Programming Throwdown Patrick Wheeler and Jason Gauci

Intro topic: Testing your car battery
News/Links:

Tech Layoffs still going on
https://www.sfchronicle.com/tech/article/google-layoffs-california-companies-18465600.php 

Real-time dreamy Cloudscapes with Volumetric Raymarchinghttps://blog.maximeheckel.com/posts/real-time-cloudscapes-with-volumetric-raymarching/

Robot Rascals
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robot_Rascals 

Meta Quest 3 
https://www.theverge.com/23906313/meta-quest-3-review-vr-mixed-reality-headset


Book of the Show

Patrick:HyperLogLog Paper
https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//pubs/archive/40671.pdf 


Jason: Eureka! NVIDIA Research Breakthrough Puts New Spin on Robot Learning 
https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2023/10/20/eureka-robotics-research/ 


Patreon Plug https://www.patreon.com/programmingthrowdown?ty=h

Tool of the Show

Patrick: Techtonica: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1457320/Techtonica/ 

Jason:
ESP32 development board: https://amzn.to/3Qpmb20 
WEMOS





Topic: HyperLogLog

MotivationCardinality Counting

LinearCounting
Hash + expectation of collision based on how full
Bloom Filter


LogLog
Use first N bits as bucket
Use max sequential 0s in each bucket
Average


HyperLogLog
Handle empty buckets
Use correction factor like linear counting for low counts (number of empty buckets) and high counts


Distributing

Transfer bucket counts





★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

Intro topic: What are expectations on developers that have nothing to do with programming
News/Links:

Pushing for a lower dev estimate is like negotiating weather with a Meteorologisthttps://smartguess.is/blog/your-estimate-is-less-than-that/

Announcing python in excelhttps://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/excel-blog/announcing-python-in-excel-combining-the-power-of-python-and-the/ba-p/3893439

7 Habits of Highly Effective Software Engineershttps://makingsmallercircles.com/articles/7-habits-of-highly-effective-software-engineers/

Raspberry pi 5 begins shipping
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Raspberry-Pi-5-Shipping


Book of the Show

Patrick:Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone Illustrated Editionhttps://amzn.to/3St3L35


Jason: The Pete and Sebastian Showhttps://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-pete-and-sebastian-show/id570256898


Patreon Plug https://www.patreon.com/programmingthrowdown?ty=h

Tool of the Show

Patrick: Obsidianobsidian.md


Jason:Ink by Inkle
https://github.com/inkle/ink




Topic: Godot

What is a game engine?
Graphics, animation, particle effects
Tilemaps
Entity component systems
Physics
Sound
I/O
Input handling (touchscreen, joystick)
GDScript


Why use a game engine?
Portability
Allow for testing individual components of the game
Libraries for ads, in-app-purchases


Godot
Open source
Focused on 2-D but now many 3-D features
Great development environment


AI Hero
Started in phaser (development rut)
Moved to Godot, rapid prototyping





★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

Intro topic: Jogging Metrics
News/Links:

Unholy LLM
https://huggingface.co/Undi95/Unholy-v1-12L-13B 

The reverse red herring  https://www.blameless.com/blog/the-reverse-red-herring

The "ens–tification" of TikTok
https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/ 

Response letter to Godot is not the new Unity
https://sampruden.github.io/posts/godot-is-not-the-new-unity/

https://gist.github.com/reduz/cb05fe96079e46785f08a79ec3b0ef21



Book of the Show

Patrick:
Math Games with Bad Drawings by Ben Orlin
https://amzn.to/48qlg9A


Jason: 
The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates
https://amzn.to/3LChBff


Patreon Plug https://www.patreon.com/programmingthrowdown?ty=h

Tool of the Show

Patrick: Factorio (Desktop Game)

Jason:AI Hero (iOS and Android)




Topic: Desktop user interfaces

What is a user interface?
Web and Mobile UI toolkits
Desktop options
Qt
Cross platform, custom UI elements
Qt creator, code generator


WxWidgets
Cross platform, uses native UI elements 
WxFormDesigner, code generation
Can look different on different operating systems


Electron
Local nodejs webserver
Html/JavaScript technology
Requires interprocess communication to use other languages  


Jupyter notebooks
Mathematica-like notebook 
Not for distribution 


StreamlitPython to web compiler

Game EnginesUnity, Godot, Unreal



Tips for building desktop UI
UI is slow (startup time, interaction time)
Separate the UI from the engine & business logic






★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

- pganalyze: https://pganalyze.com/
- Weekly series "5mins of Postgres": https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDV_1Dz2Ixgl1nT_3DUZVFw
- How Postgres chooses which index to use: https://pganalyze.com/blog/how-postgres-chooses-index
- CMU databases courses: https://db.cs.cmu.edu/courses/
- Postgres community: https://www.postgresql.org/community/

As well as social links:
- Mastodon: https://hachyderm.io/@lukas
- Twitter/X: @pganalyze, @LukasFittl
- GitHub: @pganalyze, @lfittl
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lfittl/ , https://www.linkedin.com/company/pganalyze/


★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

Intro topic: Revisiting the power of Spreadsheets
News/Links:

LK-99 Isn’t a Superconductorhttps://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02585-7

Normalizing Flowshttps://pyro.ai/examples/normalizing_flows_i.html

How is llama.cpp possible?https://finbarr.ca/how-is-llama-cpp-possible/

Chat with open source large language models
https://chat.lmsys.org/


Book of the Show

Patrick: Math with Bad Drawings by Ben Orlinhttps://amzn.to/44dsgDz

Jason: Overboard! https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.InkleLtd.Overboard Nhl=en_US&gl=US 

Patreon Plug https://www.patreon.com/programmingthrowdown?ty=h

Tool of the Show

Patrick: ffmprovisr https://amiaopensource.github.io/ffmprovisr/


Jason:Pandas read_ods() read_excel()



Topic: Differential Equations

Why should programmers learn about DiffEqLaw of Large Numbers

What are differential equations?
When you know the rate of change
EigenVectors & EigenValues
What is Jacobian What is Jacobian? | The right way of thinking derivatives and integrals



Special cases
Partial Differential Equations
Ordinary Differential Equations


Why solvers are important
Numerical Stability at larger step sizes
Example: https://medium.com/@pukumarathe/eulers-method-and-runge-kutta-4th-order-method-in-python-b4a0068a8ebe 


Fun Examples
Predator-Prey relationships in scipy
https://scientific-python.readthedocs.io/en/latest/notebooks_rst/3_Ordinary_Differential_Equations/02_Examples/Lotka_Volterra_model.html 

Physics Engines for games
https://youtu.be/52n2qKgwW_Q 

PageRank
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2001.08973.pdf 







★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

Things to consider when choosing a database

Speed & Latency
Consistency, ACID Compliance
Scalability
Language support & Developer Experience
Relational vs. Non-relational (SQL vs. NoSQL)
Data types
Security
Database environmentClient vs Server access

Info on Kris & Harper:

Website: harperdb.io
Twitter: @harperdbio, @kriszyp
Github: @HarperDB, @kriszyp



★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★