Meta?

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Ryan sits down with Dan Ciruli, VP and General Manager of Cloud Native at Nutanix, to talk about getting your virtual machines and Kubernetes to play nice in cloud-native environments, why VMs are still relevant in enterprise applications, and how AI can help modernize legacy systems. 

Episode notes: 

Nutanix combines compute, storage, virtualization, and networking so you can run applications and manage data across on-premises datacenters, public clouds, and edge locations all on one platform. 

Connect with Dan on Linkedin and Bluesky.

Congrats to Necromancer badge winner David Ferenczy Rogožan! They won the badge on their answer to Where does adb shell mkdir create directories.

TRANSCRIPT

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Reed Albergotti is the technology editor at Semafor. Albergotti joins Big Technology Podcast to break down which companies are best positioned in the coming year. We cover Meta’s superintelligence gamble, Google’s Gemini push, OpenAI’s model race, and the rise of AI companions. We also discuss Tesla’s self-driving moment of truth, Nvidia’s upside and risks, Microsoft’s Copilot dilemma, big media and streaming shake-ups, Anthropic’s IPO prospects, SPACs and private equity, quantum, and the strange new love stories people are forming with their bots. Hit play for a fast, prediction-packed tour through the year in tech—and a sharp, entertaining look at where the AI economy and Big Tech are headed next.

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Brandon Card has always been involved in sports. In High School, he was a 3 sport athlete and still plays today, along side working out, doing yoga and pilates. He's heavily interested in holistic healing and alternative medicine, mentioning a big interest in quantum frequency healing, using the sun and ocean to add voltage to the body. He has also started a foundation around mental health, as sadly, he lost his co-founder to suicide, and wishes to remove the stigma from the mental health conversation.

Brandon and his co-founder realized that all software platforms around contracts were directed towards lawyers - not towards finance. This was mind blowing, as negotiations are mostly finance driven, not based on the paragraphs of legal jargon. Brandon wanted to build something to serve this need.

This is the creation story of Terzo.

Sponsors

• Incogni
• NordProtect
• Vention
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• Full Scale
• Paddle.com
• Sema Software
• PropelAuth
• Postman
• Meilisearch

Links

• https://terzo.ai/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/brandonrcard

Ryan welcomes Anil Dash, writer and former Stack Overflow board member, back to the show to discuss how AI is not a magical technology, but rather the normal next step in computing’s evolution. They explore the importance of democratizing access to technology, the unique challenges that LLMs’ non-determinism poses, and how developers can keep Stack Overflow’s ethos of community alive in a world of AI. 

Episode notes: 

Anil is a tech entrepreneur (former CEO at our sister company Fog Creek Software) and writer. You can find him at his blog anildash.com and on Linkedin. 

Check out the last time Anil was on the pod in 2020 to talk all things Glitch and Glimmer. 

Shoutout to user pgrad for winning a Lifejacket badge on their answer to Using type hint Any in Django - NameError: name 'Any' is not defined.

TRANSCRIPT

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

• Has the cost of building software just dropped 90%?
• More on Deprecation Warnings
• How FOSS Won and Why It Matters
• Should I be looking for a GitHub alternative?
• 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.

HEADS UP: We are taking next week off, happy holiday everyone.

Michael #1: Has the cost of building software just dropped 90%?

• by Martin Alderson
• Agentic coding tools are collapsing “implementation time,” so the cost curve of shipping software may be shifting sharply
• Recent programming advancements haven’t been that great of a true benefit: Cloud, TDD, microservices, complex frontends, Kubernetes, etc.
• Agentic AI’s big savings are not just code generation, but coordination overhead reduction (fewer handoffs, fewer meetings, fewer blocks).
• Thinking, product clarity, and domain decisions stay hard, while typing and scaffolding get cheap.
• Is it the end of software dev? Not really, see Jevons paradox: when production gets cheaper, total demand can rise rather than spending simply falling. (Historically: the efficiency of coal use led to the increased consumption of coal)
• Pushes back on “only good for greenfield” by arguing agents also help with legacy code comprehension and bug-fixing. I 100% agree. #Legacy code for the win.

Brian #2: More on Deprecation Warnings

• How are people ignoring them?
  • yep, it’s right in the Python docs: -W ignore::DeprecationWarning
  • Don’t do that!
  • Perhaps the docs should give the example of emitting them only once
    • -W once::::DeprecationWarning
• See also <code>-X dev</code> mode , which sets -W default and some other runtime checks
• Don’t use warn, use the <code>@warnings.deprecated</code> decorator instead
  • Thanks John Hagen for pointing this out
  • Emits a warning
  • It’s understood by type checkers, so editors visually warn you
  • You can pass in your own custom UserWarning with category
• mypy also has a command line option and setting for this
  • --enable-error-code deprecated
  • or in [tool.mypy] enable_error_code = ["deprecated"]
• My recommendation
  • Use @deprecated
  • with your own custom warning
  • and test with pytest -W error

Michael #3: How FOSS Won and Why It Matters

• by Thomas Depierre
• Companies are not cheap, companies optimize cost control. They do this by making purchasing slow and painful.
• FOSS is/was a major unlock hack to skip procurement, legal, etc.
• Example is months to start using a paid “Add to calendar” widget!
• It “works both ways”: the same bypass lowers the barrier for maintainers too, no need for a legal entity, lawyers, liability insurance, or sales motion.
• Proposals that “fix FOSS” by reintroducing supply-chain style controls (he name-checks SBOMs and mandated processes) risk being rejected or gamed, because they restore the very friction FOSS sidesteps.

Brian #4: Should I be looking for a GitHub alternative?

• Pricing changes for GitHub Actions
  • The self-hosted runner pricing change caused a kerfuffle.
  • It’s has been postponed
• But… if you were to look around, maybe pay attention to
  • These 4 GitHub alternatives are just as good—or better
    • Codeburg, BitBucket, GitLab, Gitea
  • And a new-ish entry, Tangled

Extras

Brian:

• End of year sale for The Complete pytest Course
  • Use code XMAS2025 for 50% off before Dec 31
• Writing work on Lean TDD book on hold for holidays
  • Will pick up again in January

Michael:

• PyCharm has better Ruff support now out of the box, via Daniel Molnar
  • This is from the release notes of 2025.3: "PyCharm 2025.3 expands its LSP integration with support for Ruff, ty, Pyright, and Pyrefly.”
  • If you check out the LSP section it will land you on this page and you can go to Ruff.
  • The Ruff doc site was also updated. Previously it was only available external tools and a third party plugin, this feels like a big step.
• Fun quote I saw on ExTwitter: May your bug tracker be forever empty.

Joke:

• Try/Catch/Stack Overflow
• Create a super annoying linkedin profile - From Tim Kellogg, submitted by archtoad

Ranjan Roy from Margins is back for our weekly discussion of the latest tech news. We cover: 1) Recap of my Sam Altman interview 2) OpenAI's memory play 3) Deepening relationships between people and chatbots 4) Could an all-knowing AI assistant work? 5) Model vs. product revisited 6) OpenAI's enterprise play 7) The infrastructure bet 8) OpenAI's forthcoming AI device 9) AGI's meaning? 10) Google's fast Gemini flash models 11) Microsoft Copilot falling out of favor

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From Big Technology on Substack: Seven Big Thoughts on OpenAI's Strategy & Future Following My Sam Altman Conversation
https://www.bigtechnology.com/p/seven-big-thoughts-on-openais-strategy

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

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The Cash Account, which is not a deposit account, is offered by Wealthfront Brokerage LLC ("Wealthfront Brokerage"), Member FINRA/SIPC, not a bank. The Annual Percentage Yield ("APY") on cash deposits as of 12/19/25, is representative, requires no minimum, and may change at any time. The APY reflects the weighted average of deposit balances at participating Program Banks, which are not allocated equally. Wealthfront Brokerage sweeps cash balances to Program Banks, where they earn the variable base APY.

Instant withdrawals are subject to certain conditions and processing times may vary.

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Ryan sits down with Corey Quinn, Chief Cloud Economist at Duckbill, at AWS re:Invent to get Corey’s patented snarky take on all the happenings from the conference. They discuss whether the AI agent hype is supported by actual buyers, how startups are faring as AWS focuses on large enterprises, and how many of the new technologies coming out this year will actually be transformative. 

Episode notes:

This episode was recorded at AWS re:Invent 2025! Check out Ryan’s recap of events on our blog. 

Duckbill provides financial planning and analysis for enterprise infrastructure to help you understand, negotiate, and optimize your cloud spend.

Connect with Corey on Linkedin and subscribe to his newsletter Last Week in AWS.

TRANSCRIPT

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

Sam Altman is the CEO of OpenAI. Altman joins Big Technology Podcast to discuss OpenAI's plan to win in a tightening AI race. Altman dissects his company's strategy, where he sees OpenAI having an advantage, and where he expects his product lineup to go in 2026 and beyond. We discuss AI memory and personalization, the distribution vs. product debate, how OpenAI will pay for its infrastructure buildout, AI devices, AI clouds, whether we've hit AGI yet, and plenty more. Tune in for an exclusive, 1-on-1 discussion with the AI industry's top catalyst.

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

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