Today Quincy Larson interviews Carl Brown, who runs the Internet of Bugs YouTube channel and has worked as a dev for over 37 years at Amazon, IBM, Sun Microsystems, and startups.
We talk about:
Utility versus hype in LLMs and agent code generation tools
Why you want to target developer jobs at small companies, and how they differ from “big tech”.
After all, how will everyone face the outrage? Carl argues that a consulting career is the perfect escape hatch.
Watch the podcast on freeCodeCamp.org Listen on the YouTube channel or your favorite podcast app.
Links to our conversation:
In Ted Chiang’s “ChatGPT is a blurry JPEG of the web” article Carl mentioned:
Karpati on Multbok Saga:
Karpati is expanding MoltBook.
Afternoon of January 30th
Moltbook doubles down after being “accused of over-hyping”.
9:39 PM January 30
Tweet showing Karpathy’s private information (redacted) from MoltBook security breach
January 31 at 4:53 PM
Fortune quoted Karpathy as saying that MoltBook “is a dumpster fire, and I certainly don’t recommend that people run this thing on their computers.”
February 2
Cory Doctorow’s quote about code failing well: Excerpt from Corey’s Mastodon with this quote in it: From Carl to Cory the Mastodon told him I was going to use that quote (which he expanded):
The article on Cloud 4.6 is good for finding bugs with fuzzing:
This quote from computer security guru Bruce Schneier:
The old paper on LLMs before this new claim about clade 4.6 is good at being vague:
False programmers believe about Patio11 names:
Similar article, but it’s about time rather than names (Karl said he was wrong in that Partick/Patio11 didn’t write it, but it’s passable):
Carl was thinking about the article discussing ageism in tech with a quote from Zuckerberg:
Book on (reciprocal) networking that Carl recommends:
Carl’s video on how AdTech is disrupting society:
Community News Section:
freeCodeCamp has just published a comprehensive course that will teach you the basic concepts, protocols and architectures of computer networking. You will learn key network engineering topics such as topology, subnetting, flow control, routing, IPv4 addressing, DNS, and more. (12 Hour YouTube Course):
And we just published our second chess course. This time you will learn the Italian game, one of the most common chess games. This handbook and accompanying video course are taught by Freecodecamp engineer Ihechikara Abba, who has a chess elo rating of 2285. He will lay many traps that white can set for black, and how not to fall for them. (Full length handbook and 1 hour YouTube course):
freeCodeCamp also published a comprehensive book on Product Lead Research. This is a must-read for any manager at a tech company. It was written by a CTO and security researcher named Omer Rosenbaum, who says: “If you manage research like it’s development, things aren’t going to go well for you.” He breaks down the most common research frameworks and methodologies, and contextualizes them through a series of case studies. (full length book):
If you are a Python developer and use the Django web development framework, this tutorial will help you improve your APIs. Mari will teach you how to use profiling and logging to find bottlenecks in your code base. Then she’ll show you how to gain additional performance through caching, so you can serve users at scale. (Read 20 minutes):
Today’s Song of the Week is George Benson’s 1984 synth jazz classic “No One Emotion.” I love the driving synth bass, the vocal harmonies, and the excellent guitar solo by Michael Simbello – the guy who made the song She’s a Maniac. If you’re looking for a pick-me-up jam, this song any day of the week.