Significant Bits

Josh Bleecher Snyder

Substantive, in-depth technical conversations about software engineering (broadly construed).

Episodes

  1. JUL 4

    Read/Write/Nil with Michael Knyszek and Michael Pratt

    Please read important erratum at end of these notes! Astute listeners will notice that this is the first episode in over a year. I recorded not one but two awesome interviews...and then failed to edit and publish them. Guilt over this haunted me. I have finally accepted I must declare moral bankruptcy on this front to be able to continue the podcast; I apologize. (I may yet bring those episodes back to life, but I will no longer block on them.) In this episode, Michael, Michael, and I discuss an awesome debugging adventure deep in the Go runtime and linux kernel. Links: * Go issue: https://github.com/golang/go/issues/73581* Metastable Failures in Distributed Systems: https://sigops.org/s/conferences/hotos/2021/papers/hotos21-s11-bronson.pdf* Sponsor: https://sketch.dev/ Erratum: I described elided nil checks as working by mapping the page at 0x0 as read only. In fact, it is unmapped, so that reads will also fault. Silly me.

    57 min
  2. Iota: whisper.cpp

    03/27/2024

    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. 🤷

    35 min
  3. Iota: Random algorithms

    02/15/2024

    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

    22 min
  4. Write It Down with Shay Nehmad

    02/05/2024

    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

    42 min
  5. Litestream and LiteFS with Ben Johnson

    01/23/2024

    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

    36 min
  6. Iota: Rolling Hashes and FastCDC

    12/31/2023

    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

    23 min
  7. Trailer

    11/25/2023

    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

    1 min

Trailer

Ratings & Reviews

5
out of 5
3 Ratings

About

Substantive, in-depth technical conversations about software engineering (broadly construed).

Information

  • Creator
    Josh Bleecher Snyder
  • Years Active
    2023 - 2025
  • Episodes
    7
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Josh Bleecher Snyder and guests
  • Show Website
    Significant Bits