OA1194 - NY defense attorney Liz Skeen joins to talk about the evolution (or devolution?) or our Miranda rights in the past several decades. How does an actual criminal defense attorney who deals with these issues every day think about them?
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PostgreSQL 18 is out (Sep 25, 2025) with a focus on faster text handling, async I/O, and easier upgrades.
New async I/O subsystem speeds sequential scans, bitmap heap scans, and vacuum by issuing concurrent reads instead of blocking on each request.
Major-version upgrades are smoother: pg_upgrade retains planner stats, adds parallel checks via -jobs, and supports faster cutovers with -swap.
Smarter query performance lands with skip scans on multicolumn B-tree indexes, better OR optimization, incremental-sort merge joins, and parallel GIN index builds.
Dev quality-of-life: virtual generated columns enabled by default, a uuidv7() generator for time-ordered IDs, and RETURNING can expose both OLD and NEW.
Security gets an upgrade with native OAuth 2.0 authentication; MD5 password auth is deprecated and TLS controls expand.
Text operations get a boost via the new PG_UNICODE_FAST collation, faster upper/lower, a casefold() helper, and clearer collation behavior for LIKE/FTS.
If you need to grind through DSA problems to get your first job, then of course, do that, but if you want to prepare yourself for a career, and also stand out in job interviews, learn how to write tests.
Testing is a skill you’ll use constantly, will make you stand out in job interviews, and isn’t taught well in school (usually).
Testing code well is not obvious. It’s a puzzle and a problem to solve.
It gives you confidence and helps you write better code.
Applies everywhere, at all levels.
Notes from Brian
Most devs suck at testing, so being good at it helps you stand out very quickly.
Thinking about a system and how to test it often very quickly shines a spotlight on problem areas, parts with not enough specification, and fuzzy requirements. This is a good thing, and bringing up these topics helps you to become a super valuable team member.
High level tests need to be understood by key engineers on a project. Even if tons of the code is AI generated. Even if many of the tests are, the people understanding the requirements and the high level tests are quite valuable.
I’ve subsequently had the team on Talk Python: #523: Pyrefly: Fast, IDE-friendly typing for Python (podcast version coming in a few weeks, see video for now.)
My experience has been Pyrefly changes the feel of the editor, give it a try. But disable the regular language server extension.
“I’ve been working with playwright more often to do end to end tests. As a project grows to do more with HTMX and Alpine in the markup, there’s less unit and integration test coverage and a greater need for end to end tests.”
Tim covers some cool E2E techniques
Open new pages / tabs to be tested
Using a pytest marker to identify playwright tests
Using a pytest marker in place of fixtures
Using page.pause() and Playwright’s debugging tool
Using assert_axe_violations to prevent accessibility regressions
Using page.expect_response() to confirm a background request occurred
From Brian
Again, with more and more lower level code being generated, and many unit tests being generated (shakes head in sadness), there’s an increased need for high level tests.
Don’t forget API tests, obviously, but if there’s a web interface, it’s gotta be tested.
Especially if the primary user experience is the web interface, building your Playwright testing chops helps you stand out and let’s you test a whole lot of your system with not very many tests.
Yes, take Ned’s advice and don’t focus so much on DSA, focus also on learning to test.
However, one topic you should be comfortable with in algortithm-land is Big O, at least enough to have a gut feel for it. And this article is really good enough for most people.
Great graphics, demos, visuals. As usual, great content from Sam Who, and a must read for all serious devs.
Some interesting discussions around setting up my own server, but this seems like it might be yak shaving procrastination research when I really should be writing or coding. So I’m holding off until I get some writing projects and a couple SaaS projects further along.
English is now an API. Our apps read untrusted text; they follow instructions hidden in plain sight, and sometimes they turn that text into action. If you connect a model to tools or let it read documents from the wild, you have created a brand new attack surface. In this episode, we will make that concrete. We will talk about the attacks teams are seeing in 2025, the defenses that actually work, and how to test those defenses the same way we test code. Our guides are Tori Westerhoff and Roman Lutz from Microsoft. They help lead AI red teaming and build PyRIT, a Python framework the Microsoft AI Red Team uses to pressure test real products. By the end of this hour you will know where the biggest risks live, what you can ship this quarter to reduce them, and how PyRIT can turn security from a one time audit into an everyday engineering practice.
Leah and Kate dive into the week’s legal news, explaining how SCOTUS continues to carry water for the Trump administration. They also cover an epic slapdown of the Roberts Court out of Hawaii, Sam Alito’s Italian sojourn, and the DOJ’s refusal to investigate the wads of cash lining border czar Tom Homan’s pockets. Then all three hosts are joined by special guests Sherrilyn Ifill, founding director of the 14th Amendment Center for Law & Democracy at Howard University, and New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie to discuss the Supreme Court in the years after the Civil War and Reconstruction and why that era, known as the Redemption Court, resonates with today’s legal landscape.
Following the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, a wave of everyday people have been punished, getting doxxed and even losing their jobs because of statements they made online regarding Kirk and his death. Even the Vice President of the United States, JD Vance, encouraged Americans to call the employers of anyone they feel is “celebrating Charlie’s murder.” Free speech matters now, more than ever. But what can we say without fear of retribution? To find out what the rules around speech in America really are, and why this is no time to self-censor, we spoke to Ari Cohn. He’s lead counsel at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, with a focus on tech policy.
And in the news: Oregon sues the Trump administration to stop the deployment of the state’s National Guard to protect federal buildings, current New York City Mayor Eric Adams pulls out of the upcoming mayoral race, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu changes his story on what happened with those bunker busters in Iran.
Jimmy Kimmel’s brief departure from the airwaves triggered a wave of debate over free speech. Partly triggering his suspension was the government threatening to leverage its power over pending media deals. That’s in part due to a piece of decades-old legislation.
Today on the show, we look at how the Telecommunications Act of 1996 set the stage for government meddling and corporate capitulation.
Death & Co. started the craft cocktail movement… and now it’s becoming a hotel chain.
Apple’s surprise Made in America power move?... Buy Intel (the whole company).
Costco opened 1 hour early for executive members … and it led to a surge in upgrades.
Plus, video advertising is coming for your… Toilet Paper.
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With Gaza cut off from food and aid, activists have taken matters into their own hands, and are attempting to circumvent Israel’s blockade themselves via the Mediterranean.
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Podcast production by Elena Schwartz, Paige Osburn, Anna Phillips, Madeline Ducharme, and Rob Gunther.
At 77, the Booker Prize-winning British novelist Ian McEwan shows no signs of slowing down. His new novel, What We Can Know, is set in Great Britain in the 22nd century – a country now partly underwater as a result of global warming. In today’s episode, McEwan speaks with NPR’s Scott Simon about the book’s plot – it tells of a search for a lost poem that was written in our own times – and notes that he is less interested in the future of science than that of the humanities, love and daily life.
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