The Stack Overflow podcast is a weekly conversation about working in software development, learning to code, and the art and culture of computer programming. Hosted by Paul Ford and Ben Popper, the series features questions from our community, interviews with fascinating guests, and hot takes on what’s happening in tech. Founded in 2008, Stack Overflow is empowering the world to develop technology through collective knowledge. It’s best known for being the largest, most trusted online community for developers and technologists. More than 100 million people come to Stack Overflow every month to ask questions, help solve coding problems, and develop new skills.
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When AI meets IP: Can artists sue AI imitators?
Ben and Ceora talk through some thorny issues around AI-generated music and art, explain why creators are suing AI companies for copyright infringement, and compare notes on the most amusing/alarming AI-generated content making the rounds (Pope coat, anyone?).Episode notes:Getty Images is suing the company behind AI art generator Stable Diffusion for copyright infringement, accusing the company of copying 12 million images without permission or compensation to train its AI model.Meanwhile, a group of artists is suing the companies behind Midjourney, DreamUp, and Stable Diffusion for “scraping and collaging” their work to train AI models. One of those artists, Sarah Anderson, wrote an op-ed in The New York Times about seeing her comics gobbled up by AI models and regurgitated as far-right memes.Speaking of copyright violations, did Vanilla Ice really steal that hook from David Bowie and Freddie Mercury? (Yes.)Check out the AI model trained on Kanye’s voice that sounds almost indistinguishable from Ye himself.Read The Verge’s deep dive into the intersection of AI-generated music and IP/copyright laws.Watch the AI-generated video of Will Smith eating spaghetti that’s been called “the natural end point for AI development.”ICYMI: The Pope coat was real in our hearts.Columbia University’s Data Science Institute recently wrote about how blockchain can give creators more control over their IP, now that AI-generated art is clearly here to stay.Congrats to today’s Lifeboat badge winner, herohuyongtao, for answering How can I add a prebuilt static library in a project using CMake?.
How a top-ranked engineering school reimagined CS curriculum
Olin College of Engineering has one of the top-ranked undergrad engineering programs in the US. Its computing curriculum is a concentration within the engineering major, not a standalone major. The upshot is a liberal arts-informed course of study with fewer math and theory requirements than a typical CS degree and a greater emphasis on practical, job-ready skills like code quality, testing, and documentation. To learn more about how software design is taught at Olin, explore the course.Andrew Mascillaro is a senior at Olin majoring in electrical and computer engineering. He’s currently a software engineering intern at Tableau. You can find him on LinkedIn.Steve Matsumoto is an assistant professor of computer science and engineering at Olin; his academic interests include crypto and cybersecurity. You can find him on GitHub or through his website.
Is this the AI renaissance?
Prosus, one of the world’s largest tech investors, acquired Stack Overflow in 2021.Check out the annual State of AI Report from Nathan Benaich and Ian Hogarth.Read our CEO’s recent post on Stack Overflow’s approach to Generative AI.Connect with Paul on LinkedIn. Today’s Lifeboat badge winner is suvayu for their answer to How to put a big centered "Thank You" in a LaTeX slide.
When setting up monitoring, less data is better
Akita is a monitoring and observability platform that watches API traffic live and automatically infers endpoint structure.Jean, who comes from a family of computer scientists, earned a PhD from MIT and taught in the CS department at Carnegie Mellon University before founding Akita.Read Jean’s post on the Stack Overflow blog: Monitoring debt builds up faster than software teams can pay it off.Jean is on LinkedIn and Twitter.Congrats are in order for Stellar Question badge winner legendary_rob for asking Adding a favicon to a static HTML page.
Ops teams are pets, not cattle (ep. 556)
A common refrain you’ll hear these days is that servers should be scaled out, easy to replace, and interchangeable—cattle, not pets. But for the ops folks who run those servers the opposite is true. You can’t just throw any of them into an incident where they may not know the stack or system and expect everything to work out. Every operator has a set of skills that they’ve built up through research or experience, and teams should value them as such. They’re people, not pets, and certainly not cattle—you can’t just get a new one when you burn out your existing ones. On this episode of the podcast—sponsored by Chronosphere—we talk with Paige Cruz, Senior Developer Advocate at Chronosphere, about how teams can reduce the cognitive load on ops, the best ways to prepare for inevitable failures, and where the worst place to page Paige is. Episode notes:Chronosphere provides an observability platform for ops people, so naturally, the company has an interest in the happiness of those people. If you’re interested in the history of the pets vs. cattle concept , this covers it pretty well. Previously, we spoke with the CEO of Chronosphere about making incidents easier to manage. We’ve covered this topic on the blog before, and two articles came up during our conversation with Paige. You can connect with Paige on Twitter, where she has a pretty apropos handle. Congrats to Stellar Question badge winner Bruno Rocha for asking How can I read large text files line by line, without loading them into memory?, which at least 100 users liked enough to bookmark.
We bought a university: how one coding school doubled down on brick and mortar
Alura is a Portuguese-language edtech platform where users can learn programming, backend and mobile development, data science, design and UX, DevOps, and more.They started small, grew into a bustling online program, then purchased a majority stake in FIAP, a private university in São Paulo, Brazil. Paulo and Stack Overflow Director of Engineering Roberta Arcoverde cohost a popular Portuguese-language podcast about programming, design, startups, and technology.Paulo’s new open-source project is full of career resources for T-shaped developers.Connect with Alura CEO Paulo Silveira on LinkedIn.Connect with Alura Chief Education Officer Guilherme Silveira on LinkedIn.Connect with Roberta Arcoverde on LinkedIn.Today’s Lifeboat badge winner is netblognet for their answer to Get JSON object from URL.
The philosopher who believes in Web Assembly
Fermyon offers serverless cloud computing. Spin is their developer tool for building WebAssembly microservices and web applications; check it out on GitHub.Like past podcast guest David Hsu of Retool (and yours truly), Matt earned a degree in the humanities before deciding to prioritize his “side gig” in tech.Follow Fermyon on GitHub. Matt is on LinkedIn.Shoutout to Lifeboat badge winner keineahnung2345 for saving Hamming distance between two strings in Python from the dustbin of time.
Going stateless with authorization-as-a-service
Cerbos is an open-source, scalable authorization-as-a-service that aims to make implementing roles and permissions a cinch. Explore their docs or see how their customers are using Cerbos. Stateless applications like Cerbos don’t retain data from previous activities, giving devs predictable plug-and-play functionality across cloud, hybrid, on-prem, and edge instances.Connect with Alex on LinkedIn and Twitter.Shoutout to Lifeboat badge winner Hoopje for rescuing Print in bold on a terminal from the dustbin of history.
Building an API is half the battle
If you prefer, you can read this as a Q&A article or watch the video.Kong is a cloud-native API platform. The first iteration of an API marketplace Marco and his colleagues built was Mashape.Developments like GraphQL and gRPC have become critical as the number of APIs increases over time.Find Marco on LinkedIn and Twitter.
From cryptography to consensus: Q&A with CTO David Schwartz on building blockchain apps
Right now, plenty of people are building businesses on social media platforms, on streaming platforms, and on market platforms that they don’t control. That platform can make the rules in any way they want and remove access at any time. That means founders are potentially one step away from losing their livelihood. The same goes for consumers buying from these platforms: if you lose access to your account, there goes all your purchases. As it turns out, you were licensing everything, not buying it. On this sponsored episode of the podcast, we talk with Ripple CTO David Schwartz about the promise that decentralized trust and distributed consensus has for software development — and for more transparency in ownership. Episode notes:Cross-border payments, while they might not be the sexiest app, are one of the best product-market fits for blockchains. Learn more about Ripple at their home page. Get started learning about the XRP Ledger with their documentation. Congrats to Lifeboat badge winner, asmeurer, for their answer to What does `S` signify in SymPy?
From Smalltalk to smart contracts, reflecting on 50 years of programming
Smart contracts aren’t actually new. Computer scientist, legal scholar, and cryptographer Nick Szabo coined the term in 1994 (possibly earlier, depending on who you ask). Old problems seem to keep coming back. Bret Victor gave a talk in 2013 called “The Future of Programming,” where he talked about problems from 1973 that were still relevant. To learn more about the Agoric blockchain, check out their homepage. If you’d rather shape how the blockchain itself operates, much of Agoric’s code is open source. Connect with Dean on Twitter or Telegram
How to keep the servers running when your Mastodon goes viral
A Principal Engineer at GitHib, Kris is president of the Nivenly Foundation and an admin at Hachyderm, an instance of the decentralized social network powered by Mastodon. The ongoing changes at Twitter have fueled interest in alternative, decentralized platforms like Mastodon and Discord.Read Leaving the Basement, Kris’s post about scaling and migrating Hachyderm out of her basement.Watch Kris’s conversation with DigitalOcean Chief Product Officer Gabe Monroy about building decentralized IT platforms.Find Kris on Twitter, GitHub, Twitch, or YouTube.Congrats to Lifeboat badge winner metakeule for answering How can I get an error message in a string in Go?
The next gen web browser has no tabs, only spaces
Today’s guests from Browser Co. are software engineer Victoria Kirst and design lead Dustin Senos of The Browser CompanyThe Browser Company is building a new kind of browser designed to keep users “focused, organized and in control.” Arc, their browser, is “full of big new ideas about how we should interact with the web” and has been called “the best web browser to come out in the last decade.” For an introduction to and first look at Arc, start with this video. You can also join the waiting list or subscribe to the Substack.Follow The Browser Company on Twitter.Connect with Victoria on LinkedIn or Twitter.Connect with Dustin on LinkedIn or Twitter.Special thanks to Ellis Hamburger, owner of the best username, for facilitating this terrific conversation with Victoria and Dustin.Congrats to Lifeboat badge winner Todd for answering How can I name a @Service with multiple names in Spring?.
After crypto’s reality check, an investor remains cautiously optimistic
In his role at SwissOne Capital, Kenny champions investments in Web3 and the metaverse. A writer on all things crypto since 2013, he’s a regular contributor to the US Chamber of Commerce.The collapse of Three Arrows Capital and FTX eroded investor trust in crypto, but Kenny remains “cautiously optimistic” about the market’s future.Connect with Kenny on LinkedIn or Twitter.Congratulations are in order for Lifeboat badge winner xray1986 for their answer to Unicode symbol that represents "download".
Moving up a level of abstraction with serverless on MongoDB Atlas and AWS
The history of computing has been a story of moving up levels of abstraction: from hard-coding algorithms and directly manipulating memory addresses with assembly languages to using more natural language constructs in high-level general purpose languages to abstracting the hardware of the computer in cloud compute. Now serverless functions take that abstraction even further. We’ve made the algorithms that process data simple and natural; MongoDB wants to do the same for how we persist data. On this sponsored episode of the podcast, we chat with Andrew Davidson, SVP Products at MongoDB, about how they’re turning a database into a fully-managed service that developers can use in a more natural way. Along the way, we discuss how the cost bottleneck has moved from the storage media to developers’ minds, how greater abstractions can enable developers, and how to get insights from production data faster. Episode notesTry MongoDB Atlas on AWS for free.You can get started with MongoDB Atlas directly from the AWS Marketplace. If you’re at a startup, you can take advantage of their special offer for startups. The community edition of their classic database is available to download as well. If you’re looking to learn a thing or two before diving in, check out MongoDB University. Our thanks to Great Question badge winner Derek 朕會功夫 for asking How can I reverse an array in JavaScript without using libraries? You know the rarest kung fu of all: asking great questions.