Issue 316: A technological 2-for-1

It’s time for a classic Stack Overflow Q&A. Q: What’s better than one interview from the floor of re:Invent? A: FOUR interviews from the floor of re:Invent. Also, this question is now closed for being off-topic. Okay, okay, fine, let’s try to stay on-topic—namely the topic of AI. On the pod this week, we’re bringing you chats with Inception’s Stefano Ermon on the power of diffusion models and Roomie’s Aldo Luevano on building physical and software AI with a purpose and real ROI. We’re also joined by Pathway’s Zuzanna Stamirowska and Victor Szczerba to dive into the world’s first post-transformer frontier model, and Mary Technology’s Rowan McNamee to chat about LLMs in the legal world—we’ll have to ask him if this week’s 4-for-1 podcast deal is so good it should be illegal.

Speaking of The Law, we consult the Law Stack Exchange as to whether social media grifting is grifting at all—plus the answer to your burning question on what happens to rocket ship boosters that don’t burn up. Not everything is rocket science, though. For instance neural networks, especially since we have a visualizer for you this week that’ll demystify those mystifying robot brains. Let’s stay on-topic and continue our demystification—we’ve got the story of one dev’s attempt to find what’s on the other side of Google’s 8.8.8.8 DNS. Maybe we owe all the mysteries around the tech we build to the complexity we’ve been adding to it, which is probably why one of the stories from the web this week is on Wirth's Law of lean software.

Oh no, we’ve gone off-topic again. Well, we tried our best. And don’t worry, we’ve got plenty of on-topic and not-closed questions to round out this week’s off-topic Overflow. Is impersonation the highest form of flattery if you’re impersonating a Window’s user with lower privileges? Can you “just bumping this thread!” and “quick follow-up on this!” your way into faster code review? Should you let AI kill your darlings if your darlings are all trash? All of those wonderfully on-topic answers ready for you in the links below.