Category: 3-SometimeTechTalk

Lou Eichenbaum, former Chief Information Security Officer at the U.S. Department of the Interior and current Federal CTO at ColorTokens joins the show for a deep dive into the evolving world of federal cybersecurity. We dive into firsthand insights on what it really means to balance mission enablement with effective risk management and why today’s CISO must act not just as a security expert, but as an executive risk manager focused on resilience, communication, and strategic alignment. We unpack what real zero trust implementation looks like beyond the buzzword, why micro-segmentation is foundational to preventing lateral movement and building mission resilience, and how federal agencies can move beyond compliance checklists toward meaningful security outcomes. We also discuss candid perspectives on what drives cybersecurity priorities inside federal agencies and and how zero trust principles will play a critical role in protecting both IT and critical infrastructure systems in the years ahead.

Ryan welcomes Marcus Fontoura, technical fellow at Microsoft and author of Human Agency in the Digital World, to discuss the intersection of technology, society, and human dignity in a digital-first world. They chat about the non-determinism of social media algorithms, the need for balance between efficiency and human dignity in technology, and the role that trust plays in AI.

Episode notes: 

Human Agency in the Digital World is an “AI-era self-help book” about reclaiming our role as pilots—not passengers—in the technology revolution. It’s available now on Amazon and everywhere books are sold. 

Connect with Marcus on LinkedIn and learn more about his work at his website.

Congrats to user Romain for winning a Populist badge on their answer to Django: show the count of related objects in admin list_display. 

TRANSCRIPT

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Nouran Farouk grew up in Egypt, which she notes the culture has a deep root in family. She and her sister have always been drawn to social entrepreneurship, being drawn to building but also positively impacting the world. In addition, Nouran has a medical background, which taught her that good intentions are not enough - you need good systems. Outside of tech, she loves to travel and visit cities. She frequently observes how people move throughout the world, and how systems influence their daily life.

Nouran and her sister wanted to learn to drive scooters. In doing so, they were immediately greeted with inequitable opportunities for women in this arena. They wanted to change this situation, and deployed a back of the napkin idea into a fully operational platform.

This is the creation story of Dosy.

Sponsors

• Unblocked
• TECH Domains
• Mezmo
• Braingrid.ai

Links

• https://www.dosybikes.com/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/nouran-aly-farouk-msc-mbbs-31637b195/

Michael Pollan is the author of A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness. Pollan joins Big Technology Podcast to discuss whether AI can ever become conscious and what that question reveals about the nature of mind. Tune in to hear a nuanced debate about whether consciousness is computable, where today’s LLMs fall short, and how researchers might actually test machine consciousness in the future. We also cover materialism vs. spirituality, the “hard problem” of consciousness, psychedelic experiences, and the emerging science of plant sentience. Hit play for a thoughtful, surprising conversation that brings the AI consciousness debate back down to earth while opening up some of its strangest possibilities.

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James Davies lives in the Maryland area, and started his career at the crossroads of tech and the auto industry. His first girlfriend's father owned some car lots - so he went to work there, wrote some software, and propelled his success at those dealerships. He notes that the auto industry was fun and has a lot of moving parts, but was pretty taxing personally. Outside of tech, he is married with 2 kids. He grew up around construction, so he enjoys getting his hands dirty and building things. In fact, he is fixing up the barn of the recent home he bought - framing, doing the plumbing, and making it livable.

James was working for the state department as a consultant, and was a customer of his current venture. He was chosen to implement the solution, which turned out to be a successful project. Post that project, he was approached by the company to lead projects on the east coast and eventually landed in the CEO role.

This is James' creation story at Kinetic Data.

Sponsors

• Unblocked
• TECH Domains
• Mezmo
• Braingrid.ai

Links

• https://kineticdata.com/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/jameswdavies/

Ryan welcomes Thibault Sottiaux, OpenAI’s engineering lead on Codex, to discuss how the Codex team dogfoods Codex to build Codex, what distinguishes an agentic coding tool from a chat-based code assistant, and why they’re focusing on a safe and secure agentic SDLC rather than just code generation.

Episode notes: 

Codex CLI is a coding agent from OpenAI that runs locally on your computer. Try it now with your Free or Go ChatGPT plan. You can keep up with everything happening at OpenAI on their blog. 

Connect with Thibault on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Congrats to user kevinyu for winning a Great Question badge for Does println! borrow or own the variable?.

TRANSCRIPT

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• Better Python tests with inline-snapshot
• jolt Battery intelligence for your laptop
• Markdown code formatting with ruff
• act - run your GitHub actions locally
• 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 11am 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: Better Python tests with inline-snapshot

• Alex Hall, on Pydantic blog
• Great for testing complex data structures

• Allows you to write a test like this:

  from inline_snapshot import snapshot
  def test_user_creation():
      user = create_user(id=123, name="test_user")
      assert user.dict() == snapshot({})
  

• Then run pytest --inline-snapshot=fix

• And the library updates the test source code to look like this:

  def test_user_creation():
      user = create_user(id=123, name="test_user")
      assert user.dict() == snapshot({
          "id": 123,
          "name": "test_user",
          "status": "active"
      })
  

• Now, when you run the code without “fix” the collected data is used for comparison

• Awesome to be able to visually inspect the test data right there in the test code.
• Projects mentioned
  • inline-snapshot
  • pytest-examples
  • syrupy
  • dirty-equals
  • executing

Michael #2: jolt Battery intelligence for your laptop

• Support for both macOS and Linux
• Battery Status — Charge percentage, time remaining, health, and cycle count
• Power Monitoring — System power draw with CPU/GPU breakdown
• Process Tracking — Processes sorted by energy impact with color-coded severity
• Historical Graphs — Track battery and power trends over time
• Themes — 10+ built-in themes with dark/light auto-detection
• Background Daemon — Collect historical data even when the TUI isn't running
• Process Management — Kill energy-hungry processes directly

Brian #3: Markdown code formatting with ruff

• Suggested by Matthias Schoettle
• ruff can now format code within markdown files
• Will format valid Python code in code blocks marked with python, py, python3 or py3.
• Also recognizes pyi as Python type stub files.
• Includes the ability to turn off formatting with comment [HTML_REMOVED] , [HTML_REMOVED] blocks.
• Requires preview mode

  [tool.ruff.lint]
  preview = true
  

Michael #4: act - run your GitHub actions locally

• Run your GitHub Actions locally! Why would you want to do this? Two reasons:
  • Fast Feedback - Rather than having to commit/push every time you want to test out the changes you are making to your .github/workflows/ files (or for any changes to embedded GitHub actions), you can use act to run the actions locally. The environment variables and filesystem are all configured to match what GitHub provides.
  • Local Task Runner - I love make. However, I also hate repeating myself. With act, you can use the GitHub Actions defined in your .github/workflows/ to replace your Makefile!
• When you run act it reads in your GitHub Actions from .github/workflows/ and determines the set of actions that need to be run.
  • Uses the Docker API to either pull or build the necessary images, as defined in your workflow files and finally determines the execution path based on the dependencies that were defined.
  • Once it has the execution path, it then uses the Docker API to run containers for each action based on the images prepared earlier.
  • The environment variables and filesystem are all configured to match what GitHub provides.

Extras

Michael:

• Winter is coming: Frozendict accepted
• Django ORM stand-alone
• Command Book app announcement post

Joke: Plug ‘n Paste

Box CEO Aaron Levie joins for our weekly discussion of the latest tech news. We cover: 1) OpenAI's anticipated $100 billion fundraise 2) Does OpenAI's big forthcoming raise settle questions about its competitiveness 3) What's going on with OpenAI and NVIDIA? 4) Hype or True: Big Proclamations from the India AI Impact Summit 5) Why can't Sam And Dario hold hands? 6) Anthropic's powerful new model 7) OpenAI acquires OpenClaw 8) What the acquisition portends 9) If software is an API, what is software? 10) Wait, is AI not increasing productivity?

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Ryan is joined by Philippe Saade, the AI project lead at Wikimedia Deutschland, to dive into the Wikidata Embedding Project and how their team vectorized 30 million of Wikidata’s 119 million entries for semantic search. They discuss how this project helped offload the burden that scraping was creating for their sites, what Wikimedia.DE is doing to maintain data integrity for their entries, and the importance of user feedback even as they work to bring Wikipedia’s vast knowledge to people building open-source AI projects. 

Episode notes: 

Wikimedia.DE announced the Wikidata Embedding Project with MCP support in October of last year. Check out their vector database and codebase for the project. 

Connect with Philippe on LinkedIn and his Wiki page. 

Today’s shoutout goes to an Unsung Hero on Stack Overflow—someone who has more than 10 accepted answers with a zero score, making up 25% of their total. Thank you to user MWB for bringing your knowledge to the community!

TRANSCRIPT

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