Significant Bits

Mar 27 2024 6 ep. 26 mins 10

Significant Bits Podcast artwork

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

Technology Education

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Iota: whisper.cpp

Mar 27 2024 35 mins

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 appro

Iota: Random algorithms

Feb 15 2024 21 mins

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 Simula

Write It Down with Shay Nehmad

Feb 04 2024 41 mins

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

Jan 22 2024 36 mins

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

Dec 30 2023 22 mins

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

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 [email protected]