In this episode we looked at the tragic story of tech company CEOs doing drugs and the various knock-on effects.

We also played a lightning round of "Aspiring to be a nation state or on drugs?" with various headlines.

This is the final episode of Picture Me Coding for 2024 and we’ll be taking a break for a few weeks after this. But we’ll be back next year!

Mike made a playlist of all the music we talked about this year too! Find it here: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6jbM32yzvi8MK3zv2cXPSr?si=f40f8df000404a11

REFERENCES ROUNDUP

• NYT: “The C.E.O.s Are Tripping. Can Psychedelics Help the C-Suite?”
• The Verge: “Google reveals quantum computing chip with ‘breakthrough’ achievements”
• Google blog announcement of quantum computing breakthrough
• Scott Aaronson: Shtetl-Optimized » Blog Archive » The Google Willow thing
• TechCrunch: “Court orders Automattic to restore WP Engine’s access to WordPress.org”
• Wordpress’s Mullenweg interview with The Verge.
• Goodbye, unreliable weather forecasts? Google DeepMind's AI model sets new benchmark for 15-day predictions | TechRadar
• Google Blog: Introducing Gemini 2.0: our new AI model for the agentic era
• the Spectator “Are you ready for agentic AI?”
• Google Genai: new Python repo with “Part” data type
• Azure’s AI Agent Service announcement
• Toms Hardware: “AI GPU Clusters with one million GPUs are planned for 2027”
• Big Tech Embraces Nuclear Power to Fuel AI and Data Centers - IEEE Spectrum
• https://subseacables.blogspot.com/2024/10/breaking-story-facebook-building-subsea.html

Send us a text

We carried over from last week and kept doing algos! This week we talked about:
- Diffie Hellman
- Radix Trees: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/321479.321481
- Kadane's Algorithm
- Raft's Leader Election: https://raft.github.io/raft.pdf

Send us a text

Mike wanted to talk about our favorite algorithms this week, so we covered a few:
- Fast Fourier Transforms
- Hyperloglog

Some references are below:

- Article in Communications of the ACM: What Is an Algorithm?
- Al-Khwarizmi (mathematician, wikipedia page)
- HyperLogLog Paper: https://algo.inria.fr/flajolet/Publications/FlFuGaMe07.pdf

Send us a text

In this episode, Mike and Erik go back to the topic of time in order to explore what is specifically frustrating to programmers about dealing with time. Why's it so hard and annoying? And why do people get so irritated when we ask them a bunch of questions about what they really want us to build with respect to time?

We also mentioned on this and our last episode that there are some new ways to reach out to us (in addition to our email address), but they are:

- Bluesky account: https://bsky.app/profile/picturemecoding.bsky.social
- Threadless store (in case you want a Picture Me Coding coffee mug or stickers!): https://picturemecoding.threadless.com/
- Existing email address: podcast@picturemecoding.com

Send us a text

This week Mike and Erik were trying to understand the arena of formal verification: what are these tools? Where do they come from? How do they work? Can we categorize them?

There's a ton of stuff to talk about in this area and we're just learning the things, so we made an attempt here to wade in and figure stuff out!

We also mentioned on this episode that there are some new ways to reach out to us (in addition to our email address), but they are:

- Bluesky account: https://bsky.app/profile/picturemecoding.bsky.social
- Threadless store (in case you want a Picture Me Coding coffee mug or stickers!): https://picturemecoding.threadless.com/
- Existing email address: podcast@picturemecoding.com

Here Are Some Links to Stuff We Discussed

• Lamport’s A Science of Concurrent Programs (pdf)
• Dafny
• Cloudflare’s Formally Verified DNS
• P language
• Wadler’s Propositions as Types paper
• Hillel Wayne’s “Let’s Prove Leftpad” and repo
• Amazon Science page on “automated reasoning” as an area
• Amazon paper “Model checking distributed protocols in Must”

Send us a text

Our discussion with Randy Edwards from last week carried over to the following week in this part 2 episode of our discussion on software engineering management. Our wide-ranging discussion included references to James Bond and Billy Woods and all kinds of unexpected stuff in between.

Announcement Part 2: In celebration of episiode 50, Picture Me Coding now has a threadless shop with shirts, stickers, and coffee mugs for purchase! Impress your friends with your knowledge of the niche podcast space! Get goods here: https://picturemecoding.threadless.com/

Send us a text

This week we took on the subject of software engineering management and we were joined in this discussion by Randy Edwards, who started writing C++ at 16 and now runs an organization with software engineering managers reporting to him.

Randy shares wisdom he's learned along the way and Mike and Erik try to interrogate the goals and methods of management.

Announcement: In celebration of episiode 50, Picture Me Coding now has a threadless shop with shirts, stickers, and coffee mugs for purchase! Impress your friends with your knowledge of the niche podcast space! Get goods here: https://picturemecoding.threadless.com/

Send us a text

Recently, some people won a Nobel Prize in Physics for contributions in the field of Neural Networks and Mike went down this huge rabbit hole of content-addressable-memory and Hopfield Networks and Geoffrey Hinton's work on the Boltzmann machine. If you feel lost in this episode, let Mike be your guide (and you may be less lost than Erik).

Send us a text