Significant Bits Josh Bleecher Snyder
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- Technology
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Substantive, in-depth technical conversations about software engineering (broadly construed).
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Iota: whisper.cpp
Links:
my little whisper.cpp bug fixwhy the logits were calculated inconsistentlywav2vec2 on arxiv and huggingfacethe openai whisper asr model announcementbeam search patiencetop notch guide to CTCthe bitter lesson (and in meme form)Errata:
* I referred in the show to LLMs as encoder-decoder models. Most modern LLMs are decoder-only.* I messed up readability at Google. It means approvability, apparently. 🤷 -
Iota: Random algorithms
In which I ramble about randomness and random algorithms. Now with theme music!
Paper Cuts planned reading: Habitability and Piecemeal Growth, in Patterns of Software (just pages 7–16 of the book, which is pages 25-32 of the PDF)
Selected links:
* SIEVE cache replacement algorithm* Power of two random choices* Marc Brooker's blog* Random forests* Count Min Sketch* Monte Carlo Simulation* Random projection* T-Digest* The fix for my embarrassing compiler bug -
Write It Down with Shay Nehmad
Shay Nehmad on how writing is the key to becoming a better engineer, how to do it, and more.
Links:
* Cup O' Go podcast* Code Complete book* Shay's blog* Obsidian and Logseq -
Litestream and LiteFS with Ben Johnson
This was a fun and decidedly humbling conversation with Ben Johnson about SQLite, databases, Litestream, and LiteFS.
Links:
Ben on GitHubLitestreamLiteFS -
Iota: Rolling Hashes and FastCDC
No guest for this inaugural episode--just me this round.
I cover the basics of rolling hashes and FastCDC, which appears to be the state of the art in content defined chunking.
Mentioned in the episode:
8 bit hash bugFastCDC paperPerkeep (once called Camlistore, oops)buprsyncI know the audio is slightly subpar (to say nothing of the content). But I think I know how to improve for next time. Finding my feet. :)
Feedback welcome: josh@sigpod.dev -
Trailer
The plan: Guests teach me substantive topics in software engineering, and I ask dumb questions.
Please send guest suggestions, topic ideas, excitement, and monopoly money to josh@sigpod.dev