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.
How to beat Doom in just 600 years
A theory explores how to play DOOM inside a human cell. Fair warning, you'll need about 600 years to complete the game.Looking for a good prompt builder to help you get the most out of your LLM? Try this one or explore this huge collection of prompts.Startup Twin Labs wants to build a product that automates repetitive tasks by letting AI take over your cursor.Harvard Medical School researchers published a study showing that the CRISPR system can encode information in living cells “as complex as a digitized image of a human hand.” Read more.Three cheers for Max Lybbert, who earned a Lifeboat badge by answering Python faster than C++? How does this happen?.
Inside Intuit's generative AI system, GenOS
Intuit shares more about their generative AI operating system (GenOS) in this Medium blog. Learn more about Intuit technology here.Congrats to Lifeboat badge winner Mohsin Naeem for answering the question How can I extract metadata from an MP3 file?Connect with Merrin on LinkedIn or X. Connect with Shivang on LinkedIn.
Agile works great...to a certain size
The estate of the late comedian George Carlin is suing the creators of an hour-long AI-generated comedy special that mimics Carlin’s distinctive delivery and material. [Ed. note: not actually AI, still lawsuit.]Prefer your AI more Freudo-Marxist? Here’s a never-ending, AI-generated conversation between Werner Herzog and Slavoj Žižek. You’re welcome.Google’s Bard surpassed GPT-4 to claim the second spot on the LMSYS Chatbot Arena Leaderboard.Agile development is faltering at big companies, and a recent report cites developer burnout as a factor. But maybe the problem lies in companies’ (mis)understanding of agile.Shoutout to Stack Overflow user Emil Laine, who earned a Lifeboat badge with their answer to How can I include all of the C++ Standard Library at once?.
Compression is understanding
Find out what’s new with ML in production.Machine learning models must learn to unlearn.Open-source game engine Godot now has a free Nintendo Switch port for game developers.We’ve previously hosted Godot cofounder and lead developer Juan Linietsky on the podcast.Stack Overflow user areller earned a Lifeboat badge with their answer to How to call a destructor.
Hacking the hamburger: How a pentester exposed holes in hundreds of fast-food chains
A white-hat hacker uncovered security vulnerabilities in an AI-powered hiring system used by fast-food chains and hourly employees around the world. Read the blog post or watch this explainer.Mariposa is a programming language with time travel.Want to be an individual contributor (IC) who still amplifies the performance of everyone around you? Be a radiating programmer.Congratulations to onmyway133, winner of a Stellar Question badge for What does the suspend function mean in a Kotlin Coroutine?.
Sending bugs back in time
Mariposa is a toy programming language that has time travel as a primary feature. Bugs are a thing of the past (literally)!Miss having a physical keyboard when thumb-typing on your phone? Well, you’re in luck. Over at CES, LG Electronics wants your devices to have “affectionate intelligence.” Whatever it takes to make AI more human-centric and empathetic.Omar used to work on the Backstage project at Spotify, so we quoted him in our article on it. Now he works on personalization, including Discover Weekly, which drops a new mixtape on you every Monday like a hipster with a crush.
Letting algorithms guide our path to the next great invention
Rabbit R1 is an AI-powered assistant you can keep in your pocket (but it’s not a phone).How will AI impact scientific research? A new collaboration between Microsoft and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory is focused on energy storage solutions.A US Senate hearing questions whether tech companies should be allowed to train their AI models on content produced by journalists without paying licensing fees.Learn how to build a mechanical computer from Legos.
How to build a role-playing video game in 24 hours
Now you know: The human body can serve as a resonance chamber for remote car keys, effectively extending their range.A hackathon team used GenAI can create a fully playable D&D-style game in just one day.Skybox AI from Blockade Labs allows users to generate 360° skybox experiences from text prompts.A significant advancement in the brain-computer interfaces (BCI) space: a novel framework called DeWave integrates “discrete encoding sequences into open-vocabulary EEG-to-text translation tasks” without the need for “eye-tracking fixations or event markers to segment brain dynamics into word-level features.”Shoutout to Stack Overflow user Vineeth Chitteti, who earned a Favorite Question badge with Is it possible to hit multiple pods with a single request in Kubernetes cluster?.
Maximum Glitch: How to break Tetris
Willis Gibson, 13, closed out 2023 by becoming the first person to officially beat the original Nintendo version of Tetris. Here’s how he did it.Want to understand the code that caused the ultimate killscreen? Watch this great explainer from HydrantDude.The 2023 film Tetris is based on the true story of the legal battle to license the game.Is the era of the robot butler upon us? Mobile ALOHA is a low-cost and whole-body teleoperation system for data collection. Check out some of what it can do.Explore the questions and answers on the Mathematics Stack Exchange.
How long till we run out of fresh data to train the AI?
Will AI fundamentally change software development or just add some efficiencies around the edges? Surveys from Stack Overflow and Github find north of 70% have probably already tried using it and many incorporate it into their daily work through a helper in the IDE. It's also worth reflecting a bit on the technology sectors that didn't have as great a 2023: crypto, VR, and quantum computing still seem far from mainstream adoption. We dive a little into the half-life of skills, which seem to be shrinking, especially in IT. Got any resolutions to learn something new this year?And what about the data we use for training? We highlight a comment from Kian Katanforoosh, a lecturer who helped create Stanford's Deep Learning course with Andrew Ng, who says we'll run out of high quality data as soon as 2030.A big thanks and congrats to Stack Overflow user Corn3lius for helping to answer a question and being awarded a life boat badge: How can I create spoiler text?
He created Stanford's Deep Learning class. Programmers will need to learn faster
Along with his work at Stanford, Katanforoosh is a founding member of deeplearning.ai and co-created the Deep Learning Specialization on Coursera. He believes the rapidly expanding capabilities of AI will mean that humans, and especially programmers, will need to learn new skills faster than ever. This doesn't mean machines are going to take our jobs. Rather, with the assistance of AI, humans will become far more capable, learning faster and mastering more domains. Not surprisingly, Katanforoosh has built his business with the goal of addressing this issue. Workera aims to help companies identify where their employees lack skills and provide them with personalized instruction that can quickly bring them up to the next level.You can find Kian on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Stanford's website. Thanks to Stack Overflow user PaxDiablo, who was awarded a Life Boat badge for providing a great answer to the question: Given a month in numeric form, how do you find the first month of its respective quarter?
Netlify CEO Matt Biilmann explains what we'll see with UI 2.0
Biilmann says we can't ignore the impact GenAI is having on developer productivity. One of their engineers created a GPT that automatically generates stories for React + TypeScript components, and after seeing how successful it was internally, Netlify made it open source for the public.We also chat over the results of their recent State of Web Development survey. The key takeaway is below: The 80% of developers that have integrated AI into their workflow are quickly reaping the benefits. Seventy percent report using AI to automate manual and repetitive tasks and 42% are using it to improve internal knowledge sharing and increase productivity, freeing up more time for impactful work and enabling faster launch times. Over 50% of developers also realized new opportunities that AI created, such as generating new web projects with a single prompt or reading API documentation.However, AI experimentation is not without its own unique challenges. Developers are concerned about receiving incorrect answers and information (65%), security issues and leaking confidential information (52%), a lack of regulation (48%), and a decrease in code quality (45%).So much opportunity, but plenty of risk as well. Last but not least, Biilmann tells us what he's looking forward to in the near future, specifically apps that can reformat their UI on the fly to be more customized to each user. He calls this UI 2.0, and it sounds a bit like what Google showed off in its recent Gemini demo. Congrats to our lifeboat winner of the week, Petrus Theron, who answered the question: How can I make a public struct where all fields are public without repeating `pub` for every field?
From prompt attacks to data leaks, LLMs offer new capabilities and new threats
SPONSORED BY DOITThe broken nose in jail scam is on the rise. With AI improvements, it’ll get harder to spot. OWASP, a non-profit dedicated to software security, tracks the top ten security risks for LLMs.We’ve spoken with DoIT on the podcast before about LLM hallucinations. DoIT’s sales pitch is simple: they provide technology and expertise to clients who want to use the cloud, free of charge, with the big cloud providers paying the bills.
A tax change is hurting startups and developers
On today’s home team episode, Ben and Ryan discuss the implications of a lapse in section 174 of the tax code. Here’s a great explainer on how it’s affecting startups and software firms, threatening jobs and potentially bankrupting some struggling companies. Video game employees are exploring a union and Microsoft recently announced it will stay neutral in the process. What’s the difference between a bad game, a low effort developer, and shovelware? Our game development Stack Exchange has some thoughts.Today’s lifeboat badge winner is “that_other_guy”, who explained: What is the difference between kill and kill -9? Hint, you want to terminate your process, not brutally murder it, ok!
Can an AI get depressed?
Does ChatGPT have seasonal depression?AIs aren’t building apps on their own, at least not yet—but they are helping developers build them. Read Isaac Lyman’s article about the three types of AI-assisted programmers.ICYMI: Listen to our interview with linguist Gašper Beguš, director of the Berkeley Speech and Computation Lab, about how LLMs and humans acquire language. Shoutout to Stack Overflow user nhgrif, who earned a Lifeboat badge by rescuing Store only date without time in a database from the ash heap of history.