The Stack Overflow Podcast

You can find Shestakofsky on his website or check him out on X.Grab a copy of his new book: Behind the Startup: How Venture Capital Shapes Work, Innovation, and Inequality. As he writes on his website, the book:Draws on 19 months of participant-observation research to examine how investors’ demand for rapid growth created organizational problems that managers solved by combining high-tech systems with low-wage human labor. The book shows how the burdens imposed on startups by venture capital—as well as the benefits and costs of “moving fast and breaking things”—are unevenly distributed across a company’s workforce and customers. With its focus on the financialization of innovation, Behind the Startup explains how the gains generated by tech startups are funneled into the pockets of a small cadre of elite investors and entrepreneurs. To promote innovation that benefits the many rather than the few, Shestakofsky argues that we should focus less on fixing the technology and more on changing the financial infrastructure that supports it.A big thanks to our user of the week, Parusnik, who was awarded a Great Question badge for asking: How to run a .NET Core console application on Linux?

Temporal is an open-source implementation of durable execution, a development paradigm that preserves complete application state so that upon host or software failure it can seamlessly migrate execution to another machine. Learn how it works or dive into the docs. Temporal’s SaaS offering is Temporal Cloud.Replay is a three-day conference focused on durable execution. Replay 2024 is September 18-20 in Seattle, Washington, USA. Get your early bird tickets or submit a talk proposal!Connect with Maxim on LinkedIn.User Honda hoda earned a Famous Question badge for SQLSTATE[01000]: Warning: 1265 Data truncated for column.

Robin is the author of a practical handbook for Selenium test automation.Connect with Robin on LinkedIn, Twitter, or via his website. Shoutout to user2651084, who earned a Great Question badge by asking How do I reset the Jupyter/IPython input prompt numbering?. 

Galileo is an end-to-end platform for GenAI evaluation, experimentation, and observability. Learn more by exploring their docs.Galileo’s Hallucination Index is a ranking and evaluation framework for LLM hallucinations (it includes a blooper reel).Connect with Vikram on LinkedIn.Stack Overflow user Petr Janeček won a Lifeboat badge for answering Null array to empty list, a question that’s helped more than 47,000 other curious folks.Are you a software developer? Take Stack Overflow’s annual survey about how you learn and level up, which tools you’re using, and which ones you want most. You can check out the results of previous surveys here.

OverflowAI is a GenAI-powered add-on for Stack Overflow for Teams that does the heavy lifting of discovering and distilling information into a coherent answer. It encompasses three modules: Enhanced Search, an upgraded search experience; Stack Overflow for Visual Studio Code, an IDE extension; and Auto-Answer App for Slack, which automates access to essential team knowledge. Read about why OverflowAI is a big step toward integrating GenAI offerings into knowledge communities and dig into what’s launching and why it’s valuable.Connect with Ash on LinkedIn.Big props to Stack Overflow user Jennifer M., who earned both a Great Question badge and a Famous Question badge by wondering How to combine the sequence of objects in jq into one object?.

Al Sweigert is the author of Automate the Boring Stuff with Python and many other books about programming. You can read them all for free here.His scroll art project introduces beginners to programming by letting them turn loops and print() into animated ASCII art.Al joined us from a retreat at the Brooklyn, NY-based Recurse Center, which offers free, self-directed retreats for programmers. Learn how to apply here.PyCon US 2024 is May 15-23, 2024, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.Connect with Al through his website.Shoutout to user Alex. S., who asked Stack Overflow’s most popular Python question ever: What does the "yield" keyword do in Python?. It’s helped 3.3 million people and counting.

Read Eira’s two-part series about developers with ADHD here and here.Chris recommends that devs with ADHD employ a “second brain” to help them track and remember information. Read Eira’s article on what second brains reveal about how we work.A few years back Chris joined us to talk about the most lightweight web “framework” around: VanillaJS. Listen to the episode.Chris offers classes and workshops for front-end developers, plus daily advice for developers with ADHD.Connect with Chris through his website or social media.

Kong is a cloud-native API gateway. Find them on GitHub.We last spoke with Marco in 2023. infConnect with Marco on LinkedIn.Congrats to Famous Question badge winner mjbradford7 on How to re-render one component from another in React.

If you’ve been laid off or you’re just sweating the possibility, here’s what to do. Check out the results of our last job market survey. Connect with Patrick on LinkedIn.Shoutout to stevenkucera, who earned a Stellar Question badge with How do I create a global, mutable singleton?.

In a narrow vote, the US Federal Trade Commission banned almost all noncompete agreements, a staple of the tech industry for years.Learn how a 2017 tax law is haunting startups in 2024.Finnish hacker Aleksanteri Kivimäki exposed tens of thousands of confidential psychiatric records and tried to extort payment directly from the affected patients. Read more about it here or here. It happened: President Biden signed the TikTok “ban,” setting a deadline for the platform’s parent company, China-based ByteDance, to divest the app within a year. And TikTok faces yet more hurdles ahead.Net neutrality is back, baby. Here’s what that means.

SQLite is the most used database engine in the world. Stop by the forum or explore the docs.Devs have pledged to support SQLite through the year 2050. The developer with a team of three, all of them himself at different points in time, was Tarn Adams of Dwarf Fortress fame. On Stack Overflow, 1.2 million people have found the answer to How can I list the tables in a SQLite database file that was opened with ATTACH?. 

Meta’s open-source Llama 3 model puts Meta’s AI assistant head-to-head with ChatGPT.Stability AI laid off 10% of its workforce, the first major AI foundation model to reduce its workforce since the advent of generative AI.Is the dot-com bubble a cautionary tale for AI enthusiasts? Listen to the episode of Marketplace from NPR.Do LLMs support Wittgenstein’s position that “meaning is use”? That depends whether you’re talking pre or post Tractatus, of course.TikTok wouldn’t lie to you: you really can make friends with your local crows. Eira’s proven method for befriending crows: Feed them dry cat food on a consistent schedule, so they learn you’re reliable, and watch them eat, so they grok that you are feeding them intentionally.Stack Overflow user Arman Ordookhani received a well-deserved Lifeboat badge for telling nearly 30,000 people How to free memory in go.

Why can’t configuration be made simple? Apple is making it easier for users to repair their iPhones with used parts.Texas is swapping human graders for AI.Automattic (owner of WordPress) is acquiring Beeper for $125M.Silicon Valley or not, San Francisco’s train system still uses floppy disks. But don’t worry, an upgrade is coming—in 2030.Shoutout to Bite code, who earned a Stellar Question badge with How do I change the URI (URL) for a remote Git repository?.

Get started with MongoDB Atlas on Google Cloud today. Read more from the MongoDB DevRel team at the MongoDB Developer Center.Learn more about Google’s Gemini models. Shout out to thitemple for their Lifeboat-worthy answer to In TypeScript, how do I declare a function that returns a string type array?.

Connect with Michael on LinkedIn. Shoutout to user1083266, who earned a Stellar Question badge with How to store image in SQLite database.

ICYMI: A backdoor in XZ, a popular open-source compression utility, highlights the risks of relying on open-source software maintained by small teams. Read more about the cyberattack here.Apple’s new LLM, Ferret, could help Siri understand the user interfaces of mobile displays, potentially expanding the capabilities of Apple’s digital assistant. Shoutout to Stack Overflow user cheese1756, who earned a Great Question badge by asking How do I ensure that whitespace is preserved in Markdown?.

Learn more about the potential of AI inference with OpenVINO Notebooks.Check out the previous podcast with Intel, where we talk with Raymond Lo about how hardware and software work together with AI.Connect with Ria on LinkedIn or GitHub. Congrats to Lifeboat badge winner Kevin, who showed what they know about TypeError; Must use key word argument or key function in Python 3.x.

A developer discovered a backdoor in XZ, a popular open-source compression utility. Read more about the cyberattack here.A Microsoft technical report pinpoints 54 attributes of great software engineers.A new report from The Economist lays out how AI is changing drug development.Are you sick of hearing about AI? What topics or technologies would you rather hear us talk about? Email us at podcast@stackoverflow.com or DM Ben here.

You can find Jessica on LinkedIn.We've published several posts, including this most recent one, about our attempt to shape an ethical approach to combining our community of knowledge and today's AI systems.Check out this blog post that details some of the work we did to build our data platform. Congrats to macfij on your lifeboat badge for answering the question: How can I do a CTRL + A and a CTRL + C?

DBRX, an open, general-purpose LLM created by Databricks, reportedly outperforms GPT-3.5 and is competitive with Gemini 1.0 Pro.Recent research found that large, complex LLMs use a simple mechanism to retrieve stored knowledge in response to a user prompt. These mechanisms can help researchers reveal what the model knows and potentially even correct false information it has stored.FTX co-founder Sam Bankman-Fried, whose downfall began in late 2022, was sentenced last week to 25 years in prison for conspiracy and fraud. Find Michael on LinkedIn.Find Cassidy on her website.Stack Overflow user Bucket received a well-deserved Lifeboat badge for rescuing How to calculate decimal(x, y) max value in SQL Server from an ocean of ignorance.Chapters (please note that these timestamps may not be exact): 00:00 Introduction and White Paper Discussion02:01 Long Context Windows and Retrieval Augmented Generation05:56 Models' Ability to Recall Relevant Information07:18 Models' Creativity and Thinking Outside the Box09:41 Advantages and Limitations of Models' Knowledge15:09 Databricks' Open Language Model22:25 Sam Bankman-Fried’s Sentence and the Effects on Crypto/Blockchain31:28 Closing Remarks and Lifeboat Badge