Category: 3-SometimeTechTalk

Raja Tabet lives in Austin, TX, but grew up overseas in Lebanon. When he migrated to the states for his education, he did not speak English, and had to go through the process of learning the language to fully integrate. He studied computer science for undergrad, and computer engineering for graduate school. And eventually, went to work for companies like IBM, Freescale, and others, prior to landing in his current role. Outside of tech, he has been married for 35 years, and has 3 kids. He and his wife are empty nesters, so they love to travel, hike and explore new areas.

In 2019, Raja joined Synopsys, specifically in their custom design and manufacturing group. A few years ago, and alongside the advent of AI, he changed roles and began building an AI powered solution for electronic design automation, or EDA.

This is Raja's creation story at Synopsys.

Sponsors

• Vention
• Build with CodeCrafters for free today and enjoy 40% off using this link. 
• Full Scale
• Paddle.com
• Sema Software
• PropelAuth
• Postman
• Meilisearch

Links

• https://www.synopsys.com/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/raja-tabet-4a83178/

Ryan welcomes Dhruv Batra, co-founder and chief scientist at Yutori, to explore the future of AI agents, how AI usage is changing the way people interact with advertisements and the web as a whole, and the challenges that proactive AI agents may face when being integrated into workflows and personal internet use. 

Episode notes:

Yutori is building AI agents that can reliably handle everyday digital tasks on your behalf on the web.

Connect with Dhruv via his website. 

Congrats to the winner of today’s Populist badge, user Don Kirkby, who earned it with their answer to Find all references to an object in python.

TRANSCRIPT

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

Ranjan Roy from Margins is back for our weekly discussion of the latest tech news. We cover: 1) Why the AI industry needs to get to AGI to make the investments pay off 2) The diverging tracks between AI model improvement and investing in scaling 3) Why the LLM craze may delay the path to AGI 4) So what is all this compute for? 5) OpenAI's $1 trillion infrastructure investment 6) The increasing prevalence of debt in AI funding 7) Could an AI collapse hit the global economy? 8) OpenAI and AMD's wacky deal 9) Oracle's margins 10) OpenAI's Sora 'surprise' 11) Will John Ternus be Apple's next CEO?

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Peter O’Donohue, CTO at Tyto Athene, and Gaurav “GP” Pal, Principal at Stack Armor join the show to unpack the future of federal compliance, security, and cloud modernization. From automating risk management frameworks to balancing mission urgency with cybersecurity, the discussion dives into how government and industry can partner to drive efficiency, accountability, and continuous monitoring. Finally we explore insights on the evolution of FedRAMP, secure-by-design practices, and the role of AI and quantum in shaping the next five years of compliance.

Ryan welcomes back Evan You, the creator of Vite and Vue.js, to discuss the evolution of build tools in web development, the unique features of Vite from its plugins to its hot module capabilities, and the future of Vite, including its integration with Rust. Plus, they touch on Vite’s new documentary and the power of open-source communities.

Episode notes:

Vite is a frontend build tool powering the next generation of web applications. 

Check out all of the work Evan is doing at his company VoidZero. 

For more on the origins of Vite, watch the newly-released Cult.repo’s documentary. 

If you’d rather hear Evan talk about Vue.js, listen to the podcast we published with him earlier this summer. 

Today’s shoutout goes to user dbush for winning a Populist badge on their answer to How does printing a union itself and not its member work in C?.

TRANSCRIPT

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

Today, we are talking with Oliver Mitchell, Partner at ff Venture Capital, the most engaged technology venture capital firm in New York City since 2008. They have an extensive portfolio, and have created billions of dollars in market cap value.

Recently, Oliver has released a book titled A Startup Field Guide in the Age of Robots and AI. In the book, he sets the stage to mentor - and provide mentors - around building a hardware startup in modern day times. The book is full of advice, real life stories from the trenches, and practical information to help you succeed.

Questions:

• Tell me about the book - what was the main goal of you writing it, what were you trying to accomplish?
• In the book, you discuss what it takes to launch a business in this industry. What are the five essential rules for launching a successful automation company?
• How do you attract investors, given their visceral reaction to hardware sensors and robots? How do you prepare, circumvent or comfort these investors when they spot the red flags?
• Hardware startups require the right people, the right R&D, etc. - just to get to MVP. What are some strategies for validating product-market fit in hardware startups?
• At times, the government creates roadblocks through over-regulating and slow pace of play. But how can these partnerships be used for funding and even potentially customer acquisition channels?
• In your book, you've interviewed some of the most respected luminaries in the space. Can you elaborate on these real world case studies? What were the significant challenges they overcame?
• If you could give one piece of advice to someone heading down this path, what would it be?

Sponsors

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

Links

• https://ffvc.com/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/oliverbmitchell/
• https://www.amazon.com/dp/1032827491

• * Python 3.14*
• * Free-threaded Python Library Compatibility Checker*
• * Claude Sonnet 4.5*
• * Python 3.15 will get Explicit lazy imports*
• Extras
• Joke

About the show

Sponsored by DigitalOcean: pythonbytes.fm/digitalocean-gen-ai Use code DO4BYTES and get $200 in free credit

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.

Brian #1: Python 3.14

• Released on Oct 7
• What’s new in Python 3.14
• Just a few of the changes
  • PEP 750: Template string literals
  • PEP 758: Allow except and except* expressions without brackets
  • Improved error messages
  • Default interactive shell now
    • highlights Python syntax
    • supports auto-completion
  • argparse
    • better support for python -m module
    • has a new suggest_on_error parameter for “maybe you meant …” support
  • python -m calendar now highlights today’s date
• Plus so much more

Michael #2: Free-threaded Python Library Compatibility Checker

• by Donghee Na
• App checks compatibility of top PyPI libraries with CPython 3.13t and 3.14t, helping developers understand how the Python ecosystem adapts to upcoming Python versions.
• It’s still pretty red, let’s get in the game everyone!

Michael #3: Claude Sonnet 4.5

• Top programming model (even above Opus 4.1)
• Shows large improvements in reducing concerning behaviors like sycophancy, deception, power-seeking, and the tendency to encourage delusional thinking
• Anthropic is releasing the Claude Agent SDK, the same infrastructure that powers Claude Code, making it available for developers to build their own agents, along with major upgrades including checkpoints, a VS Code extension, and new context editing features
• And Claude Sonnet 4.5 is available in PyCharm too.

Brian #4: Python 3.15 will get Explicit lazy imports

• Discussion on discuss.python.org

• This PEP introduces syntax for lazy imports as an explicit language feature:

  lazy import json
  lazy from json import dumps
  

• BTW, lazy loading in fixtures is a super easy way to speed up test startup times.

Extras

Brian:

• Music video made in Python - from Patrick of the band “Friends in Real Life”
  • source code: https://gitlab.com/low-capacity-music/r9-legends/

Michael:

• New article: Thanks AI
• Lots of updates for content-types
• Dramatically improved search on Python Bytes (example: https://pythonbytes.fm/search?q=wheel use the filter toggle to see top hits)
• Talk Python in Production is out and for sale

Joke: You do estimates?

Mike Krieger is the chief product officer at Anthropic and co-founder of Instagram. Krieger joins Big Technology Podcast to discuss Anthropic's Sonnet 4.5 launch and how the company's been able to speed up AI model development. Tune in to hear how Anthropic is using internal tools to move fast, where the next generations of model improvements will look like, and whether model orchestration will be the core differentiator between labs. We also cover how AI development compares to social media, whether AI content will ever take off, and enterprise AI's path ahead.

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Alex Galkin can't remember a time where he wasn't doing tech. Funny enough, he does remember a time before internet was common place. In 6th or 7th grade, he got a computer and immediately disassembled it. And eventually, he built an internet service provider for his community, eventually dropped out of university, and sold his internet provider. Outside of tech, he has always been into sports - cycling, motorcycles, etc. And though he doesn't have much time for it anymore, he is big into Brazilian Jujitsu.

At his old role, Alex started to pitch subscription pricing for their products. The timing wasn't right for deep machine learning for pricing, so his boss turned him down. Several years later, he and his team are leveraging the power of Contextual AI to calculate and optimize price combinations.

This is the creation story of Competera AI.

Sponsors

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

Links

• https://competera.ai/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexhalkin/