The Hutter Prize: Compression, prediction, and the limits of intelligence
I texted Don about a side gig: €5,000 for every 1% you shave off a zip file. It's a real contest. For 20 years, Marcus Hutter has offered €5...
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CoRecursive w/ Adam Bell
CoRecursive features In-Depth technical interviews with software developers.
Episodes
20 of 117 episodesThe Bitter Lesson: The history of reinforcement learning
I've been trying to understand how machine learning actually works. Not use it, understand it, down to the ifs and loops. How does a program...
The Pre-Training Wall and the Treadmill After It
I've been confusing Don with frontier-lab links late at night for a bit. Ilya Sutskever told a NeurIPS audience that pre-training as we know...
Story: The Aging Programmer
Kate Gregory has been writing C++ for over forty years. Books, keynotes, a consulting firm she built from the ground up. At sixty-three, she...
From Hacker News to TikTok - How Algorithms Learned to Hook Us
Corey told me about his AI cat reel problem. He found these AI-genearted cat videos hilarious. Who makes these? He kept sending them to his...
Notes: The Universal Paperclip Clicker
Multiple VS Code windows. "Agent stopping" in a robot voice. A laptop stand on the treadmill so Claude can keep working while I run. The Big...
Story: Inside Early Google - Race Conditions, Java Pain, and the Birth of AdWords
Ron Garret left JPL for a 100-person startup he'd just discovered on Usenet. Four a.m. alarms. Burbank to San Jose on Southwest. A rented ro...
Story: The Bug He Couldn't Name - A 15-Year Fight Inside One Developer's Mind
Imagine facing a problem you can't name, something that feels bigger than any bug you've ever had to fix. How do you debug your own mind whe...
Story: Godbolt's Rule - When Abstractions Fail
What do you do when your code breaks and the only fix is to dig into the runtime below? Matt Godbolt lives for that. Tile-based renderers, c...
Story: Risk Rolls Downhill - The Software Bug That Sent People to Prison
What if a software bug drained your savings, ruined your reputation, and nobody believed it wasn't your fault? Scott Darlington took over a...
Quick Update
A quick update from Adam about the podcast's current state, consistency challenges, and what's coming next. Episode Page Support The Show Su...
Coding in the Red-Queen Era
What do we risk when we let AI do the heavy lifting in our coding? Are we giving up the thinking that makes us good at what we do? And as ex...
When AI Codes, What's Left for me?
I've always found meaning—and a lot of strength—in building things. Now, with AI coding agents changing the way we work, it's easy to feel t...
Story: Coding Through Chaos : Addiction, Recovery and Acceptance
What if your search for connection took you somewhere you never meant to go—almost costing you everything? John Walker grew up building comp...
Story: The Power of Context: Reimagining Learning
Have you ever found yourself in a situation where learning felt like an uphill battle? Like no matter how hard you tried, the pieces just wo...
Story: briffa_sep98_e.pro - The File That Sparked a Storm
Can a single line of code change the way we see science, policy, and trust? In this episode we explore the "Climategate" scandal that erupte...
Story: Hatetris - Obsession, Friendship, and World Records
What if a simple game became a gateway to computational breakthroughs? David Freiberg and Felipe set out on a journey to conquer Hatetris, a...
Story: One Million Checkboxes - The Viral Game That Defied Convention
What if internet trolls could become your greatest collaborators? Nolen Royalty discovered this unexpected truth when his simple checkbox ga...
Story: Leaving Stripe
What if leaving your dream job was the way to discover your true self? Jon de la Motte failed his first Stripe interview, but he didn't give...
Story: Inside Shopify's Layoffs
What if you had to break life-changing news to your team—could you handle the weight of their futures? Allison's journey from software engin...