The Stack Overflow Podcast

SPONSORED BY SHELL On this sponsored episode of the podcast, Ben and Ryan chat with Maya Sellon, inclusive design and digital accessibility principal at Shell, about how she’s scaling accessibility and inclusive design practice across an organization the size of Shell. They talk about how knowing the accessibility issues is half the battle, how people are the key to scale, and what video games teach us about inclusive design.

The home team chats with William Falcon, an AI researcher and creator of PyTorch Lightning, about developing tooling for the AI ecosystem, open-source contributions, what happens when widely hyped technology needs to scale, and why he’s bullish on experienced developers using AI but not so bullish on new devs doing the same.

On this home team episode: Massachusetts makes a welcome shift toward skills-based hiring, AI-generated content robs us of our appetite for mac and cheese, and large-scale crypto mining operations account for more than 2% of the US’s electricity generation. Plus: A PDF quite a bit bigger than Germany.

On today’s home team episode: a new study confirms that AI isn’t putting us out of business, why tech layoffs have been good for share prices, and the programming students learning to code with Copilot.

Ben and Ryan check in about complex images (an maybe even interactive games) encoded in living cells, the latest trends in prompt engineering, and the benefits of gaming to your education.

SPONSORED BY INTUIT In today’s episode of the podcast, sponsored by Intuit, Ben and Ryan talk with Shivang Shah, Chief Architect at Intuit Mailchimp, and Merrin Kurian, Principal Engineer and AI Platform Architect at Intuit. They discuss generative AI at Intuit, GenOS (the generative AI operating system that they built), and how GenAI can scale without sacrificing privacy.

The home team convenes to discuss AI deepfakes, the legal implications of generating an AI version of a dead comedian or a famous singer-songwriter, whether leaderboard rankings reflect reality, and the relationship between agile development and burnout.

The home team chats about machine learning and its applications beyond the hot topic of GenAI, what it means for models to unlearn data, the future of open source, and new frontiers in game development.

Ben and Ryan talk about the hacker who exposed a security vulnerability in AI-powered software, security risks of smart devices, symbolic deduction engines in AI, and the programming language that features time travel.

Ben and Ryan are joined by Ryan’s former colleague and current backend engineer at Spotify, Omar Delarosa, to talk about time-traveling programming languages, a keyboard that turns an iPhone into a Blackberry, and what it’s like working on everyone’s personal DJ.