The Peterman Post

In college I briefly studied RISC vs CISC for my major but I forgot almost everything now. So it was great to talk to David Patterson about what happened there since he was one of the people involved in the historic RISC versus CISC debates. Given his computer architecture expertise, I also was curious to hear his explanation of the differences about CPUs, GPUs and TPUs so we discussed that too.

Interviewed Martin Hellman recently who was one of the inventors of the Diffie-Hellman key exchange algorithm. I had heard of his name ever since I learned the concept when I studied computer science in college. Pretty surreal to get to talk to him. He explained some of the key concepts but also it was interesting to hear the stories behind what we learn in the textbooks. Also, I have a ton of content recorded that I’m working on editing.

Ryan Williams is a professor at MIT and the winner of the Gödel Prize in theoretical computer science. I interviewed him all about his work starting by asking him a popular Leetcode question (3 SUM). Check out the episode wherever you get your podcasts: YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts. 03:54 - Doing better than the popular optimal solution 01:08:31 - Advice for his younger self [00:41] Okay, I want to start by asking you the most popular LeetCode question.

Draft

Vlad Feinberg is Google DeepMind’s pre-training area lead and I asked him all about how to land a job at a frontier lab like Google DeepMind, Anthropic or OpenAI. Check out the episode wherever you get your podcasts: YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts. 08:45 - The difference between AI research and engineering 21:41 - Domains that matter for the frontier 58:59 - Advice for his younger self [00:33] You wrote this post that was titled “How to Land a Job at a Frontier Lab”.

Simon Peyton Jones is the co-creator of Haskell (pure functional programming language) and I interviewed him about functional programming, why it matters, and his thoughts on other programming languages. Check out the episode wherever you get your podcasts: YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts.

Avi Wigderson is the only person in history to have won both a Turing Award (computer science) and Abel Prize (math). I interviewed him all about his field. Check out the episode wherever you get your podcasts: YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts.

James Cowling was the most senior engineer at Dropbox (Senior Principal) before he left to start his own company, Convex. I interviewed him recently digging into all the technical work of his career, learnings he had, and advice tailored towards the new “AI era” we’re in now. The conversation was a lot of fun and I’m glad a lot of his takes are refreshingly not “doomer” takes. Below are the top three takeaways I had from the conversation to save you time.

James Cowling is the CTO at Convex and was previously the most senior engineer at Dropbox. We discussed technical details of his past projects, simplicity vs complexity, and career advice given where AI is today. Check out the episode wherever you get your podcasts: YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts.

Bjarne Stroustrup is the creator of the C++ programming language and a former researcher at Bell Labs. I got to interview him about his career and programming language design. This conversation was a lot of fun. I brought my equipment to his office and we shot it right there. That’s why the background of his shot is almost entirely C++ books (many of which he wrote). In addition to language design questions, I asked him for his personal anecdotes since I felt only he could tell those stories.