Intro topic: Video Game Prices

News/Links:

• Step one: Jump in the Lava - Abyssoft
  • https://youtu.be/WdadpHLAfdA?si=oXYnhB0EdkR_RaPE
• Scalable world models for continuous control
  • https://www.tdmpc2.com/
• Clever code is probably the worst code you could write - Engineer’s Codex
  • https://read.engineerscodex.com/p/clever-code-is-probably-the-worst
• A new, open source text-to-speech model called Dia has arrived to challenge ElevenLabs, OpenAI and more
  • https://venturebeat.com/ai/a-new-open-source-text-to-speech-model-called-dia-has-arrived-to-challenge-elevenlabs-openai-and-more/
    
    

Book of the Show

• Patrick
  • The Muscle Ladder - Jeff Nippard
    • https://amzn.to/44Dznsz
• Jason
  • Metaphysics of War
    • https://amzn.to/4jMjvZ5
      
      

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

Tool of the Show

• Patrick
  • Pokemon Trading Card Game Pocket
• Jason
  • Phi-4
    • https://huggingface.co/spaces/microsoft/phi-4-multimodal
      
      

Topic: Memory Management

• Motivation
  • Avoid thrashing / crashes
  • Allocate resources efficiently
  • Keep high uptime
• Where
  • OS Level
    • Heap management
    • Virtual Memory
  • Language/Compiler Level
    • Cpp
    • Garbage collection
    • Ownership
• Tools
  • Instrumentation
    • Export to Datadog / Grafana
  • Python: psutil & tracemalloc
  • Valgrind
• What to do when your program uses too much memory?
  • Reduce data sizes
    • Compression
    • References
    • Lazy initializer
    • Generators & Back Pressure
  • Ring buffers
  • Arena allocators
  • Disk based caching

Intro topic: Grills

News/Links:

• You can’t call yourself a senior until you’ve worked on a legacy project
  • https://www.infobip.com/developers/blog/seniors-working-on-a-legacy-project
• Recraft might be the most powerful AI image platform I’ve ever used — here’s why
  • https://www.tomsguide.com/ai/ai-image-video/recraft-might-be-the-most-powerful-ai-image-platform-ive-ever-used-heres-why
• NASA has a list of 10 rules for software development
  • https://www.cs.otago.ac.nz/cosc345/resources/nasa-10-rules.htm
• AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT performance estimates leaked: 42% to 66% faster than Radeon RX 7900 GRE
  • https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/amd-estimates-of-radeon-rx-9070-xt-performance-leaked-42-percent-66-percent-faster-than-radeon-rx-7900-gre

Book of the Show

• Patrick:
  • The Player of Games (Ian M Banks)
    • https://a.co/d/1ZpUhGl (non-affiliate)
• Jason:
  • Basic Roleplaying Universal Game Engine
    • https://amzn.to/3ES4p5i
      
      

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

Tool of the Show

• Patrick:
  • Pokemon Sword and Shield
• Jason:
  • Features and Labels ( https://fal.ai )

Topic: Reinforcement Learning

• Three types of AI
  • Supervised Learning
  • Unsupervised Learning
  • Reinforcement Learning
• Online vs Offline RL
• Optimization algorithms
  • Value optimization
    • SARSA
    • Q-Learning
  • Policy optimization
    • Policy Gradients
    • Actor-Critic
    • Proximal Policy Optimization
• Value vs Policy Optimization
  • Value optimization is more intuitive (Value loss)
  • Policy optimization is less intuitive at first (policy gradients)
  • Converting values to policies in deep learning is difficult
• Imitation Learning
  • Supervised policy learning
  • Often used to bootstrap reinforcement learning
• Policy Evaluation
  • Propensity scoring versus model-based
• Challenges to training RL model
  • Two optimization loops
    • Collecting feedback vs updating the model
  • Difficult optimization target
    • Policy evaluation
• RLHF & GRPO

Intro topic: Lego event space & retail store: https://www.instagram.com/bambeecave

News/Links:

• StackOverflow Question Count Going Down
  • https://gist.github.com/hopeseekr/f522e380e35745bd5bdc3269a9f0b132
• DeepSeek claims its ‘reasoning’ model beats OpenAI’s o1 on certain benchmarks
  • https://techcrunch.com/2025/01/20/deepseek-claims-its-reasoning-model-beats-openais-o1-on-certain-benchmarks/
• Computer Science Papers Every Developer Should Read
  • https://newsletter.techworld-with-milan.com/p/computer-science-papers-every-developer
• Nvidia Cosmos - an AI platform to change the future of robots and cars - wins Best of CES 2025
  • https://www.zdnet.com/article/nvidia-signs-largest-car-maker-toyota-to-use-its-self-driving-tech/

Book of the Show

• Patrick: Alice’s Adventures in a differentiable wonderland
  • https://www.sscardapane.it/alice-book/
• Jason:
  • A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (Hulu/Netflix/etc)

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

Tool of the Show

• Patrick:
  • Digseum
    • https://store.steampowered.com/app/3361470/Digseum/
• Jason:
  • Sqlitedict - Python dictionaries saved to disk

Topic: Project Planning and Management

• Why?
  • Gathering feedback
  • Identifying risks
  • Deciding future headcount
  • Documenting / discovering dependencies
  • Critical path
  • Schedule
  • Reduce the bullwhip effect
• How it works
  • SMART goals
    • specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound
    • MT is most important
  • Gantt Charts
  • Scrum
  • Agile
  • Kanban
• Tools
  • Whiteboard (the generic IRL one)
  • Post it notes
  • JIRA
  • Asana
  • OpenProject
• Dealing with uncertainty
  • Buffering
    • Issues with recursive padding
  • Project planning Post-Mortems