Category: 3-SometimeTechTalk

Alan Fisher started his career as a computer programmer. Early on, he was hired by the 1st or 2nd largest freight railroad in the world, Union Pacific. He describes their technology group as having a punk rock spirit, leaning towards building their own solutions over buying them, which he found great value in. Outside of tech, he has been married for 30 years, and has 3 kids. He is an avid runner, landing someplace between a marathon runner and a mile in the morning kinda guy. He also loves to read the classics, drawing inspiration from them, along with restoring old homes.

Given his rich history in the rail industry, Alan has led the charge in growth, innovation, and most recently, logistics, analytics, and digital mine. As his company started to look to the future in how to solve the industry's most pressing problems, his team executed the acquisition of a portfolio of companies and products - driving by automated inspection.

This is a creation story of KinetiX at Wabtec Corporation.

Sponsors

• Paddle.com
• Sema Software
• PropelAuth
• Postman
• Meilisearch
• Mailtrap
• .TECH Domains (https://get.tech/codestory)

Links

• https://www.wabteccorp.com/
• https://www.wabteccorp.com/digital-intelligence/condition-monitoring/kinetix-inspection-technologies
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/alanjamiefisher/

Dr. Ben Rapoport and Michael Mager are the co-founders of Precision Neuroscience, a company building a minimally invasive, high-resolution brain-computer interface. The two join Big Technology to discuss the modern day applications of BCIs and frontiers of the technology, including computer control, stroke rehab, decoding consciousness in coma patients, AI-powered neural biomarkers for depression, and the long-term prospect of merging human cognition with machines. Tune in for a fascinating look at the potential for one of earth's most promising technologies.

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We are bringing you a special episode, as our friends at Strata return to the podcast. You might remember our interview from Season 8 with Eric Olden, Co-founder & CEO of the company. Eric took us through the creation story of the company. Today, we will be talking with Granville Schmidt, Chief Architect at Strata, who has been instrumental in architecting and building identity orchestration for AI agents from the ground up. In our chat, we are going to be discussing how the enterprises need to take advantage of identify for agents, and can do so seamlessly, no matter their level of tech debt, disconnection, or complex migration path.

Questions

• Let's break down Identity Orchestration for our audience. Can you explain what it is and walk us through a real customer scenario where it made a huge difference
• Enterprises have accumulated decades of identity tech debt. What are the main problems identity orchestration solves for companies trying to modernize?
• I noticed you work with customers in what you call DDIL environments - disconnected, disrupted, intermittent, and limited bandwidth scenarios. Can you help us understand what these environments look like in practice and why identity becomes such a critical challenge there? 
• You've pioneered Identity Orchestration for AI Agents. What was the moment when you realized AI agents needed a fundamentally different approach to identity management?
• Imagine a company with 1,000 employees but 50,000 AI agents running autonomously. How does your platform handle identity for all these agents differently than traditional systems?

Links

• https://www.strata.io/
• https://www.strata.io/identityheroes/
• https://codestory.co/podcast/e22-eric-olden-strata-identity/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/granvilleschmidt/

Derek Ting grew up in Canada-land, enjoying all the things of the area but especially hockey. He mentioned he has a bit of ADD, which made it hard for him to make it through a chapter in school. Nowadays, he has 2 kids. His oldest son plays hockey, and he and his family enjoys rooting on the Toronto Maple Leafs. When asked about food, he claimed to be one of lives to eat, as he loves food. In fact, the more exotic food the better - but not as far as insects or something.

When Derek figured out that carriers wanted to charge for texting, on top of the fees he was already paying for his phone and associated services. He found this atrocious, and he wanted to figure out a way to text for free - and eventually, all phone service.

This is the creation story of TextNow.

Sponsors

• Paddle.com
• Sema Software
• PropelAuth
• Postman
• Meilisearch
• Mailtrap
• .TECH Domains (https://get.tech/codestory)

Links

• https://www.textnow.com/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/derekting/

• * rathole*
• * pre-commit: install with uv*
• A good example of what functools.Placeholder from Python 3.14 allows
• Converted 160 old blog posts with AI
• 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.

Michael #1: rathole

• A lightweight and high-performance reverse proxy for NAT traversal, written in Rust. An alternative to frp and ngrok.
• Features
  • High Performance Much higher throughput can be achieved than frp, and more stable when handling a large volume of connections.
  • Low Resource Consumption Consumes much fewer memory than similar tools. See Benchmark. The binary can be as small as ~500KiB to fit the constraints of devices, like embedded devices as routers.
    • On my server, it’s currently using about 2.7MB in Docker (wow!)
  • Security Tokens of services are mandatory and service-wise. The server and clients are responsible for their own configs. With the optional Noise Protocol, encryption can be configured at ease. No need to create a self-signed certificate! TLS is also supported.
  • Hot Reload Services can be added or removed dynamically by hot-reloading the configuration file. HTTP API is WIP.

Brian #2: pre-commit: install with uv

• Adam Johnson
• pre-commit doesn’t natively support uv, but you can get around that with pre-commit-uv
• $ uv tool install pre-commit --with pre-commit-uv
• Installing pre-commit like this
  • Installs it globally
  • Installs with uv
  • adds an extra plugin “pre-commit-uv” to pre-commit, so that any Python based tool installed via pre-commit also uses uv
• Very cool. Nice speedup

Brian #3: A good example of what functools.Placeholder from Python 3.14 allows

• Rodrigo Girão Serrão
• Remove punctuation functionally
• Also How to use functools.Placeholder, a blog post about it.
• functools.partial is cool way to create a new function that partially binds some parameters to another function.
• It doesn’t always work for functions that take positional arguments.
• functools.Placeholder fixes that with the ability to put in placeholders for spots where you want to be able to pass that in from the outer partial binding.
• And all of this sounds totally obscure without a good example, so thank you to Rodgrigo for coming up with the punctuation removal example (and writeup)

Michael #4: Converted 160 old blog posts with AI

• They were held-hostage at wordpress.com to markdown and integrated them into my Hugo site at mkennedy.codes

• Here is the chat conversation with Claude Opus/Sonnet.

  • Had to juggle this a bit because the RSS feed only held the last 50. So we had to go back in and web scrape. That resulted in oddies like comments on wordpress that had to be cleaned etc.
  • Whole process took 3-4 hours from idea to “production”duction”.
  • The chat transcript is just the first round getting the RSS → Hugo done. The fixes occurred in other chats.

• This article is timely and noteworthy: Blogging service TypePad is shutting down and taking all blog content with it

• This highlights why your domain name needs to be legit, not just tied to the host. I’m looking at you pyfound.blogspot.com. I just redirected blog.michaelckennedy.net to mkennedy.codes

• Carefully mapping old posts to a new archived area using NGINX config. This is just the HTTP portion, but note the /sitemap.xml and location ~ "^/([0-9]{4})/([0-9]{2})/([0-9]{2})/(.+?)/?$" { portions. The latter maps posts such as https://blog.michaelckennedy.net/2018/01/08/a-bunch-of-online-python-courses/ to https://mkennedy.codes/posts/r/a-bunch-of-online-python-courses/

  server {
      listen 80;
      server_name blog.michaelckennedy.net;
  
      # Redirect sitemap.xml to new domain
      location = /sitemap.xml {
          return 301 <https://mkennedy.codes/sitemap.xml>;
      }
  
      # Handle blog post redirects for HTTP -> HTTPS with URL transformation
      # Pattern: /YYYY/MM/DD/post-slug/ -> <https://mkennedy.codes/posts/r/post-slug/>
      location ~ "^/([0-9]{4})/([0-9]{2})/([0-9]{2})/(.+?)/?$" {
          return 301 <https://mkennedy.codes/posts/r/$4/>;
      }
  
      # Redirect all other HTTP URLs to mkennedy.codes homepage
      location / {
          return 301 <https://mkennedy.codes/>;
      }
  }
  

Extras

Brian:

• SMS URLs and Draft SMS and iMessage from any computer keyboard from Seth Larson
• Test and Code Archive is now up, see announcement

Michael:

• Python: The Documentary | An origin story is out!

Joke: Do you know him? He is me.

Kylan Gibbs, CEO of Inworld, joins the show to discuss the technical challenges of creating interactive AI for virtual worlds and games, the significance of user experience, and the importance of accessibility and cost-efficiency in deploying AI models.

Episode notes: 

Inworld provides solutions for AI applications that allow teams to build and deploy workloads, spend less time on maintenance, and accelerate iteration speed.

Connect with Kylan on LinkedIn.

Today we’re shouting out the winner of an Illuminator badge, user MrWhite, who edited and answered 500 questions, both actions within 12 hours.

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

M.G. Siegler is the author of Spyglass. He joins Big Technology podcast for the latest of our monthly discussions about Big Tech strategy and AI. Today we cover whether OpenAI broke ChatGPT with its GPT-5 rollout and whether new AI models are similar to typical technology rollouts. We also cover Apple's forthcoming new lineup of phones: the iPhone Air, the folding iPhone, and the curved glass iPhone. We conclude with a discussion of the U.S. taking ownership 10% of Intel.

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