Podcasts about TCP

From the sudden retirement of Internet pioneer Vint Cerf to the unstoppable advance of "apex agentic adversaries," get a front-row seat to the unfolding security revolution and its massive real-world stakes. Why Fable5's re-release has disappointed. Opera becomes the first browser to offer "Paste Protect." Microsoft BlueHammer exploit is "hammering" systems. Industry legend (TCP creator) Vint Cerf on AI. Chrome turns 150 with too many fixes to load. Google fails to sidestep a $4.67 billion EU fine. One last (we can hope) Chat Control vote next week. AirDrop & Android Quick Share are exploitable. How to bypass Claude's and ChatGPT's guardrails. My own Sunday spin with SpinRite. A legendary hacker uses AI on a widespread library Show Notes - https://www.grc.com/sn/SN-1086-Notes.pdf Hosts: Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte Download or subscribe to Security Now at https://twit.tv/shows/security-now. You can submit a question to Security Now at the GRC Feedback Page. For 16kbps versions, transcripts, and notes (including fixes), visit Steve's site: grc.com, also the home of the best disk maintenance and recovery utility ever written Spinrite 6. Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free audio and video feeds, a members-only Discord, and exclusive content. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: blackhat.com/us-26 and use code TWIT cohesity.com/Resilience bitwarden.com/twit zscaler.com/security XBOW.com adaptivesecurity.com

From the sudden retirement of Internet pioneer Vint Cerf to the unstoppable advance of "apex agentic adversaries," get a front-row seat to the unfolding security revolution and its massive real-world stakes. Why Fable5's re-release has disappointed. Opera becomes the first browser to offer "Paste Protect." Microsoft BlueHammer exploit is "hammering" systems. Industry legend (TCP creator) Vint Cerf on AI. Chrome turns 150 with too many fixes to load. Google fails to sidestep a $4.67 billion EU fine. One last (we can hope) Chat Control vote next week. AirDrop & Android Quick Share are exploitable. How to bypass Claude's and ChatGPT's guardrails. My own Sunday spin with SpinRite. A legendary hacker uses AI on a widespread library Show Notes - https://www.grc.com/sn/SN-1086-Notes.pdf Hosts: Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte Download or subscribe to Security Now at https://twit.tv/shows/security-now. You can submit a question to Security Now at the GRC Feedback Page. For 16kbps versions, transcripts, and notes (including fixes), visit Steve's site: grc.com, also the home of the best disk maintenance and recovery utility ever written Spinrite 6. Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free audio and video feeds, a members-only Discord, and exclusive content. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: blackhat.com/us-26 and use code TWIT cohesity.com/Resilience bitwarden.com/twit zscaler.com/security XBOW.com adaptivesecurity.com

From the sudden retirement of Internet pioneer Vint Cerf to the unstoppable advance of "apex agentic adversaries," get a front-row seat to the unfolding security revolution and its massive real-world stakes. Why Fable5's re-release has disappointed. Opera becomes the first browser to offer "Paste Protect." Microsoft BlueHammer exploit is "hammering" systems. Industry legend (TCP creator) Vint Cerf on AI. Chrome turns 150 with too many fixes to load. Google fails to sidestep a $4.67 billion EU fine. One last (we can hope) Chat Control vote next week. AirDrop & Android Quick Share are exploitable. How to bypass Claude's and ChatGPT's guardrails. My own Sunday spin with SpinRite. A legendary hacker uses AI on a widespread library Show Notes - https://www.grc.com/sn/SN-1086-Notes.pdf Hosts: Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte Download or subscribe to Security Now at https://twit.tv/shows/security-now. You can submit a question to Security Now at the GRC Feedback Page. For 16kbps versions, transcripts, and notes (including fixes), visit Steve's site: grc.com, also the home of the best disk maintenance and recovery utility ever written Spinrite 6. Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free audio and video feeds, a members-only Discord, and exclusive content. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: blackhat.com/us-26 and use code TWIT cohesity.com/Resilience bitwarden.com/twit zscaler.com/security XBOW.com adaptivesecurity.com

From the sudden retirement of Internet pioneer Vint Cerf to the unstoppable advance of "apex agentic adversaries," get a front-row seat to the unfolding security revolution and its massive real-world stakes. Why Fable5's re-release has disappointed. Opera becomes the first browser to offer "Paste Protect." Microsoft BlueHammer exploit is "hammering" systems. Industry legend (TCP creator) Vint Cerf on AI. Chrome turns 150 with too many fixes to load. Google fails to sidestep a $4.67 billion EU fine. One last (we can hope) Chat Control vote next week. AirDrop & Android Quick Share are exploitable. How to bypass Claude's and ChatGPT's guardrails. My own Sunday spin with SpinRite. A legendary hacker uses AI on a widespread library Show Notes - https://www.grc.com/sn/SN-1086-Notes.pdf Hosts: Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte Download or subscribe to Security Now at https://twit.tv/shows/security-now. You can submit a question to Security Now at the GRC Feedback Page. For 16kbps versions, transcripts, and notes (including fixes), visit Steve's site: grc.com, also the home of the best disk maintenance and recovery utility ever written Spinrite 6. Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free audio and video feeds, a members-only Discord, and exclusive content. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: blackhat.com/us-26 and use code TWIT cohesity.com/Resilience bitwarden.com/twit zscaler.com/security XBOW.com adaptivesecurity.com

From the sudden retirement of Internet pioneer Vint Cerf to the unstoppable advance of "apex agentic adversaries," get a front-row seat to the unfolding security revolution and its massive real-world stakes. Why Fable5's re-release has disappointed. Opera becomes the first browser to offer "Paste Protect." Microsoft BlueHammer exploit is "hammering" systems. Industry legend (TCP creator) Vint Cerf on AI. Chrome turns 150 with too many fixes to load. Google fails to sidestep a $4.67 billion EU fine. One last (we can hope) Chat Control vote next week. AirDrop & Android Quick Share are exploitable. How to bypass Claude's and ChatGPT's guardrails. My own Sunday spin with SpinRite. A legendary hacker uses AI on a widespread library Show Notes - https://www.grc.com/sn/SN-1086-Notes.pdf Hosts: Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte Download or subscribe to Security Now at https://twit.tv/shows/security-now. You can submit a question to Security Now at the GRC Feedback Page. For 16kbps versions, transcripts, and notes (including fixes), visit Steve's site: grc.com, also the home of the best disk maintenance and recovery utility ever written Spinrite 6. Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free audio and video feeds, a members-only Discord, and exclusive content. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: blackhat.com/us-26 and use code TWIT cohesity.com/Resilience bitwarden.com/twit zscaler.com/security XBOW.com adaptivesecurity.com

From the sudden retirement of Internet pioneer Vint Cerf to the unstoppable advance of "apex agentic adversaries," get a front-row seat to the unfolding security revolution and its massive real-world stakes. Why Fable5's re-release has disappointed. Opera becomes the first browser to offer "Paste Protect." Microsoft BlueHammer exploit is "hammering" systems. Industry legend (TCP creator) Vint Cerf on AI. Chrome turns 150 with too many fixes to load. Google fails to sidestep a $4.67 billion EU fine. One last (we can hope) Chat Control vote next week. AirDrop & Android Quick Share are exploitable. How to bypass Claude's and ChatGPT's guardrails. My own Sunday spin with SpinRite. A legendary hacker uses AI on a widespread library Show Notes - https://www.grc.com/sn/SN-1086-Notes.pdf Hosts: Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte Download or subscribe to Security Now at https://twit.tv/shows/security-now. You can submit a question to Security Now at the GRC Feedback Page. For 16kbps versions, transcripts, and notes (including fixes), visit Steve's site: grc.com, also the home of the best disk maintenance and recovery utility ever written Spinrite 6. Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free audio and video feeds, a members-only Discord, and exclusive content. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: blackhat.com/us-26 and use code TWIT cohesity.com/Resilience bitwarden.com/twit zscaler.com/security XBOW.com adaptivesecurity.com

We've been running a bit of an Agent Cloud series surveying all the top inference/compute/cloud providers, from Databricks to Daytona to Railway and, even further back, E2B, but we're excited to conclude this series returning to Modal, which has just raised a monster $355M Series C.The cloud was built for developers. But agents are now changing that.The old infra stack was designed for a human who could read docs, reason through YAML, and understand dashboards to figure out what they need when something broke. While this was painful for developers, it worked since they could fill in missing context in their heads.However, agents don't have that luxury. Now in this new era of agents, everything has to be tighter.They need a place to write code, run it, inspect the output, change the environment, debug failures, and try again. Fast iteration and feedback loops with all the necessary context are crucial for agents to operate properly. Furthermore, sandboxes are a clear representation of this shift as agents can easily spin up isolated environments. This programmatic infra even extends to research:Two years ago, we were one of the first to cover Modal with CEO Erik Bernhardsson and Alessio designed our favorite LS thumbnail of all time:At the time, Modal was just a teeny little company with a $17M Series A.Today, fresh off their $355M Series C, Modal is one of the clearest examples of the agent cloud future being built in real time: a cloud platform moving past traditional web app assumptions toward the workloads AI actually creates such as elastic inference, sandboxes, GPU burst, post-training, background agents, and infrastructure that agents themselves can operate.In this episode, Modal CTO Akshat Bubna joins swyx and Vibhu to unpack why AI applications don't fit traditional cloud assumptions, why Kubernetes was never designed for bursty compute-heavy workloads, and why Modal is now shifting from developer experience to agent experience.We go deep on Modal's AI infra stack: serverless functions, decorator-based infrastructure, elastic inference for custom models, GPU snapshotting, DeFlash, speculative decoding, Auto Endpoints, sandboxes, persistent storage, networked containers, private IPv6, RDMA, multi-node training, and Modal's capacity pool across 17 cloud providers. Akshat also explains why RL rollouts can require 100,000 sandboxes, why production agents need hard guardrails, why observability may matter more than reading code, and why AI has made infrastructure exciting again.We discuss:* Why Kubernetes wasn't built for bursty AI workloads* How Modal started as a better runtime before becoming an AI cloud* Why Modal added GPUs before ChatGPT* The shift from developer experience to agent experience* Why observability matters when agents are writing the code* Elastic inference for custom models across audio, video, robotics, and comp bio* GPU snapshotting, cold starts, and why inference workloads are so bursty* Why RL rollouts can require 100,000 sandboxes* DeFlash, speculative decoding, and frontier-level inference performance* Auto Endpoints and making optimized inference easier to deploy* What Modal adds beyond vLLM, SGLang, and raw GPU rental* Modal's 17-cloud capacity pool and supercloud strategy* Networked sandboxes, sidecars, private IPv6, and RDMA* Serverless multi-node training for post-training and research workloads* Auto-research, model-guided sweeps, and agents launching GPU experiments* Compute strategy, capacity planning, and batch tiers* Why production agents need specialized sandboxes and hard guardrails* Modal's take on managed agents, CI, Gitpod/Ona, Python, TypeScript, and Modal BenchAkshat Bubna* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/akshat-bubna-188885103* X: https://x.com/akshat_bModal* Website: https://modal.comTimestamps00:00:00 Introduction00:00:39 Modal's origin and why Kubernetes wasn't enough00:04:32 Developer Experience → Agent Experience00:06:21 Modal's AI cloud primitives00:09:14 Sandboxes, agent loops, and proto-Cognition00:12:12 Elastic inference, GPU snapshotting, and 100,000 sandboxes00:15:24 DeFlash, speculative decoding, and Auto Endpoints00:19:59 Production-grade inference beyond raw GPUs00:22:00 Background agents, Ramp Inspect, and the agent lifecycle00:24:08 Modal's 17-cloud supercloud strategy00:26:40 Networked sandboxes, private IPv6, and RDMA00:32:48 Multi-node training, post-training, and auto research00:37:36 Compute strategy, capacity planning, and batch tiers00:40:55 Open models, real-time AI, and production agent infra00:43:06 Hard guardrails, managed agents, and specialized sandboxes00:46:06 Why AI made infrastructure exciting again00:48:30 Model APIs, differentiated products, and agentic video00:51:50 CI, coding-agent infra, SDKs, and Modal Bench00:57:28 Closing ThoughtsTranscriptIntroduction: Modal, Series C, and the Art PartySwyx [00:00:00]: We're here with Akshat, CTO of Modal, together with Vibhu. Congrats on your Series C.Akshat [00:00:10]: Thank you.Swyx [00:00:11]: Your party yesterday was amazing.Akshat [00:00:15]: Yeah.Swyx [00:00:15]: From all the photos and all the swag.Akshat [00:00:17]: We had a bunch of art installations, which was fun, seeing, like, our products on pedestals next to, like, Rodin.Swyx [00:00:25]: Very nice. Very nice. When you started, it was not the GPU inference company. Maybe it was in your mind. Take us back to the origin story.Modal's Origin: A New Runtime Beyond KubernetesAkshat [00:00:39]: I first met Eric, who's the CEO, through an investor. Back then Eric was already thinking about building, a new runtime, and he got there thinking through why are workflow orchestration products so hard to use. It's because you have to run them on Kubernetes. Kubernetes is hard to manage. It's not built for burstiness and, custom images,Swyx [00:01:03]: YeahAkshat [00:01:03]: It has a terrible developer experience.Swyx [00:01:05]: And I'll, I'll interjectAkshat [00:01:06]: YeahSwyx [00:01:07]: For listeners, who are new, we interviewed Eric two years ago, and there's a bit more of the story there from Spotify and all those things.Swyx [00:01:14]: And I came across Eric through Data Council because he did that talk on the serverless container stack that you guys did, which was like, that was my first like, “Okay, I need to take Modal very seriously” moment.Akshat [00:01:26]: Yeah.Swyx [00:01:26]: But it was still very unclear, like, do I need all this for just my data pipelines?Akshat [00:01:33]: Yeah. initially what we were thinking about was if we build a better runtime, it's a very useful primitive in itself. It's There's a lot of things that, get solved by serverless functions, like you can do, ETL stuff, you can do job queues, you can do all this, like, bursty processing, which it turns out every company had needs for. but then we also were thinking about this as like, this is a primitive that we can build a whole collection of products on, which are very verticalized. So perhaps data engineering would've been the first one, but we were thinking about inference. Back then it was more classical inference, like computer vision stuff and running XGBoosts and whatnot. But we added GPUs to the product a year before ChatGPT came out.From Serverless Containers to GPU WorkloadsSwyx [00:02:19]: Nice.Akshat [00:02:19]: We just didn't think it would be that big of a deal.Swyx [00:02:22]: Yeah, just like add A100.Vibhu [00:02:23]: Was there any, like, early key problem that really sparked off why you built it?Akshat [00:02:28]: Yeah. Primarily it's just, none of the tooling that was out there was built for, one, a really great developer experience, and also there's a general trend of, a lot of the workloads that we were seeing were very. I wish there was a better word for it, but compute-heavy. Like, they need, one, like, need a lot more resources, so you need to burst up and down a lot, versus like Kubernetes designed for, like, slow scaling and, more for, like, web server use cases. And also there's just a lot more specialization in, like, what kinds of environments these workloads run in. Like, we had sometimes they need accelerators, sometimes they need different kinds of images, and this is just like a consistent thing that we saw across a lot of companies. That would be the next step.Software-Defined Infrastructure and Decorator-Based DXSwyx [00:03:13]: Yeah. Yeah. Be nice. I don't know how much this factored into the early story, but I wrote a post when I was at Temporal about infrastructure, software-defined infrastructure or something like that.Akshat [00:03:22]: Yeah, the self-provisioningSwyx [00:03:23]: Self-provisioning.Akshat [00:03:24]: Yeah.Swyx [00:03:24]: Yeah. I can't even remember my own post.Swyx [00:03:26]: And then you put me on the landing page.Akshat [00:03:28]: Yeah. We really like, the term and so we stole it.Swyx [00:03:32]: Because you had the insight that everything can just be in decorators co-located with the code, right?Akshat [00:03:37]: Yeah.Swyx [00:03:37]: Was that a big part of the originalAkshat [00:03:39]: YesSwyx [00:03:39]: Story or it was just like a DX layer?Akshat [00:03:41]: That was, really important because we really didn't want people to spend, so much time, writing YAML, and it seemed like you could really condense the surface area of what you're doing, put it in code so you can operate on it just like you operate on other code, and like build stuff that's more expressive and dynamic. and so yeah, that was always a very important part.Swyx [00:04:04]: Then the pushback is this is a DSL.Akshat [00:04:07]: Yeah.Swyx [00:04:07]: It's you're closed source. I am locked into Modal.Akshat [00:04:11]: Yeah. We never really got pushback for that because the nice thing about Modal is you can bring whatever code you have, and sure, the DSL is at the configuration layer for, what hardware you're using, how you're scaling things up, but you still own the code.Akshat [00:04:27]: And that's, that's been an important, part of our story, even as we do inference now.Swyx [00:04:32]: Yeah.Vibhu [00:04:32]: How much of do you think still stays the same today? Like if you were to build something today, DevX very important, but I feel like, a lot of this has been changed with just hook it up to an agent, have Claude Code, have Codex implement a tool. there's very agent native primitives that are different than if I'm doing this myself, right?Developer Experience → Agent ExperienceAkshat [00:04:54]: We've changed our SDK team to think about agent experience instead of, developer experience and we think that the same benefits that apply for DX also apply for AX, which is why would you have an agent read through hundreds of Kubernetes files and like write YAML that's not even typed when it can make a couple of changes in a decorator and it gets this self-provisioning runtime of, being able to see its changes live in action? yeah, it just seems from the customers we talk to, they find Modal is much faster for agents to use versus operating on a different substrate.Swyx [00:05:34]: Yeah, because like you, again, you co-locate the infrastructure requirements to the code that runs it.Akshat [00:05:38]: Yeah.Swyx [00:05:38]: Well, the negative thesis now is that nobody's looking at their code anymore, so there's no point.Akshat [00:05:44]: Yeah, people aren't looking at code. one thing we still see is really important is observability.Swyx [00:05:51]: Yeah.Akshat [00:05:51]: Like how good is your dashboard? And of course, like we have, we push a lot of it to the CLI so the agents can do their own investigation, but you still need humans to go interpret what's going on and, make judgment calls and whatnot. and that's I feel like, Maybe more important now than looking at the code itself.Swyx [00:06:11]: Yes, because like, you can try to treat the code as a black box and then use, see the observable action that comes out of it, and then just prompt a change.What Modal Is For: AI Cloud PrimitivesAkshat [00:06:21]: Yeah.Swyx [00:06:22]: So I think it takes a bit of restraint to not specialize, to say, “I want to ship a new primitive,” and then just be general purpose.Swyx [00:06:31]: People ask you, “What are you for?” You're like, “ I don't know. We can do this, we can do that.”Vibhu [00:06:36]: Well, I'd be curious to see, like, okay, if we were to ask you, like, what is Modal for even at a high level? There's a lot you guys do, sandboxes, GPUs, everything. How do you answer?Akshat [00:06:46]: Modal is a cloud platform that's built for, where we've built the primitives from scratch for AI applications. and right now it covers, inference, training, batch processing, and sandbox workloads.Akshat [00:07:00]: But we're building a lot moreSwyx [00:07:02]: I noticed you didn't say web server, so there is still a role for, like, the always-on large-scale Kubernetes type things.Akshat [00:07:09]: Yeah, absolutely. We're, we're not trying to compete with the renders of the world, because yeah, we think the differentiator for us is the, are the workloads that need specialized compute, need to scale up and down a lot. yeah, they're, they're, they're just shaped differently.Working Alongside Frontier StartupsVibhu [00:07:26]: I think you're building a lot of it alongside the startups, right? They're innovating quite a bit, even in your, like, latest blog post. Like, even in the series C, the customers that you mention here, the cognitions, technical ones, ramps and whatnot, they're, they're innovating with you, right? And that's not something AWS is doing directly with.Akshat [00:07:45]: Yeah, absolutely. I think, this is again classic. We're a small team. We can move really fast. our engineers are working with our customers and figuring it out. Yeah.Swyx [00:07:54]: So my first week at Cognition, I walked in, there was someone wearing a Modal shirt. I was like, “What are you doing here?” They're like, “Yeah, I just. I am embedded inside of Cog.”Akshat [00:08:05]: Yeah, I think that was Peyton. We sent him overSwyx [00:08:07]: Yeah.Akshat [00:08:07]: Because, the latency of communication was too high otherwise.Swyx [00:08:12]: Yeah, distributed node, you have to - you have to place one and collocate.Vibhu [00:08:16]: Yeah.Swyx [00:08:16]: So I had a, I had direct personal experience, right? So I worked on smol developer three years ago. it was inspired by Claude 1. I think you onboarded me at some point, like, just before, and I was like, “Oh, like, I need some bursty compute. Like, I was just gonna try using Modal.” And it was a, it was a pretty pleasant experience. apparently, I showed up in the board meeting, like the analytics.smol developer, Sandboxes, and Proto-CognitionAkshat [00:08:39]: Yeah, you blew up on Hacker News and,Swyx [00:08:41]: YeahAkshat [00:08:41]: We got a big traffic spike. I. I think the way you used smol developer was Modal functions for running stuff, which was. Like, the, that was a good use case. but then, yeah.Swyx [00:08:53]: Yeah. That - So to me, that was proto-cognition.Akshat [00:08:55]: Right.Swyx [00:08:56]: If only I had, like, stuck to it.Swyx [00:08:58]: Like, that was like, if - did you say draw the tech treeAkshat [00:09:00]: AbsolutelySwyx [00:09:00]: You're just like, “Yeah, like, probably this will happen.”Akshat [00:09:02]: Yeah. Like, he was so close. You were just rebuilding upon usSwyx [00:09:04]: I just didn't realize.Akshat [00:09:05]: But the funny story there is at the same time, we were talking to a bunch of customers who needed something like sandboxing.Swyx [00:09:14]: Yeah.Akshat [00:09:14]: This is like twenty-three.Swyx [00:09:15]: Yeah.Akshat [00:09:16]: So we builtSwyx [00:09:17]: You introduced a new API right after that.Akshat [00:09:18]: Yeah.Swyx [00:09:19]: Yes.Akshat [00:09:19]: Like, we built sandboxes in May of twenty-three before anyone was even knew this was gonna be a thing. And the first example we published was, we took smol developerSwyx [00:09:28]: Smol developerAkshat [00:09:28]: And put it in a loop, so the agent can iterate on itself.Swyx [00:09:33]: Loops are hot these days.Vibhu [00:09:34]: It's the looper.Akshat [00:09:34]: Yeah.Vibhu [00:09:35]: Loops in. When was this, twenty-three?Akshat [00:09:38]: Yeah.Vibhu [00:09:39]: A small check.Akshat [00:09:39]: Yeah.Swyx [00:09:39]: It's like twenty-three. so the. the, those for listeners, like, the problem was the models are not built for any of this, right?Swyx [00:09:46]: Like, you're just trying to like. They're not post-training to understand, like, looping and, like, self-correction and tool calling was there, but, like, also not that great.Akshat [00:09:55]: Yeah.Akshat [00:09:55]: I don't remember if you used tool calling in this one, but yeah, the models would just diverge after like ten iterations and not produce anything meaningful.Swyx [00:10:03]: Yeah. But like, then. So okay, like now talking to myself three years ago, the answerVibhu [00:10:08]: Of course they will get betterSwyx [00:10:09]: Collect all the failures, build benchmark, and then collect all the, examples, build the RL environmentAkshat [00:10:15]: RightSwyx [00:10:15]: Sell it for like ten billion dollars to Meta.Swyx [00:10:17]: And then also train a model and then sell that for sixty billion dollars to Elon. And this isAkshat [00:10:23]: Yeah, of courseSwyx [00:10:23]: The funny machine. Like, it's like, it's about the hardware.Akshat [00:10:28]: It's hard to have that inherent conviction that the stuff will get that much better.Swyx [00:10:33]: In retrospect, it's so f*****g obvious.Akshat [00:10:36]: Fair enough.Swyx [00:10:37]: Like, what else were we doing back then? I don't know. anyway. Yeah. So this. That was the start of your sandboxing journey, right? I feel like it didn't blow up until, like, last year.Akshat [00:10:49]: Yeah.Swyx [00:10:50]: So there was like a couple years of quietness.Akshat [00:10:52]: Exactly, yeah. We wereVibhu [00:10:53]: I think very underrated product value. Like, my experience with Modal, Charles, before he had joined Modal, met this guy at a hackathon, and he really insisted we wanted to run some small model, not hosted anywhere, and he's like, “ there's this cool company, Modal. They'll like spin up a GPU sandbox, we can throw it on there. They'll take a Hugging Face link.” And like there's so much value just right there, right? Like instant hosting, spin it up, spin it down. It'll stay cold, but we run the demo a few days later, it'll come back up and like all this stuff in retrospect, like it's still what we needed like today.Akshat [00:11:27]: Yeah, it's still needed today. workload shapes have changed a lot as, we run stuff for people with really massive production scale and, there it's it's not about scaling from zero to one, but it's how do we scale really elastically, from like thousand to fifteen hundred GPUs very quickly in a given region. It's the same shape problem.Elastic Inference, GPU Autoscaling, and Custom ModelsVibhu [00:11:50]: Okay. So you look at, say, Cursor Composer, right?Akshat [00:11:53]: Yeah.Vibhu [00:11:53]: They had a. “We'll do RL on a model every couple hours.” you guys have a whole version of RL inference gym and whatnot.Vibhu [00:12:01]: When you look at workloads like that, you're doing train runs where you need to scale up, scale down every hour thousands of GPUs, right? That's the example for we do need it, right?Akshat [00:12:12]: Yeah. Well, so I'll, I'll take a step back and, maybe talk about like how people use Modal today. because our biggest use case is, elastic inference. And the thing we first found product market fit, with was inference for custom models. So we stayed away from the LLM space, and we were serving companies like Suno for audio, Runway for video, robotics, comp bio companies that train their own model elsewhere. But Modal is the best black box that for deployment, scaling to however many GPUs you need as your traffic pattern changes. And we saw all of them like have a very unpredict- predict- predictable, traffic pattern. it's like diurnal. It's Some days, like the company will do a launch and, they'll need like, way more. And it's not just one model that they deploy. They-- all these companies deploy, lots of different models in different regions, and so the autoscaling problem becomes even harder because then you have to scale within a certain region, and those cycles are offset. So different times you scale up in different regions.Akshat [00:13:20]: So that's like our sortVibhu [00:13:22]: And thatAkshat [00:13:22]: YeahVibhu [00:13:22]: That in and of itself is a huge category. There's a bunch of inference providers which, provide this fireworks, does this as a service together, whatnot, Base10. that's carved into its own niche for language models, at least right now.Akshat [00:13:36]: Yeah. the thing that we have specialized in is the autoscaling aspect.Vibhu [00:13:41]: Yeah.Akshat [00:13:41]: Because we found that it's not universally true that everyone else can autoscale, and we've gone deeper into it on the tech side by, we've incorporated GPU snapshotting into the product so we can take the GPU state, like your torch.compile model, snapshot it, and the next cold start is way faster. And so going back to your question, it's That's why you need a lot of burstiness for inference. But then people also do a lot of demand training, like for RL stuff, your rollouts are bursty, as you said. People also do a lot of batch jobs. So we'll see, a lot of companies, before they have a training run, they'll need thousands of GPUs to run encoding or something like that. And I think those things are much more bursty than. I agree that agents are not that bursty. sandboxes are, except when you're doing RL. RL is justRL, Batch Jobs, and 100,000 SandboxesVibhu [00:14:28]: Or commerceAkshat [00:14:28]: Insanely bursty.Vibhu [00:14:29]: Yeah.Akshat [00:14:30]: Yeah. Like when you're doing, rollouts, you sometimes need a hundred thousand sandboxes in your sandboxes.Vibhu [00:14:37]: Yeah. I'm curious if you've seen early sparks of continual learning. There are some people, like our friends, ngram, recently announced thisAkshat [00:14:45]: YeahVibhu [00:14:45]: They're, they're trying to do training. That also seems like a different workload, right? If you're doing training twenty-four/seven per se, there's a very weird dynamic of how you're using GPUs between people and whatnot, but seems like something you guys would work for.Akshat [00:15:00]: As you said, we're, we're fortunate to work with a number of, customers at the frontier and grab some of our customers. and they are taking the primitives we have, and trying to use them in very interesting ways, like continual learning. It's possible as the stuff gets better, some of that will be part of, our offering as well if, more people need it. but we're, we're just waiting to seeVibhu [00:15:23]: YeahAkshat [00:15:23]: How it shakes out.Vibhu [00:15:24]: Is there a primitive that you added after sandboxing that was the next step in the story?LLM Inference, DeFlash, and Speculative DecodingAkshat [00:15:32]: I guess we've been going much deeper into LLM inferenceVibhu [00:15:35]: YeahAkshat [00:15:35]: Because we realized that some of the advantages we have with like autoscaling, again, especially in different regions and whatnot, are, not present elsewhere. and the place where we had a gap was we weren't, working on the model layer itself. Like we were a black box. And, we realized that, we can get to frontier-level model performance, with, by having great people who work on this. And, we've been open sourcing a lot of our work, in terms of, Recently, we, shared our work on DeFlash, which is a block-based, speculator, and we've open sourced, all of it. So, you can - By using open source DeFlash, you can get the same performance as you would with one of the proprietary providers. And the next thing we're thinking about hereVibhu [00:16:23]: I thought this wasAkshat [00:16:24]: YeahVibhu [00:16:24]: An interesting blog post as well, right? Like, I think in here you make a claim that. Not a claim, just that how effective speculative deco-decoding really just get to.Akshat [00:16:33]: Yeah.Vibhu [00:16:33]: Anything you wanna point out from this around, what people should know?Akshat [00:16:39]: Yeah, absolutely. the high-level summary is, it would help to describe what speculative decoding is.Vibhu [00:16:44]: Yes.Akshat [00:16:44]: I will, yes.Vibhu [00:16:45]: I think, likeAkshat [00:16:46]: YeahVibhu [00:16:46]: So we've covered like Eagle and all thisAkshat [00:16:47]: YeahVibhu [00:16:47]: Like Hydra and all those things, but it was like two years ago.Akshat [00:16:51]: Yeah.Vibhu [00:16:51]: I think it doesn't hurt, right?Akshat [00:16:52]: Yeah. Speculative decoding is you have a smaller model, called a draft model, predict tokens ahead of the bigger model, and then you have the bigger model, verify all of this, all the tokens are predicted. And the reason it's faster is if you're predicting, one token at once, you're bound by memory bandwidth. But if you can batch the verification of, the draft model, then you're much more efficient using compute, and it's faster, and as long as your draft model is producing a lot of tokens that can get accepted, which is called the accept length, you can get a speed up that's, multiple times of, the original model speed. and well, that's what we highlight here. It's Like people talk a lot about we made these kernels faster and whatnot, but improving kernel will only give you like few percentage points of improvement, and, increasing accept length, literally is a multiplicative decreaseVibhu [00:17:47]: Like two to four X.Akshat [00:17:48]: Yeah, exactly.Vibhu [00:17:48]: Without much head-on performance.Akshat [00:17:50]: Yeah. I think it may - you are running a second model, right? So it may be something more expensive in the compute,Vibhu [00:17:57]: I meant quality performanceAkshat [00:17:58]: Probably not by muchVibhu [00:17:58]: But yeah. I thinkAkshat [00:17:59]: So there's no drop in quality performanceVibhu [00:18:01]: YeahAkshat [00:18:01]: Because you're always. You're never accepting a token that the big modelVibhu [00:18:04]: It's strictly betterAkshat [00:18:05]: YeahVibhu [00:18:05]: Or it's same.Akshat [00:18:06]: Exactly.Vibhu [00:18:07]: Right. Yeah.Akshat [00:18:08]: And so we've been working a bunch on DeFlash, which is a block-based speculator. so it's instead of predicting, one token at a time, it's predicting a block. And we've been open sourcing our work with it. The next thing for us here is for helping people train speculators and custom models. it's it's something that traditionally is very forward-deployed engineering driven, support deployed, engineer driven, like you work with customers and help them do that. And our vision for. This is why we launched Auto Endpoints, is we want to make frontier-level performance available to everyone. And so, we mentioned this in the announcement, we teased it. The next thing we're, we're launching is, as you run an auto endpoint, we shadow trafficAuto Endpoints and Frontier-Level PerformanceVibhu [00:18:54]: Do you want to explain what auto endpoints are?Akshat [00:18:57]: Yeah.Vibhu [00:18:57]: I lovely, yeah.Akshat [00:18:58]: Yeah. So, this is, I guess, going back to your Modal is you touch the code, but, sometimes people don't wanna touch the code, and they wanna get started with an endpoint that works and has all the great performance and, scalability that Modal has. So we've made that easier with, a way to create an endpoint from our UI, from the CLI, that has all of our optimizations that we talked about, like the DeFlash stuff already baked in, and there's full transparency. So we give you the code, you can go run it yourself, and if you want, you can eject out into the full Modal experience, which we see as people get sophisticated, they do wanna tweak the models, they wanna, fine-tune stuff. You can still do all of that. It's it's not a black box. And yeah, the next thing, as we teased later in the post, is how do we give you value even beyond this in terms of having your draft models evolve as your data distribution evolves, again, without having to talk to a person and, yeah.Vibhu [00:19:59]: I guess just to understand it directly, you have the GPUs, you have an endpoint that's compatible, you serve open model. If someone was to do this themselves, what's the delta that you guys provide? So you do a lot of open source great work on effective inference. how does it compare to, say, I take the same model, 5.2 FP8, take shelf inference engine, vLLM, SGLang, get compute of similar capacity, similar cost. What's the delta that plugging into something this, like this offers outside of the benefit of, scaling?Production Inference Beyond Raw GPUsAkshat [00:20:34]: It's interesting because we've taken the approach of open sourcing our contributions and upstreaming them. we work closely with the SGLang team. We want the improvements that our team, comes up with to be, there in open source for others to use, even outside of Modal. The benefit to us is we have a team that has significant expertise in terms of if you do have something that is not there, our team can help you get that performance, first. the other thing is with these endpoints, we are way more elastic, as you said, than, anyone else, and you have true scaling to zero. you have true, burstiness, and in practice, that matters a lot more to people than just finding, the GPU and, running Modal code on something.Vibhu [00:21:20]: Yeah. And I will say it's not that straightforward to just. like what I said is easier said than done, right?Akshat [00:21:26]: Yeah.Vibhu [00:21:27]: It's I think still for the average person, still hard to just gut check using different. There's, there's quite a bit of combinations you can make there. the trade-offs aren't really known at face value.Akshat [00:21:40]: Yeah. it's it's not just that. I think it's it's that running production-grade inference is a hard infer problem.Vibhu [00:21:49]: YeahAkshat [00:21:49]: Even if you subtract out the autoscalingVibhu [00:21:50]: YeahAkshat [00:21:51]: Is controlling things like tail latency and, making sure every, request is delivered at least once and whatnot.The Model and Agent LifecycleVibhu [00:22:00]: There's a lot of innovation that you can do here. I think, it's very interesting that you're starting to encroach on, like as you become a full cloud, you're starting to encroach on other people's turf.Vibhu [00:22:09]: What will you not do?Akshat [00:22:13]: Well, we wanna follow our users and, make sure they get like a platform that has everything that works well together. so right now we're focused on the model lifecycle and the agent, lifecycle. so both like going from data prep to training to inference, and then also if I want to deploy a background agent, let's say, sandbox, do persistent storage, a whole bunch of other stuff.Vibhu [00:22:38]: We talked to Cole, who did, OpenInspect. Yeah.Akshat [00:22:42]: Yeah.Vibhu [00:22:42]: And RealInspect also is on Modal.Akshat [00:22:44]: Yeah. So Ramp Inspect was a great example of a background agent that was really successful because they, were able to use some of the primitives like snapshotting and fast scaling to just have something that feels really reactive and works well.Ramp Inspect and Background AgentsVibhu [00:23:02]: Yeah. That's the new CTO of, Ramp right there.Akshat [00:23:05]: Yeah, Rahul.Vibhu [00:23:08]: It was really fun. yeah, okay, I think, all very bullish. Like, one of my reflections was also I did not originally. So when I met you guysThe Inference Inflection: CPU, GPU, and Co-LocationVibhu [00:23:19]: You weren't that much in the GPU game, and now you're all about, inference. And one of the points that I hinged on for Jensen's keynote at GTC this year was, what we're calling like the inference inflection, right? That let's say in AI workloads or machine learning workloads, it used to be like, let's call it eight to one GPU to CPU, and now it's more like one to one, which is like a interesting. Like, - because of how much agents are blocked or call out to this, to CPU heavy stuff the actual, like, limiting factor, like, swings back and forth from GPU to CPU a lot more than it used to be all GPU and then occasional CPU.Akshat [00:24:01]: Yeah.Vibhu [00:24:02]: GPU, CPU. And now it's like just constantly, and you just have to locate everything.Seventeen Clouds and the Supercloud StrategyAkshat [00:24:08]: Yeah. And that's one of the things that, again, we see as, something appealing about Modal, which is we've built this capacity pool that spans, 17 cloud providers, so we're, we're very good at Running on various kinds of cloud capacity across the worldSwyx [00:24:24]: You don't have your own data centers?Akshat [00:24:25]: We don't have our own data centers. We just run across a lot of neo cloudsSwyx [00:24:29]: Yeah. AreAkshat [00:24:30]: Metal providers.Swyx [00:24:30]: Yeah. Question mark.Swyx [00:24:31]: Yeah. You're, you're running the math, and you're like, “What's the cutover point where you're like.”Akshat [00:24:36]: Yeah, it's a good question. part of it is we see our differentiator in the software layer, and, being capital light and focusing on the software helps us move really fast. so far it's worked out well because there are so many other people building data centers that we're able to work effectively with them, and again, focus on what makes us, special.Swyx [00:24:55]: Yeah.Swyx [00:24:56]: 17 gets you into, like, the local providers sometimes. LikeAkshat [00:25:00]: The,Swyx [00:25:01]: Which was the most interesting one?Akshat [00:25:02]: There are a lot more neo clouds than you expect, and they all have various degrees of, various levels of reliability. And, that's why it's something we've invested a lot of time in, is building our own reliability layer on top. so if the GPU falls off the bus or something happens, we user workloads are not affected, and that lets us use a lot more capacity than,Swyx [00:25:30]: YeahAkshat [00:25:30]: You as a user would be able to.Swyx [00:25:32]: It's a useful thing to have because like now everyone knows, like, what layer you are and, like, you optimize for being the super cloud of all clouds.Akshat [00:25:41]: Yeah. That's, that's, that's the idea. and so I guess when you mentioned colocation, that's, that's another interesting thing where, one thing we've seen is people come to us when they want, very specifically located, CPUs or GPUs, like they wantSwyx [00:25:57]: Oh, they pin it in likeAkshat [00:25:58]: YeahSwyx [00:25:58]: EU?Akshat [00:25:59]: Exactly. Or EU, US.Swyx [00:26:01]: Right. Data resiliencyAkshat [00:26:02]: AustraliaSwyx [00:26:02]: Locality thing or performance or what?Akshat [00:26:04]: It's either data locality or latency, yeah.Swyx [00:26:07]: Yeah.Akshat [00:26:07]: Like, you want your. They're running sandboxes and model. They want them to be right next to aSwyx [00:26:10]: Yeah, it's easy thenAkshat [00:26:11]: YeahSwyx [00:26:12]: To. That is important in all those things. and so, like, you've accidentally, I don't know if it's accident, but, like, you've built the perfect primitive for agents to express themselves. And then, like, it's almost very funny how every extra development just involves more file system, just involves more CPU.Akshat [00:26:30]: Yeah.Swyx [00:26:31]: Just like the things that you already have. I don't know much about, if there's any, like, networking usages that are interesting, but you've also done some good work on networking.Networking, Sidecars, Private IPv6, and SandboxesAkshat [00:26:40]: Yeah, that's exactly right. Like, we're just taking compute storage and networking and building stuff on that layer, for, again, the stuff people need.Swyx [00:26:49]: YeahAkshat [00:26:50]: We see a few interesting networking things coming up. one is people want networked sandboxes. so we haveSwyx [00:26:57]: For like a Docker cluster type thing.Akshat [00:26:59]: Yeah.Swyx [00:26:59]: Sorry, Docker Swarm. Oh, f**k. What is it called?Akshat [00:27:02]: Compose.Swyx [00:27:03]: Compose type thing.Akshat [00:27:04]: Yeah. So if you want Docker Compose, our sandboxes now support, this thing called sidecars. So you can. A sandbox is a pod of containers, and you can run multiple containers in, a sandbox. also useful because, going back to networking, people want a lot of control over, outbound networking from a sandbox.Swyx [00:27:23]: Yeah.Akshat [00:27:23]: Like, they might wanna run a middle proxy for, like, maybe logging stuff for RL or, controlling how egress can happen to a domain, injecting credentials. and yeah. So we've, we've had to build a lot of that stuff ourselves.Swyx [00:27:38]: Yeah.Akshat [00:27:39]: But then also sometimes people want, sandboxes spanning multiple nodes to talk to each other, which is an emerging thing we're seeing. We have support for that for a different reason, and yeah, we'll see if that becomes stable.Swyx [00:27:52]: Like, just an open socket. It's a. This is directly like mTLS.Akshat [00:27:56]: We do support that, which is you can, expose a tunnel inside a sandbox.Swyx [00:28:01]: Yeah.Akshat [00:28:01]: And then you can either expose it to public internet or it can be, you can add like a HTTP, auth layer above it. But we have this thing called I6PN, which we haven't talked about, which is this, like, overlay network using IPv6 addresses. so if Modal containers, within the same workspace, when this is enabled, can address each other using this private IPv6 address, and no one else can.Akshat [00:28:28]: So it's like private networking, for containers. We built it because we needed it as a primitive for our distributed training product. so we have this other feature, which is you can add a decorator to a function, and you get a cluster of GPUs. and they have RDMA networking. so you can run a distributed training job, that's truly serverless. and we did the overlay network for that. But then we've seen that people are using it for other reasons, and, I'm intrigued to yeah, what would people do with it.Swyx [00:28:59]: Build primitives and let people figure it out, right?Akshat [00:29:01]: Yeah, exactly.Swyx [00:29:02]: You put out a pretty interestingAkshat [00:29:03]: They're like, they read the docs webpage. Let me use thatSwyx [00:29:06]: YeahAkshat [00:29:06]: Something they never intended to work. This is literally not even in our docs page. People somehow found it, and they're using it.RDMA, Memory Movement, and Distributed TrainingSwyx [00:29:12]: Huh.Swyx [00:29:14]: The way you portrayed it with, like, RDMA versus TCP, like, very well laid out, but just the transfer speed change at scale for RL, like yeah, you have it, you have it built in. I'm sure someone found it. It's found it to be a lot more efficient before you made a thing out of it, right?Akshat [00:29:32]: Yeah. And not to split hairs, I guess the overlay network is the TCP overlay network.Akshat [00:29:39]: The reason we have that is you need that to do the key exchange for RDMA before you set up the RDMA network on top of that. but then people found the TCP part.Swyx [00:29:48]: Can I tell you, this is like a big aha moment for me becauseAkshat [00:29:51]: YeahSwyx [00:29:51]: So I review 2,200 submissions for the World's Fair.Akshat [00:29:56]: Yeah.Swyx [00:29:57]: And then I got this from John OsterhoutAkshat [00:29:58]: HuhSwyx [00:29:59]: Who I don't know if. Do John Osterhout by name?Akshat [00:30:01]: The name sounds familiar.Swyx [00:30:02]: He published a. He's a well-known professor, published a lot of interesting software design books, and this is the talk he chose to submit, is on RDMA at Inference. And I'm like, you wouldn't think that this guy, who is like operating systems guy, would care about RDMA.Akshat [00:30:20]: I, it makes sense to me because I,Swyx [00:30:24]: This is the cloud, right? YeahAkshat [00:30:25]: Like, the way you move around your KV cache and how efficiently you can do it, how efficiently you move, your weights from your training GPUs to your inference GPUs in RL is there's a lot of degrees of freedom, and it is a systems problemSwyx [00:30:41]: YeahAkshat [00:30:41]: Moving memory aroundSwyx [00:30:42]: YeahAkshat [00:30:43]: Scheduling.Swyx [00:30:44]: This shows you how primitive my understanding of networking stuff is.Swyx [00:30:46]: Is this like the domain of WireGuard as well?Akshat [00:30:50]: Not quite.Swyx [00:30:51]: It's adjacent?Swyx [00:30:53]: Explain everything.Akshat [00:30:54]: Sure.Swyx [00:30:56]: How do we move memory around GPUs?Akshat [00:30:58]: Well, so sorry. Yeah, that is memory. Sorry, I was talking more, and maybe I was talking like five minutes back, about the private IPv6, addressing that you've set up.Swyx [00:31:09]: Yeah.Akshat [00:31:09]: Is it like it's a VPN?Swyx [00:31:10]: Yeah, it is like a VPN, and yeah, WireGuard is, yeah, you're right. It is,Akshat [00:31:16]: Right. Yeah, you already moved on to new topicsSwyx [00:31:17]: A similarAkshat [00:31:18]: OkaySwyx [00:31:19]: In the same space, WireGuard is, encrypted and this is,Akshat [00:31:23]: And you don't need encryption.Swyx [00:31:23]: Yeah.Akshat [00:31:24]: Yeah.Swyx [00:31:24]: This is not encrypted. that's the main difference. This is TCP and we have eBPF programs that will reject or allow the TCP connection based on whether you're allowed to do it.Akshat [00:31:35]: Used to involve a full sidecar, but now you have eBPF in the Linux kernel.Swyx [00:31:39]: Yeah.Akshat [00:31:40]: Yeah. I don't know if this is a natural follow-on to the topic of like my skepticism on distributed training is that while, like, people spend a lot of money on, like, cables to hook up GPUs, and even that is not, like, fast enough, and that's the bottleneck, is your networking fast enough?Swyx [00:31:59]: Yeah. So I guess you're talking about fully distributed training like, Dialog or something which is like cross data centerAkshat [00:32:06]: That would be, yes.Swyx [00:32:07]: That's the extreme.Akshat [00:32:08]: Yeah.Swyx [00:32:08]: You're in the middle, and then other people would have like the Mellanox cables up in, like, their actual data center.Akshat [00:32:14]: When you run multi-node training on Modal, RDMA, I think Mellanox, is, or InfiniBand is like a, is all seen as RDMA. but it's a way to bypass the TCP networking stack and, transfer, stuff much faster, between one node, to the other. And we have I think like 3 terabit per second, internal networkingSwyx [00:32:40]: OkayAkshat [00:32:40]: Which is the standard that's needed.Swyx [00:32:42]: Okay. So I misunderstood whatAkshat [00:32:43]: 50Swyx [00:32:43]: What part of the stack you wereAkshat [00:32:44]: 50 gigs overSwyx [00:32:45]: YeahAkshat [00:32:45]: If you wentSwyx [00:32:45]: YeahAkshat [00:32:46]: RDMA.Swyx [00:32:46]: Okay.Swyx [00:32:48]: Yeah. I, very impressive work.Multi-Node Training, Post-Training, and Auto ResearchSwyx [00:32:52]: So effectively you're extending like the model philosophy to the training cluster, like, yeah.Akshat [00:32:59]: Yeah. And we're, we're not going for like large scale training runs. the thing that we've built multi-node training for is, we see a lot of, smaller scale post-training. like, people are post-training like medium sized fund models, so they can, get higher quality on inference. this is a perfect fit, for something like that.Swyx [00:33:21]: Yeah. That is my impression of how a lot of these labs explore branches in post-training and then eventually merge whatever they find in.Akshat [00:33:31]: Yeah. The other use case we've seen for multi-node training is even if you have a big cluster, your researchers are still doing small runsSwyx [00:33:38]: YesAkshat [00:33:39]: Having elasticity thereSwyx [00:33:40]: Right, sureAkshat [00:33:40]: Matters a lot more.Swyx [00:33:41]: Yeah. the, like, this is like the current limiting factor for auto research, which is like you need to give your model some GPUs in order for it to completely run.Akshat [00:33:51]: We have a blog post on auto resource and model is,Swyx [00:33:55]: YeahAkshat [00:33:56]: Yeah, like, turns out to be pretty good substrate for that.Swyx [00:33:59]: So my impression is auto research means many things, likeAkshat [00:34:01]: YeahSwyx [00:34:01]: Anything that Andrej coins. Right now it's still science fair, right? Like not like, I don't know how many people are doing this.Akshat [00:34:08]: We're having a golf.Swyx [00:34:08]: Yeah.Akshat [00:34:09]: I thought the same thing.Swyx [00:34:11]: Yeah, you would know.Akshat [00:34:12]: We, like, our internal both training and inference teams use this the general shape of this quite a bit. like we have this one internal repo called auto inference, which essentially we've automated our own forward-deployed engineering efforts using, this harness, which is, the agent will just spin up a sweep of different things. It'll even run like, NVIDIA inside profiler and it'll like tweak configs and it'll arrive the right thing. it'll change your GPUs both from H200 to B200, and works really well.Swyx [00:34:47]: Nice.Akshat [00:34:47]: So yeah.Swyx [00:34:48]: By the way, I enjoy that your forward-deployed engineering is so technical that you have to do these things.Swyx [00:34:52]: It's very different from forward-deployed engineering from other people.Akshat [00:34:54]: Yeah. For our forward-deployed engineering team is, essentially they're like applied inference researchers or applied training researchers.Swyx [00:35:02]: Someone told me like they have to be able to build, but they also have to be able to sell. do they have to sell or are they like they're good, they're just like post-sale type of thing?Akshat [00:35:09]: It does, being able to talk to a customer and engage effectively with themSwyx [00:35:13]: YeahAkshat [00:35:13]: Matters a lot.Swyx [00:35:14]: They want the same thing.Akshat [00:35:15]: Yeah.Swyx [00:35:15]: ?Akshat [00:35:15]: But it's it's not really a sales, thing. We pair them with-- We have solution architects as well that are more on the sales side.Swyx [00:35:23]: Okay. Let's spend a bit more time on auto research. This is a big focus for for this year. Where does this go? like, have people explored enough? Like, there's all these beautiful charts of like improve and then level off a bit and then you find the next thing. Is this one abstraction up from normal training? Is that how we think about it, or do you think about it differently? Like model level training versus high, like driven hyperparameter search.Auto Inference and Modal BenchAkshat [00:35:51]: Yeah, like,Swyx [00:35:51]: Someone, some people call it like neural architecture search or whatever, right? Like.Akshat [00:35:54]: Yeah, - So the stuff I've seen people do with it is nowhere on the architecture level. It's pretty much tweaking parameters, but it's it's a hyperparameter sweep that's guided by some model intuition, so it's like much more efficient than, whatever other, sweep you would have.Swyx [00:36:12]: Yeah, it's just, it's just a question of where you want to spend your compute?Akshat [00:36:16]: Right.Swyx [00:36:16]: ‘Cause yeah, you can just throw infinite amounts of money on this and somehow you'll bang out Shakespeare?Akshat [00:36:22]: Yeah, infinite monkey.Swyx [00:36:24]: Yeah, so like the very good for model. and I think it's also very important that agents can spin up other agents, can spin up their infrastructure. Like very good for you. how good is our LLMs at generating model code? Like the benefit of existing LLMs is that you are in the data.Akshat [00:36:42]: Yeah. They're, they're surprisingly good. I think like pre Cloud 4 they were not, and then now they're able to shot, stuff out of the box. But we're playing around with releasing like a Modal Bench for like the harderSwyx [00:36:55]: YeahAkshat [00:36:55]: Things, that the LLMs cannot do yet and maybeSwyx [00:36:59]: What's an example of that?Akshat [00:37:01]: I think the things that- Sometimes agents struggle with, without right guidance and a skill is, how to, use the rest of our observability. Like how to. Something is failing, like how do you look at the logs and then update the right thing? It's reasoning about that. But they're able to shot, likeSwyx [00:37:23]: Yeah. You can just add a skill to it?Compute Strategy and Capacity PlanningAkshat [00:37:26]: Yeah. So we have a Modal skill now that. Which is why we built this Modal Bench. It's to find things like that, so we can address them in our tool.Swyx [00:37:35]: Tune a skill. Yeah.Akshat [00:37:36]: Yeah.Swyx [00:37:36]: No. it's it's good. are you facing any shortages? like we talk a lot about GPU shortages, but also CPU, also memory.Swyx [00:37:44]: Yeah.Akshat [00:37:45]: We have had a lot of growth, which means that, there's - we've had to be much better aboutSwyx [00:37:53]: PlanningAkshat [00:37:54]: Proactive capacity planning.Swyx [00:37:55]: Yeah.Akshat [00:37:55]: So we have,Swyx [00:37:57]: Which by the way, like it's like a MBA's like dreamAkshat [00:38:00]: YesSwyx [00:38:00]: Is like just planning this stuff. I think last time you and I talked about something maybe about this.Akshat [00:38:03]: Yeah. we have a really competent team of people that we call, The role is called compute strategy. so yeah, if anyone listening here or wants to work on thatSwyx [00:38:13]: Compute strategy?Akshat [00:38:13]: Yeah.Swyx [00:38:14]: I think,Akshat [00:38:14]: I feel like,Swyx [00:38:15]: I think the normies call it FP&A or something.Akshat [00:38:18]: Well, it's more It's it's not FP&A. It's it's There's a lot of interesting financial questions of like what is the blend between one year and three-year reservations? how do we forecast our own capacity? how do we. especially since our capacity is very fungible across different GPU types and different regions, like you have to model a lot of it. and you also have to have an opinion on how the supply chain is gonna evolve, and then you have to like, take bets,Swyx [00:38:49]: YeahAkshat [00:38:49]: Based on that.Swyx [00:38:50]: Tokenomics.Akshat [00:38:50]: Yeah.Swyx [00:38:51]: This is like probably a not a real point, but, I was trying to think about like what other industries. I was trying to think about like, we cannot be first to like these kinds of problems.Akshat [00:38:59]: Yeah.Swyx [00:39:00]: And what other industries have had this? And I was like, airlines with fuel and like they have to hedge their fuel and like, I think for a long time Southwest because they made like a hero fuel bet, they like were like super low cost becauseAkshat [00:39:12]: OhSwyx [00:39:12]: Compared to everyone else.Akshat [00:39:14]: Yeah. I hadn't thought about that.Vibhu [00:39:16]: We're at a fun time too?Akshat [00:39:18]: Yeah. It's. A lot of the compute business in general, for us is also about being very good about capacity management. That is how you have great unit, economics. but also over time it's how you can unlock more value for customers. Like, one of the things we're building now is like a way for customers to get, If they don't care about latency, like get much cheaper pricing and they'll get results back in like next 24 hours or something, like a batch tier essentially.Batch Tiers and Latency-Insensitive WorkloadsSwyx [00:39:47]: Yeah.Akshat [00:39:47]: And those are levers we have because we control the whole stack and scheduling and whatnot to give people a sufficientSwyx [00:39:53]: Yeah. I feel like they're not as popular. Like those, like the Frontier Labs have all those APIs. They're not as popular as they should be.Akshat [00:40:00]: The demand that we see for something like that is not for LLMs. although sometimes people wanna run evals andSwyx [00:40:08]: OkayAkshat [00:40:08]: Synthetic data prep and there it makes sense.Swyx [00:40:10]: Okay.Akshat [00:40:11]: But it's from a lot of LLM companies, like people who are doing computational bio, like they have to run really big batch jobs and they don't care about when they get it back.Swyx [00:40:22]: Yeah. And like they have a reasonable. It's it's also like a cousin to the stopping problem of like, will this finish in time?Akshat [00:40:30]: Yeah. You can bound it.Swyx [00:40:33]: Yeah.Akshat [00:40:33]: Like you can give peopleSwyx [00:40:34]: YeahAkshat [00:40:34]: SLAs on it.Swyx [00:40:35]: Yeah. I think what's, what's interesting is like the next phase of model.Swyx [00:40:38]: Like what, do people expect from you, now that you're established and you're like well-known compute player among all these leading companies. You had an inference launch week, and we talked a little bit about the launches. like what else? Like what else should people know?What Modal Builds NextAkshat [00:40:55]: We are building primitives that make our users' lives much easier. So, I think for example, with LLM inference, thousands more companies are gonna post-train their own models and, deploy open source models for inference. so we're thinking a lot about what is the best product shape for that. And, that involves everything from our training gym to, then, endpoints that get frontier-level performance. again, but I haven't talked to anyone. It looks somewhat different on other verticals. Like, we're also seeing a lot of real-time, audio-video stuff in there, which is why like, we're working on things like regional routing, with fallbacks. So you can get GPUs that are as close to users as possible. so you get like low latency for video streaming and whatnot. And then on the agent side, it's,Akshat [00:41:52]: We're still working very closely with our customers because stuff is changing so fast in terms of what they need. And, I think beyond sandboxes and persistent file systems, there's a lot of other things people will need from this agent stack as they build production agents. So yeah, we're thinking about those other things that fit in there.Swyx [00:42:13]: I want to ask what the other things are.Akshat [00:42:15]: Yeah. I probably should share right now.Swyx [00:42:17]: I think-- I think, okay, so, I do think a lot about the principal components of cloud, and you do talk about compute storage networking.Akshat [00:42:25]: Yeah.Swyx [00:42:25]: Because so far for me, it's fine. so far for the. the first couple generations of cloud, it's fine. What's different, qualitatively different about agents that you need some new permission level? Like a lot of people, okay, and I'll just kinda spew tokens at you until it like hopefully sparks something.Akshat [00:42:43]: Yeah.Swyx [00:42:44]: Like the new level now is whatever Claude Code does, which is dangerously scope permissions or like allow list by command or like whatever, right? And sometimes they're like, “Well, okay, we have like this adaptive thinking mode where like, just trust me, bro. I will make the calls for you.” Is that it? like mediated permissions.Hard Guardrails vs. LLM-Mediated PermissionsVibhu [00:43:03]: Now you're looping it with a goal and letting it roll.Akshat [00:43:06]: Yeah, I'm, I'm skeptical of LLM media permission for stuff that is at the sandbox level because you do want hard boundaries.Swyx [00:43:16]: Yeah.Akshat [00:43:16]: Otherwise, someone can exfiltrate stuff.Swyx [00:43:20]: But likeAkshat [00:43:20]: YeahSwyx [00:43:20]: Maybe that's old school thinking. Maybe we're the dinosaurs.Swyx [00:43:23]: Maybe the AI OS or the LLM OS is really the kernel is a goddamn LLM.Swyx [00:43:30]: Like it makes you feel uncomfortable.Akshat [00:43:31]: Yeah, I'm, I'm toldSwyx [00:43:32]: But that's what trusting the LLM is. Like imagine a spherical cow perfect LLM.Akshat [00:43:36]: Right.Swyx [00:43:37]: That it.Akshat [00:43:39]: Maybe.Swyx [00:43:41]: I wanna test the boundaries, right?Akshat [00:43:42]: Yeah.Swyx [00:43:42]: Like, and I don't believe that, but I wanna see where I'm wrong ‘cause that's, that's the consensus.Akshat [00:43:49]: Yeah. I think you always need hard guardrails when you want, And you can pair those with softer guardrails, right? And that's gonna be a lot of mediated.Managed Agents and Specialized SandboxesSwyx [00:44:00]: There. I'll also get you a end with a couple of your commentary on like the ecosystem outside of Modal. Manage agents. Everyone has one. Gemini, OpenAI, Claude, very useful for you, but also like it is their way of starting to edge into your space.Akshat [00:44:17]: Yeah.Swyx [00:44:17]: What's going on?Akshat [00:44:19]: Yeah, we're, very excited to partner with Anthropic and some of the other foundation labs, will not name who we're also working with. the way we see it is the manage agent thing is a great place to start if you're starting out building an agent and, But then when you get to, building something more production grade, like you're a company that's like Ramp that's building their own, Ramp also runs their accounting agent on us, so their external-facing agent. You need a lot more control over, your compute primitive on things like, what sort - how do you persist different files that the agent has access to, and how do you snapshot and restore? How do you control the networking? maybe you want GPUs. When you get to that point, you kinda want, a specialized sandbox provider, that gives you those things, and that's the role that we are trying to play.Swyx [00:45:15]: YeahAkshat [00:45:16]: We don't really have an opinion on the harness, whether it runs - it's a cloud-managed agent, and you hook it up to Model Sandbox, or you run the harness in Model Sandbox. We'll see where people converge with that.Swyx [00:45:26]: Yeah. Do you any opinions on like the meta harnesses, or just another layer on top of these things?Akshat [00:45:31]: You mean like the OpenPipeSwyx [00:45:33]: OpenPipe is one. I think Vercel had one, which I can't remember the name of right now. Fredshot had one. and then, to me, most recently was Data Databricks that had Omnigen. All these are meta harness. Like it's kinda pseudo agent cloud type things.Akshat [00:45:50]: I personally have not played around with them.Swyx [00:45:53]: Yeah.Akshat [00:45:53]: Build agents with them.Swyx [00:45:54]: Everything's bullish Modal, as long as it consumes more infra.Akshat [00:45:57]: That's why we're focusing on the infra layer. It's somewhere where our, relative competence is and, also it's a hard problem to solve.Swyx [00:46:06]: Yeah. I will say like just generally reflecting on that, I don't know if - if there's other topics on Modal, but like just generally reflecting as an infra person, not as intense as you, but in that field, this has like been the most exciting time in infra. Like it was boring for a while, and you couldn't really get people excited about data infrastructure. Like Eric would get on Data Console, everyone just watched the video and like say, “Look at how many sandboxes I can spin up,” and no one gave a crap.Why Infrastructure Became Exciting AgainAkshat [00:46:39]: Yeah.Swyx [00:46:40]: And like now everyone gives a crap.Akshat [00:46:42]: That's true. It is a very exciting time, and I think a lot of that's driven by just the amount of scale all of this stuff needs.Swyx [00:46:50]: I think the, like a lot of your initiatives or a lot of your like product directions make sense in retrospect, which is like the best kind, but I wouldn't necessarily have thought about it myself, which.Akshat [00:47:00]: We need the predictions.Swyx [00:47:02]: I think there's a lot that you just don't even see, right? Like you have the batch, you have the voice, you have the multimodal, but what else?Akshat [00:47:10]: What else is coming up for usSwyx [00:47:11]: Yeah. Where do you see things going?Akshat [00:47:13]: Yeah. I, in generalBiotech, Robotics, and Non-LLM AI WorkloadsAkshat [00:47:15]: It's it's clear that there's there's a huge shift happening. I think one thing that's not as obvious to people because LLM inference gets talked about so much and is also we work a lot of companies that are, doing things like drug discovery and computational bio, like the Chai Discoveries of the world. Big things are probably gonna happen there. we work a lot of robotics companies that are putting robots in like active deployments and getting good results out of them.Swyx [00:47:45]: Is there Air Gap Modal? Is there a version that is like prem air gapped whatever?Akshat [00:47:50]: No. We,Swyx [00:47:51]: You should cloud only.Akshat [00:47:51]: Yeah.Swyx [00:47:52]: Yeah. Okay. But yeah, so what you're saying is like because you're focused on primitives and they're good primitives, you find use cases in all these kinds of things.Akshat [00:48:01]: Yeah.Swyx [00:48:01]: Probably diversifies you a little bit away from LMS all the time.Akshat [00:48:05]: Yeah, absolutely. We're, we'- our goal isn't to only serve the LLM inference market.Swyx [00:48:10]: There are a lot just on the website, the audio,Akshat [00:48:12]: Yeah. We said both onSwyx [00:48:14]: Computational bio images. Yeah, there's a lot here. There's QTA TTS, customizing. Oh, Chatterbox. there was customizing Whisper.Akshat [00:48:24]: Okay. Yeah.Swyx [00:48:25]: This screen reminds me of a fallen competitor, which Replicate.Model APIs vs. Differentiated AI ProductsSwyx [00:48:31]: What's your postmortem on what happened?Akshat [00:48:34]: This is one thing we've stayed away from is providing an API for models because I think providing model APIs is some of it ends up serving like a really hobbyist market, which is much less sticky.Swyx [00:48:50]: Yeah.Akshat [00:48:50]: And we've always wanted to build for companies that are building products and need more flexibility that's not just an API.Swyx [00:48:57]: Which you can build an API for a model and this is clearly what it is. But you - but what you're saying, you can wrap it into a more fully functioning back end that you run.Akshat [00:49:06]: Yeah. So all of our examples, it's not that spin up this model, here's an API token, use it. They're all code.Swyx [00:49:13]: Okay.Akshat [00:49:13]: And so the point is that this is just an example.Swyx [00:49:16]: Starter code.Akshat [00:49:17]: Yeah. But you can tweak it however you want.Swyx [00:49:20]: Yeah.Akshat [00:49:21]: And if you're like a company building a product, like, computational bio whatnot, yeah.Swyx [00:49:26]: I guess I'm trying to tease out for listenersAkshat [00:49:28]: YeahSwyx [00:49:28]: When does it stop becoming, oh, you're just an API call and you're just a wrapper on API to becoming what you call a product, right?Swyx [00:49:36]: Like, what is that layer? Like what-- Like, more lines of code, but like beyond that, what is the substance that people add that qualifies it to be something more?Akshat [00:49:46]: I think there's a little bit of like a selection effect of like a lot of the companies who do wanna get deeper into that level are probably building something that's more differentiated. And, I think, an example is like - with LLM inference, originally we, worked with companies that were building their own post-training frameworks or they were, - Ramp early in the day was training their own tokenizer and like swapping out the tokenizer in Llama and whatnot. I'm not saying that's, that successful, in that case. But a better example is like, let's say Suno. because Suno, does not use Modal for training.Swyx [00:50:26]: Mikey on the pod. Yeah.Akshat [00:50:27]: But they use Modal for all their inference and that's because they have like a custom-- They have completely custom model architecture and that means that they have to be at the code level and tweak things that are not, just an API.Swyx [00:50:41]: It's interesting as well, like we had, Ethan, most recently on the xAI Groq team make a prediction that like the next tier in video gen is not a better video model, it's a better model or agent that orchestrates video models.Video Agents and Production WorkflowsAkshat [00:50:56]: Oh, interesting.Vibhu [00:50:56]: Language model backbone that can use toolsAkshat [00:50:58]: RightVibhu [00:50:59]: And write code.Akshat [00:51:00]: Like, yes, I can make my second video or my second video from Groq, but I want my minute video.Akshat [00:51:06]: And I'm not going there through normal video gen.Swyx [00:51:10]: Yeah, that's interesting. I - So we have GPU sandboxes and recently have seen a few companies doing agents that do video manipulation or,Akshat [00:51:22]: Yeah. Give it FFmpeg and just do it.Swyx [00:51:23]: Run FFmpeg. But likeAkshat [00:51:25]: That's not enough.Swyx [00:51:25]: Yeah.Akshat [00:51:26]: You need to give it Adobe.Swyx [00:51:27]: Yeah, I hadn't put it together with like it would be a video production thing. in my mind these things were going more towards editingAkshat [00:51:36]: Yeah.Vibhu [00:51:36]: Well, shout out Mantis.Akshat [00:51:37]: I think about this a lot.Swyx [00:51:38]: .Akshat [00:51:41]: Yeah. Sorry.Vibhu [00:51:41]: Luma. Luma Agent is a version of this for video production, but it's a off.Swyx [00:51:46]: I was gonna get your quick takes, on some other stuff that happensGitpod/Ona, CI, and Runtime SandboxesSwyx [00:51:50]: In recent news and just-just see if you have anything interesting. Gitpod, very li

From the sudden retirement of Internet pioneer Vint Cerf to the unstoppable advance of "apex agentic adversaries," get a front-row seat to the unfolding security revolution and its massive real-world stakes. Why Fable5's re-release has disappointed. Opera becomes the first browser to offer "Paste Protect." Microsoft BlueHammer exploit is "hammering" systems. Industry legend (TCP creator) Vint Cerf on AI. Chrome turns 150 with too many fixes to load. Google fails to sidestep a $4.67 billion EU fine. One last (we can hope) Chat Control vote next week. AirDrop & Android Quick Share are exploitable. How to bypass Claude's and ChatGPT's guardrails. My own Sunday spin with SpinRite. A legendary hacker uses AI on a widespread library Show Notes - https://www.grc.com/sn/SN-1086-Notes.pdf Hosts: Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte Download or subscribe to Security Now at https://twit.tv/shows/security-now. You can submit a question to Security Now at the GRC Feedback Page. For 16kbps versions, transcripts, and notes (including fixes), visit Steve's site: grc.com, also the home of the best disk maintenance and recovery utility ever written Spinrite 6. Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free audio and video feeds, a members-only Discord, and exclusive content. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: blackhat.com/us-26 and use code TWIT cohesity.com/Resilience bitwarden.com/twit zscaler.com/security XBOW.com adaptivesecurity.com

From the sudden retirement of Internet pioneer Vint Cerf to the unstoppable advance of "apex agentic adversaries," get a front-row seat to the unfolding security revolution and its massive real-world stakes. Why Fable5's re-release has disappointed. Opera becomes the first browser to offer "Paste Protect." Microsoft BlueHammer exploit is "hammering" systems. Industry legend (TCP creator) Vint Cerf on AI. Chrome turns 150 with too many fixes to load. Google fails to sidestep a $4.67 billion EU fine. One last (we can hope) Chat Control vote next week. AirDrop & Android Quick Share are exploitable. How to bypass Claude's and ChatGPT's guardrails. My own Sunday spin with SpinRite. A legendary hacker uses AI on a widespread library Show Notes - https://www.grc.com/sn/SN-1086-Notes.pdf Hosts: Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte Download or subscribe to Security Now at https://twit.tv/shows/security-now. You can submit a question to Security Now at the GRC Feedback Page. For 16kbps versions, transcripts, and notes (including fixes), visit Steve's site: grc.com, also the home of the best disk maintenance and recovery utility ever written Spinrite 6. Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free audio and video feeds, a members-only Discord, and exclusive content. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: blackhat.com/us-26 and use code TWIT cohesity.com/Resilience bitwarden.com/twit zscaler.com/security XBOW.com adaptivesecurity.com

This week Shawn Tierney meets up with Maria Santella and Robert Murao of ICP DAS USA to learn about their new Modbus RTU, TCP, and other products in this episode of #TheAutomationPodcast. For any links related to this episode, check out the “Show Notes” located below the video. Watch The Automation Podcast from The Automation Blog: Listen to The Automation Podcast from The Automation Blog: The Automation Podcast, Episode 274 Show Notes: Special thanks to Maria and Robert for coming on the show, and to ICP DAS USA for sponsoring this episode. To learn more about these products, please see the below links: Modbus Gateways  Modbus Touch Screen Controllers   Modbus RTU DAQ Serial Port Sharing Devices  Modbus over Cellular Until next time, Peace ✌️ If you enjoyed this content, please give it a Like, and consider Sharing a link to it as that is the best way for us to grow our audience, which in turn allows us to produce more content

Start Your Transformation Now⁠⁠  In this episode of The Jim Fortin Podcast, Jim explores the concept of practical attachment — not as an abstract spiritual idea, but as a very real, everyday force that quietly steals joy and peace of mind. Inspired by his own experience of packing up and moving on from the stunning Sedona home he spent 39 months building, Jim takes listeners on a journey through the many forms of attachment: possessions, relationships, jobs, success, identity, and even deeply held beliefs about reality. The Buddha once said that the root of suffering is attachment, and Jim makes that truth impossible to ignore by grounding it in ordinary life.  From designer clothing and Rolex watches to soul-sucking jobs and controlling relationships with adult children, Jim walks through the subtle and not-so-subtle ways people cling to things — not because of the things themselves, but because of the meaning and identity they project onto them. He shares personal stories, including the half-million-dollar loss he accepted without hesitation to finally move on, his brother's intentionally homeless life, and what it felt like to live at both ends of the financial spectrum. The real insight emerges: attachment is not about the object — it is about the energy spent protecting what we believe defines us.  If there is anything in life causing unhappiness, there is an attachment hiding beneath it — and this episode is the invitation to find it.  What You'll Discover in This Episode:  (00:00) The root of suffering — Jim opens by framing attachment not as a spiritual buzzword but as a practical, everyday pattern, challenging listeners to honestly ask: what am I actually attached to, and how much is it costing me?  (08:46) Attachment to things — From homes and cars to designer clothes and family heirlooms, Jim explores how we attach to physical possessions and the emotional weight that comes with protecting them, even long after they are gone.  (15:04) Attachment to people and relationships — Jim examines how attachment to partners, children, and even adult kids can quietly become a form of control — and how one TCP student's breakthrough came when she finally released her grip on her 23- and 24-year-old children.  (19:43) Attachment to jobs, fear, and identity — Jim unpacks why people stay in miserable jobs, how attachment to success and achievement is really about what others will think, and why peace of mind must rank above all other currencies.  (26:59) Attachment to beliefs and ideology — From MAGA to money to self-importance, Jim explains how the more we are attached to an idea, the more we must defend it — and how mistaking our perceptions for ultimate reality is one of the greatest sources of inner conflict.  (30:00) The transformational reframe — Jim closes with a grounding reminder: we are born with nothing, we own nothing, and any lack of happiness is a signal pointing directly to an attachment waiting to be examined and released.  Listen, apply, and enjoy!  Transformational Takeaway  You were born with nothing — and in truth, you own nothing. Every possession, relationship, job, and belief you cling to becomes a source of suffering the moment you mistake it for your identity. Attachment is not just about things. It is about what you have decided those things say about you. When you stop and ask, "What am I attached to right now?" — especially in moments of unhappiness or fear — you take back the one thing no possession can ever give you: peace of mind. That is the ultimate currency. The moment you can release your grip, even just a little, is the moment life stops being a prison and starts becoming a journey you are actually free to enjoy.  Let's Connect:  Instagram | Facebook | YouTube | LinkedIn  LIKED THE EPISODE?  If you're the kind of person who likes to help others, then share this with your friends and family. If you have found value, they will too. Please leave a review on Apple Podcasts so we can reach more people.  Listening on Spotify? Please leave a comment below. We would love to hear from you!  With gratitude, Jim 

What if your healthcare team already knew what happened during your hospital stay — before you even explained it? What if someone on your care team noticed you were struggling on a Saturday and simply showed up? In this episode, Jamie sits down with Christopher Laffey, Nurse Practitioner at Your Health, to break down what a truly connected, proactive model of care actually looks like when it's working. Christopher practices in North Charleston, SC, where his team — nurses, therapists, social workers, community health workers, and more — functions less like a traditional office practice and more like a living, breathing safety net woven around each patient's real life. What you'll hear in this episode: Why most patients are failing not because nobody cares, but because the system itself is fragmented — and what doing it differently actually looks like on a Tuesday morning The real difference between "patient-centered" as a marketing phrase and patient-centered as a daily practice (hint: it involves seeing the medication bottles on the kitchen table) A powerful real-life story of a bedbound patient whose caregiver suddenly disappeared — and how the team mobilized over a weekend, on their own time, to prevent a hospitalization The single mindset shift every clinician needs to make the transition from visit-based thinking to longitudinal care Why "value-based care" doesn't mean discounted care — it means the organization is accountable for your outcomes, not just your appointments If you've ever left a doctor's appointment feeling more confused than when you walked in, this episode will show you what healthcare can feel like when it's actually designed around you. www.YourHealth.Org

A bi-weekly news show informing you on the latest in Bitcoin, privacy and open source tech hosted by Ungovernables, Max and Q. AOBFTF with ZachQ eurotripNew Foundation websiteNEWSU.S. Treasury seizes nearly 1B in Iran-linked crypto, Tether freezes 344M USDT on Tron https://bitcoinmagazine.com/news/u-s-treasury-the-united-states-iranThe Mined in America Act would put the Bitcoin network at riskhttps://www.therage.co/mined-in-america-act-bitcoin-at-risk/CVE in Core Lightning: Optech #407 disclosurehttps://bitcoinops.org/en/newsletters/2026/05/29/Introducing Cube: Burak unveils a trustless Bitcoin smart contract L2https://medium.com/cube-bitcoin/introducing-cube-8b3702e470a5Published: May 2026Anonymous plaintiff sues for title to $293 billion in dormant Bitcoinhttps://bitcoinmagazine.com/news/anonymous-plaintiff-seeks-legal-bitcoinPublished: 2026-05-28The U.S. Constitution inscribed on the Bitcoin blockchain via expanded OP_RETURN https://bitcoinmagazine.com/news/someone-inscribed-the-constitution-bitcoinPublished: 2026-05-29RELEASESBitcoin Protocol, Core, Knots, SecurityCore Lightning v26.06rc2 — 2026-05-22Release candidate 2 for CLN 26.06. Documentation and gRPC interface refinements on top of rc1's graceful command, sendamount RPC, and BOLT12 payer-proof support. Routing-node operators should test on a non-production node before adopting.Eclair 0.14.0 — 2026-05-21Significant Lightning release from ACINQ. Final versions of channel splicing, simple taproot channels, and zero-fee commitments all ship in this version. This is the Eclair side of the same protocol work showing up in CLN and LDK. If you run an Eclair routing node, this is the upgrade to track.Hardware Signers and Hardware-Wallet AppsColdcard MK5 launch — 2026-05-29New flagship hardware. Larger Gorilla Glass screen, redesigned buttons, improved NFC, dual secure element architecture retained. Already supported in Bitcoin Safe 2.0.0rc0 from earlier this fortnight.Frostsnap 0.3.0 — 2026-05-27Headline change: deterministic firmware build with cryptographic digest verification. So end users can independently verify the firmware binary matches the source. That is the right direction for any hardware signer carrying real money.Keystone 3 v2.4.4 — 2026-05-26Wallet connection removal, Zcash SLIP39 support added, device verification fixes.Trezor Suite v26.5.1 — 2026-05-27 (FTD re-surfacing)Adds ERC-681 QR code support in the send form. Show editorial: only relevant if you use Trezor for Ethereum-side workflows, not a Bitcoin-only change.Ledger Live Desktop 4.5.0 — 2026-05-21Bridge integration refactoring across desktop and mobile.Ledger Live Mobile 4.6.0 — 2026-05-28Async API updates and bridge resolution improvements.Software WalletsSparrow Wallet 2.5.0 — 2026-05-21Headline feature: Silent Payments receiving wallets, including support for airgapped hardware wallet signers. Adds frigate.2140.dev as a Silent Payments capable public Electrum server, auto-selected when required. Plus a BIP32 derivation fallback when retrieving signing nodes for high-index inputs. This is the biggest privacy upgrade of the fortnight in any consumer-facing Bitcoin wallet, and the airgapped-signer support means Coldcard and similar users get it without going hot.Sparrow Frigate 1.5.3 — 2026-05-30Adds a privacy-preserving hourly aggregate of historical scan stats, locally generated server.features response when the backend returns a method-not-found error, improvements to the hosts field in server.features.Bitcoin Seed Tool 2.3.0 — 2026-05-19 (borderline, in grace)Educational interface redesign with violet accent color and integrated learning features.Nunchuk Android 2.5.2 — 2026-05-27"Bug fixes and improvements," nothing detailed publicly.Liana Business v0.1 — 2026-05-20First alpha of Liana's business product line. Environment variable support for signet testing. New product tier from Wizard Sardine for business-focused multisig with timelocked recovery.Peach Bitcoin 0.69.0 (build 350) — 2026-05-19Encrypted backup of custom payout addresses, restoration guidance, camera permission fix, push notification translations.Lightning, L2, ScalingPhoenix 2.8.0 — 2026-05-22UI fixes on Android: scanning inverted QR codes, a button to use the entire available balance when paying Lightning.Phoenixd 0.8.0 — 2026-05-20Upgraded lightning-kmp dependency to 1.12.0.ZEUS 13.0.2 — 2026-05-21Stable release of the RC chain we previewed last fortnight. New default RGS server at rgs.zeusln.com with 15-minute graph updates instead of 3-hour. Improved clipboard, NFC, UI improvements.Arkade arkd v0.9.6 — 2026-05-26Package and component renaming, CI workflow improvements, golang version bump.Arkade TS SDK @arkade-os/sdk 0.4.32 — 2026-05-29Maintenance bump.Arkade TS SDK @arkade-os/boltz-swap 0.3.37 — 2026-05-29Maintenance bump on the Boltz-swap helper.ThunderHub v0.18.4 — 2026-05-29Native display formatting for trading distribution, better CLTV headroom in route building.Blink Mobile 2.4.49 — 2026-05-30Bug fix: removes ABI-prefixed versionCode overrides.LNbits v1.5.5-rc1 — 2026-05-24Release candidate.Mostro v0.17.4 — 2026-05-22Payout confirmation to winner, solver-directed dispute slash, concurrent taker bonds with first-to-lock wins, MOSTRO_NSEC_PRIVKEY environment variable, Yadio price tolerance fix.Bisq v1.10.1 — 2026-05-30Raises trade amount limits to 0.250 BTC after the v1.10.0 post-exploit reset. Adjusts risk-based reduction factors. Fixes a BSQ swap validation bug.Bisq v1.10.0 — 2026-05-17 (carries over from last fortnight as final tag on cutoff day)The post-incident hardening release we covered last fortnight: trade protocol validation, PGP supply-chain verification, 0.125 BTC initial cap, macOS Apple Silicon support.EcashCashu TS v4.5.1 — 2026-05-23Deprecates the current checkProofsStates method in favour of a v5-compatible one. Wallet builders should plan the migration.Fedimint SDK canary release — 2026-05-27React Native transport: flattened RPC payload, persistent callback. Rolling canary channel.Bitcoin Dev InfrastructureBDK FFI 3.0.0 — 2026-05-29Major version of the BDK language bindings. Anyone shipping a wallet on top of BDK should read the migration notes carefully.Liquid GDK 0.77.4 — 2026-05-27Rate-limiting error handling, Rust dependency updates, UTXO retrieval fixes, build improvements.Self-Hosting and Sovereignty InfraJoinMarket-NG 0.31.1 — 2026-05-30Privacy-critical fix: prevents a Sybil DoS where relayed !hp2 floods could starve a maker's own post-ioauth commitment broadcasts. Also installs whiptail in maker and taker container images so the jm-ng TUI works out of the box. JoinMarket-NG continues to ship hardening on a tight cadence.Tor Browser 15.0.14 — 2026-05-19 (borderline, in grace)Important Firefox security updates rolled in.Mullvad Browser 15.0.14 — 2026-05-19 (borderline, in grace)Firefox 140.11.0esr base, NoScript 13.6.19.1984.Nostr (Bitcoin-relevant)Amethyst 1.11.0 — 2026-05-20Restores Lightning Address and LNURL fields in Edit Profile. Useful: those fields were missing for a stretch and creators relying on zaps as a revenue stream were getting cut off in profile edits.EDUCATIONTFTC retrospective: Why Keonne Rodriguez is in prison for building Samourai Wallet — 2026-05-28Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #407 — 2026-05-29CLN vulnerability disclosure (already in news), transcripts from a May Bitcoin Core developer meeting covering SwiftSync, cluster mempool, Erlay redesign, package relay. Eclair 0.14.0 and CLN 26.06rc2 release context.Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #406 — 2026-05-22BIP322 advances to Complete status with human-readable prefixes and PSBT support. TCP hole punching for Bitcoin nodes behind NATs (we flagged this Delving Bitcoin thread last fortnight). Services section highlights Ibis Wallet (BDK-based with coin control and Tor), LDK Server, Mempool.space taproot visualization.Bitcoin Optech #406 recap podcast — 2026-05-26Discussion of BIP322 updates, TCP hole punching, Ibis Wallet, LDK Server, Mempool.space v3.3.0, peer-observer infrastructure.Bitcoin Optech #405 recap podcast — 2026-05-19Bitcoin Core CVE-2024-52911 discussion and the UTXO-set P2P sharing draft BIP with Fabian Jahr.Rainey's book on financial censorshipMentioned by Gladstein on 2026-05-21 as quoting his work on the war on cash and the blocksize war. Plug in education / further reading.TO DONATE TO ROMAN'S DEFENSE FUND: https://freeromanstorm.com/donateHELP GET SAMOURAI A PARDONSIGN THE PETITION ----> https://www.change.org/p/stand-up-for-freedom-pardon-the-innocent-coders-jailed-for-building-privacy-tools DONATE TO THE FAMILIES ----> https://www.givesendgo.com/billandkeonneSUPPORT ON SOCIAL MEDIA ---> https://billandkeonne.org/VALUE…

Mark “Murch” Erhardt, Gustavo Flores Echaiz, and Mike Schmidt are joined by Oliver Gugger and 0xB10C to discuss Newsletter #406.News● Significant updates to BIP322 Generic Signed Message Format (1:17) ● TCP hole punching for Bitcoin nodes behind NATs (17:39) Changes to services and client software● Ibis Wallet announced (40:15) ● LDK Server announced (41:10) ● Mempool.space v3.3.0 released (42:06) ● peer-observer P2P monitoring tooling (32:28) Notable code and documentation changes● Bitcoin Core #29136 (43:27) ● Bitcoin Core #34893 (47:24) ● Bitcoin Core #34860 (48:20) ● Bitcoin Core #31298 (53:52) ● Bitcoin Core #28802 (57:04) ● Eclair #3298 (58:52) ● LDK #4575 (1:02:08) ● LND #10814 (1:03:13) ● Rust Bitcoin #6191 (1:04:35) ● BLIPs #42 (1:06:20)

AWS Morning Brief for the week of May 18th , with Corey Quinn. Links:Announcing general availability of Amazon EC2 M3 Ultra Mac instancesAmazon EventBridge Scheduler adds 619 new SDK API actions, including Lambda Managed InstancesAmazon Redshift launches RG instances powered by AWS GravitonAmazon Route 53 Domains adds support for 34 new Top Level Domains including .app, .dev, and .health.ENA Express for Amazon EC2 instances now supports traffic between Availability ZonesStreaming CloudWatch metrics to VPC-based OpenTelemetry collectors using LambdaHow HotelTrader cut inter-AZ cost 95% and latency by 49% with Valkey GLIDE on Amazon ElastiCacheIntroducing Claude Platform on AWS: Anthropic's native platform, through your AWS accountAmazon CloudFront Premium flat-rate pricing plan now supports higher, configurable usage allowancesScalable cross-cloud data migration to Amazon S3 with distributed rcloneDirty Frag and other issues in Amazon Linux kernelsCVE-2026-8178 - Remote Code Execution via Unsafe Class Loading in Amazon Redshift JDBC DriverFragnesia Local Privilege Escalation report via ESP-in-TCP in the Linux KernelOngoing updates on Copy.fail and variantsIssue with Amazon SageMaker Python SDK - Model artifact integrity verification issues (CVE-2026-8596 &: CVE-2026-8597)

In Episode 365 of The Canine Paradigm, we work through listener questions and cover the kind of practical training issues that show up in real homes and real schedules. Along the way, we also talk about avoiding burn out, because training does not happen in a vacuum. If the handler is fried, the plan falls apart, so we discuss how to structure work in a way that is sustainable. Then, because our TCP listeners keep requesting it, we take a sharp turn into alien territory. The conversation moves from dog training to aliens, and the result is exactly what you would expect. It is part training Q and A, part sanity check, and part alien invasion detour that somehow still circles back to how people think, decide, and cope under pressure. If you want an episode that has useful takeaways but does not take itself too seriously, this one will land well. Further Details Are you in search of top-tier dog trainers and steadfast supporters of the Canine Paradigm? Below is a comprehensive list of individuals and businesses that stand by our mission, contribute to our operational costs, and make significant contributions to the canine community. Glenn Cooke oversees a wide range of canine-related services at Pet Resorts Australia. Pat Stuart offers a full suite of coaching and dog training services through Serious dog business We invite you to support our show and access exclusive content on our Patreon page. Your contributions directly support the show's ongoing production, and we deeply appreciate the wonderful community that has formed around it. If you're unsure how to contribute, feel free to reach out to us for assistance. Explore our complete range of merchandise at our Teespring store. You can also help by spreading the word within the canine community or suggesting special guests for future interviews. For information on how to listen to our podcast, please visit this link. Subscribe to our YouTube channel for video content and updates. If you enjoyed the podcast, we would greatly appreciate your reviews on iTunes, Spotify, and other podcast directories. Details on joining the International Association of Canine Professionals (IACP) can be found here. We highly recommend membership for anyone serious about advancing in the canine industry. We also encourage you to check out Dogs Playing for Life, a transformational rescue process making a positive impact on dogs across the USA. Support Our Supporters Narelle Cooke hosts her own podcast, Natural Health for People and Pets, available on all major podcast platforms. Be sure to listen in. For the finest human-grade supplements for your dogs, visit Canine Ceuticals. Now available in the USA. SHOW SPONSOR Jason Firmin of Einzweck Dog Quip is another proud SHOW SPONSOR. The innovative motorcycle dog kennel can be found at Rowdy Hound. SHOW SPONSOR For daycare and heartfelt training services, check out From the Heart Dog Training. SHOW SPONSOR Our dear friend and frequent contributor, Birdy O'Sheedy, can be found at The magic in dogs Special Thanks A huge thanks to all our contributing artists. Please take a moment to support their amazing work: Jane Stuart Avery Keller Zoie Neidy

A bi-weekly news show informing you on the latest in Bitcoin, privacy and open source tech hosted by Ungovernables, Max and Q. AOBPrime Time reminderVibe codingVegas recapZach PanelQ panel (video not up yet)NEWSVegas Product AnnouncementsBlock launched a new Bitkey hardware wallet with a secure touchscreen and 2-of-3 multisig that removes the need for seed phrases, tying transaction verification directly to the device screen (Bitcoin Magazine).Blockstream released Jade Core, an entry-level open-source hardware wallet with Bluetooth pairing, offline signing, and Blind Oracle PIN protection (Bitcoin Magazine).Lightspark became a Visa principal member and unveiled Grid Global Accounts, connecting Bitcoin-based payments to 175M Visa merchants across 33 countries with plans to reach 100 by year-end (news.bitcoin.com).Block demoed Square NFC tap-to-pay for Bitcoin settled over the Lightning Network with 0% processing fees through 2026, with 800,000+ Square merchants already auto-enrolled (block.xyz).Aven unveiled a Bitcoin-backed Visa credit card with revolving credit lines from $1K to $1M starting at 7.99% APR, 2% cash back, and BitGo custody (GreekReporter).Cash App rolled out auto-conversion of P2P payments into Bitcoin, a 5% Bitcoin Back rewards program at Square merchants, and 5x higher withdrawal limits ($10K/day, $25K/week) (block.xyz).Tether Investments proposed a three-way merger of Twenty One Capital, Strike, and Elektron Energy to combine treasury, mining, lending, and capital markets, with Elektron contributing roughly 5% of global hashrate (BM).Sztorc eCash ForkTopic: Paul Sztorc announced a Bitcoin hard fork called "eCash" set for August 2026 (block 964,000). Copies Bitcoin's ledger but reassigns ~500,000 of Satoshi's forked coins to early investors. 80-85% negative community reaction.Posted: April 24-28, 2026LinkDOJ "Developer Exemptions" Announced at Bitcoin 2026 - But Are They Real?Published: April 27-28, 2026Sources: The Rage | Crypto.newsSummary: Acting AG Todd Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel told Bitcoin 2026 that developers who write code without "knowingly" helping criminals will not be charged. Blanche claimed the DOJ has "fundamentally changed the game" and ended "regulation by prosecution." L0la L33tz at The Rage argues the exemption is performative - the government's existing cases treat receiving a complaint email or reading a news article about misuse as sufficient "knowledge."Keonne Rodriguez Writes from Prison - "Letter #6: Two Years In"Published: April 25, 2026Sources: The Rage | Reason MagazineSummary: Samourai Wallet co-founder Keonne Rodriguez published his sixth letter from federal prison, marking two years since his arrest. He's serving 5 years for conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money-transmitting business. Trump said he would "look into" a pardon but has taken no action.Tornado Cash Retrial: DOJ Pushes for October DatePublished: Ongoing (retrial proposed October 2026)Sources: The Rage (April 22)Summary: Prosecutors are pushing for an October 2026 retrial of Roman Storm on money laundering and sanctions charges after a jury deadlocked in August 2025. Storm was convicted on the unlicensed money transmitter charge but the jury couldn't agree on the two more serious counts (up to 40 years combined).Vercel Hack Exposes Crypto Infrastructure Supply Chain RiskPublished: April 20, 2026Source: LINKSummary: Vercel disclosed a breach traced to a compromised Google Workspace connection through a third-party AI tool (Context.ai). The hack exposed environment variables and API keys for numerous Web3 projects. Solana DEX Orca confirmed it rotated all deployment credentials. A cybercrime forum post claimed to be selling Vercel data for $2M.BIP47DBPublished: May 3, 2026Source: LINKSummary: An open protocol for inscribing BIP47 reusable payment codes onto the Bitcoin blockchain using Ordinals inscriptions with compressed binary encoding. The protocol creates a decentralised, censorship-resistant, and publicly verifiable directory of payment codes that eliminates single points of failure in the PayNym ecosystem. Anyone may write to the directory, and all entries are client-side verifiable against the secp256k1 curve.RELEASESZeus v13.0.0 - April 27, 2026Major release: new "node in the phone" using LDK Node, redesigned onboarding, embedded LND channel migration preserving existing channels, Cashu protocol rewrite with offline transaction capabilities, embedded LND upgraded to v0.20.1-beta, revamped amount input with currency selection, Cashu mint review via Nostr social graph, ZEUS Pay+ custom profiles, Android stealth mode. Over 100 merged PRs.Release linkMempool v3.3.0 - April 21, 2026Major release: taproot script tree visualization, sighash highlighting, stale block comparisons, annexes support, sub-1-sat/vB transaction handling, ephemeral dust support, PSBT signature display, Liquid Simplicity support, new API endpoints, Angular framework upgrade. v3.3.1 hotfix same day.Release linkUmbrel 1.7.0 / 1.7.1 - April 27-28, 2026Home screen shortcuts, built-in text editor in Files, advanced networking (hostname customization, static IP), network sharing for external USB drives, 17 new languages. v1.7.1 fixed a false storage error on restart.Release linkBTCPay Server v2.3.8 / v2.3.9 - April 23-24, 2026v2.3.8: Enhanced subscription management with new API routes, improved POS QR code login, LUD-21 support for LNURL-pay verification. v2.3.9: Patch fixing server recovery after plugin crashes and xpub parsing issue.Release linkBULL Bitcoin v6.9.1 - April 21, 2026FSS10 migration fallback for Android, Colombia (COP) deposit support, real-time WebSocket notifications, 11 new languages, Ledger hardware wallet support. Extensive bug fixes.Release linkEnvoy v2.2.14 - April 23, 2026Hardened iOS Bluetooth connectivity, fixes for Passport Prime account display, Magic Backup bug fixes, coin control/fee flow improvements, updated translations.Release linkCake Wallet v6.1.0 / v6.1.2 - April 20-23, 2026Native USDT bridging between Ethereum, Polygon, and Arbitrum. Optimized core engine, improved multi-chain wallet stability, Lightning invoice generation and EVM connectivity fixes.Release linkStart9 v0.4.0-beta.7 - April 29, 2026Beta for the complete StartOS rewrite. Tunnel design refinements, backup reliability fixes with rsync and CIFS support, improved TCP connection timeouts in reverse proxy. Requires careful update process.Release linkLNbits v1.5.4 - April 23, 2026Ability for operators to cap number of users or extensions per instance. AppImage installation fix. UI fixes, QR code optimization, webhook error handling.Release linkDojo v1.29.1 - April 27, 2026Patch reverting a bitcoinjs dependency update that caused block sync to stall. Dependency reversion and lockfile updates.Release linkBitkey - April 19-26, 2026Three app releases shipped (2026.5.0, 2026.6.0, 2026.7.0). Rapid release cadence; full notes at bitkey.world/releases.Release linkNunchuk v2.4.2 / v2.4.3 - April 23 / May 2, 2026Bug fixes and maintenance improvements.Release linkEDUCATIONBTC Vegas Talks (https://www.youtube.com/@BitcoinMagazine/videos)TO DONATE TO ROMAN'S DEFENSE FUND: https://freeromanstorm.com/donateHELP GET SAMOURAI A PARDONSIGN THE PETITION ----> https://www.change.org/p/stand-up-for-freedom-pardon-the-innocent-coders-jailed-for-building-privacy-tools DONATE TO THE FAMILIES ----> https://www.givesendgo.com/billandkeonneSUPPORT ON SOCIAL MEDIA ---> https://billandkeonne.org/VALUE FOR VALUEThanks for listening you Ungovernable Misfits, we appreciate your continued support and hope you enjoy the shows.You can support this episode using your time, talent or treasure.TIME:- create fountain clips for the show- create a meetup- help boost the signal on social mediaTALENT:- create ungovernable misfit inspired art, animation or music- design or implement some software that can make the podcast better- use whatever talents you have to make a contribution to the show!TREASURE:- BOOST IT OR STREAM SATS on the Podcasting 2.0 apps @ https://podcastapps.com- DONATE via Monero @ https://xmrchat.com/ugmf- BUY SOME STICKERS @ https://www.ungovernablemisfits.com/shop/FOUNDATIONhttps://foundation.xyz/ungovernableFoundation builds Bitcoin-centric tools that empower you to reclaim your digital sovereignty.As a sovereign computing company, Foundation is the antithesis of today's tech conglomerates. Returning to cypherpunk principles, they build open source technology that “can't be evil”.Thank you Foundation Devices for sponsoring the show!Use code: Ungovernable for $10 off of your purchaseCAKE WALLEThttps://cakewallet.comCake Wallet is an open-source, non-custodial wallet available on Android, iOS, macOS, and Linux.Features:- Built-in Exchange: Swap easily between Bitcoin and Monero.- User-Friendly: Simple interface for all users.Monero Users:- Batch Transactions: Send multiple payments at once.- Faster Syncing: Optimized syncing via specified restore heights- Proxy Support: Enhance privacy with proxy node options.Bitcoin Users:- Coin Control: Manage your transactions effectively.- Silent Payments: Static bitcoin addresses- Batch Transactions: Streamline your payment process.Thank you Cake Wallet for sponsoring the show!MYNYMBOXhttps://mynymbox.ioYour go-to for anonymous…

This interview was recorded for the GOTO Book Club.http://gotopia.tech/bookclubLukasz Dynowski - Independent Consultant & Co-Author of "Learning API Styles"Sam Newman - Author of "Building Microservices" & "Monolith to Microservices"Check out more here:https://gotopia.tech/episodes/436RESOURCESLukaszhttps://github.com/ludyn-leohttps://www.linkedin.com/in/ldyniahttps://learningapistyles.comSamhttps://twitter.com/samnewmanhttps://github.com/snewmanhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/samnewmanhttp://samnewman.iohttp://samnewman.io/blogLinkshttps://www.youtube.com/@ldynia1https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLRkB-vSK4koOHYIhpKXuXpipVpByEKuPuhttps://learningapistyles.comhttps://github.com/ldynia/learning-api-styleshttps://nordicapis.com/the-bezos-api-mandate-amazons-manifesto-for-externalizationhttps://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1176617.1176622DESCRIPTIONIn this GOTO Book Club episode, Sam Newman — author of "Building Microservices" — sits down with Lukasz Dynowski, co-author of "Learning API Styles", for a refreshingly low-level deep dive into a subject most developers think they already understand. The book deliberately starts from the network layer up — transmission modes, TCP, protocol stacks — rather than jumping straight to REST and GraphQL, because, as Lukasz explains, most API problems only become visible when you understand the substrate beneath them. The conversation covers the full spectrum: public vs internal APIs, the Bezos API Mandate moment, why treating your API as a product is non-negotiable, and why the choice between binary and textual protocols is never as obvious as performance benchmarks suggest.The real gold comes in two moments. First, Lukasz lays out a crisp checklist for what makes a good API — audience-awareness, maintainability, efficiency, intuitiveness, resilience, security, testability, and documentation that actually matches behavior. Second, Sam shares a war story about a credit derivative system where the only way to figure out who was accessing the database was to turn off the credentials and wait for angry phone calls.The lesson: context shapes every trade-off, there's no universal right answer between REST, gRPC, WebSockets, or messaging, and the best API decision is the one that fits your situation — not the one that fits the conference talk.RECOMMENDED BOOKSLukasz Dynowski • Learning API Styles • https://amzn.to/3PFembKSam Newman • Building Resilient Distributed Systems • https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/building-resilient-distributed/9781098163532Sam Newman • Monolith to Microservices • https://amzn.to/2Nml96ESam Newman • Building Microservices • https://amzn.to/3dMPbOsRonnie Mitra & Irakli Nadareishvili • Microservices: Up and Running• https://amzn.to/3c4HmmLBlueskyInstagramLinkedInFacebookCHANNEL MEMBERSHIP BONUSJoin this channel to get early access to videos & other perks:https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCs_tLP3AiwYKwdUHpltJPuA/joinLooking for a unique learning experience?Attend the next GOTO conference near you! Get your ticket: gotopia.techSUBSCRIBE TO OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL - new videos posted daily!

Cybersecurity is entering an “invisibility crisis,” where threats are no longer loud, external attacks but subtle abuses of normal system behavior. Techniques like SockStress exploit TCP assumptions to drain resources, residential proxy networks turn everyday users into unwitting infrastructure, and fake VPNs weaponize trust to exfiltrate data. Even ransomware response processes are being hijacked, transforming incident response into an attack surface. At the same time, transparency mechanisms are failing—Google, Meta, and Microsoft frequently ignore user opt-outs—highlighting a systemic breakdown in consent and accelerating calls for digital sovereignty.This shift feeds directly into geopolitics. Nations increasingly view reliance on foreign technology as a strategic risk, pushing “digital sovereignty” agendas. France, for example, is migrating government systems to domestic or open-source alternatives like Linux and Jitsi, and relocating sensitive health data infrastructure. Meanwhile, advanced AI proliferation introduces a paradox: companies restrict powerful models to prevent misuse, yet real-world breaches—such as the Tianjin Supercomputer incident, where attackers exfiltrated 10 petabytes via a compromised VPN—demonstrate how stealthy, persistent threats can evade detection at scale.Critical infrastructure remains especially vulnerable. Iran-linked actors have targeted industrial control systems (PLCs), showing how cyber intrusions can translate into physical manipulation. The message is clear: internet-connected industrial systems must adopt stronger controls, including multifactor authentication and continuous monitoring, particularly across energy and water sectors.Alongside these risks, the workforce itself is transforming. AI is shifting human roles from execution to oversight—people increasingly “direct” rather than “do.” However, this creates a paradox: while AI boosts productivity, it also increases complexity, oversight demands, and cognitive load. Managers now supervise fleets of AI agents, and professionals often refine AI outputs instead of producing original work. Despite widespread tech layoffs, judgment, accountability, and problem framing are becoming the most valuable—and scarce—skills.The broader theme is one of diminishing visibility and control. Whether in cybersecurity, geopolitics, or labor, systems are becoming more opaque, automated, and interdependent. Even efforts to uncover foundational truths—like identifying Satoshi Nakamoto—remain inconclusive despite advanced analysis. In this environment, the key differentiator is no longer technical capability alone, but human judgment: the ability to question assumptions, verify continuously, and navigate a world where the greatest risks are hidden in plain sight.

This episode of PING is an interview with Marc Blanchet from Viagenie in Quebec, Canada. Marc has been active in Internet Procotols and the IETF for decades, most recently focussed on Internet Protocol communications in deep space. Marc presented at the recent APRICOT/APNIC61 meeting held in Jakarta. We've got used to the idea of IP working in Low Earth Orbit, with the rise of Starlink as a high speed service which in many cases out-performs terrestrial services available in rural and remote locations. And, we've had IP services mediated via GeoSynchronous orbit satellites like DirecTV, which are now significantly less popular because of one overriding problem: the very long end-to-end delay. People find the half-second of round-trip time to a GEO satellite unacceptable. But, in space, things get much worse. Marc's work looks at space contexts which go far beyond these orbital "shells" around earth, into the distances to the Moon, to the Asteroid belt, and beyond to other planets. The delay component in these networks isn't just an inconvenience, it has very real implications for rount-trip-time effects on a protocol like TCP, which demands a stream of "ACK" signals to manage the sender and receivers models of bandwidth and delay and retransmission. Marc has been working on how to simulate the effects of these very long delays using earth bound Virtual Hosts and code, using the Linux TUN device, and TC-NETM along with code developed by his team. This allows them to programatically define an experiment in delay, loss, re-ordering terms, which can span hours of packet-in-flight time, and look at how switches and routers, intermediate elements of an end-to-end IP exchange can work. Code patches to these systems to represent delay as a 64 bit quantity now mean it's theoretically possible to test IP out to the edge of the galaxy, if you had a way to keep machines running that long. If we look at what we actually want from IP networks in deep space, TCP isn't the right choice for how to get applications to work: There is a much better choice in QUIC, a more modern session-layer like protocol which can deploy over unreliable transport like UDP, and which integrates transport-layer security and IP address agility into the same model. As Marc discusses in this episode. IP in space is already a reality, with deployment of mobile telephony 4G base stations to the moon, and Chinese researchers experimenting with QUIC. The IETF is actively exploring the protocol options in the TIPTOP working group.

The Pure Report podcast went on location to the Pittsburgh Pure User Group, set against the backdrop of the Ohio River, to celebrate the GA launch of the Everpure and Nutanix solution. We interviewed a lineup of guests—including David Stevens, Expedient's Rob McCafferty, Don Poorman, and Systems Engineer Adam Hill—who all gathered with customers and partners to discuss the excitement surrounding the new offering. Stevens emphasized the highly integrated nature of the solution, which simplifies setup to just a few operations on the array and in Nutanix . The momentum around the solution is growing - a month after the GA announcement, this event is the perfect forum to answer customer questions and showcase the solution's ease of use and ability to replicate the operational experience virtualization administrators prefer. Our discussion shifts to the business value of the solution, specifically addressing customer challenges like finding alternatives to existing virtualization platforms, reducing costs, and hedging bets against recent industry changes. Guests note that the new architecture helps organizations keep data on-premises to meet regulatory requirements, while still enabling them to burst new workloads into the cloud. The episode features Rob McCafferty, Chief Solutions Officer at Expedient, who details their role as a beta customer and launch partner for the Pure and Nutanix offering. Expedient, a long-time customer of both companies, is thrilled to provide clients with the flexibility and the optionality unlocked by bringing together two industry leaders, with clients already in the queue for deployment. Expedient focuses on delivering reduced risk, cost control, and stability in their platforms for clients. The episode concludes by focusing on the power of Pure user groups, which are described as crucial venues for peer-to-peer interaction and sharing knowledge about topics like cyber, AI, and virtualization. Technical Evangelist Don Poorman points out that the success of the joint solution is due to the similar customer-focused cultures of Pure and Nutanix. Poorman advises customers to view the new virtualization optionality as a bigger exercise than just cost savings, recommending they consider the long-term effects on automation and cyber security. He also advocates for Pure's forward-looking technology investment in NVMe over TCP, which he sees as more robust than Fiber Channel for the next 15 years. The team encourages customers to step up and lead future user group events to continue building the community, both physically and on the Pure Community digital platform. To learn more, visit: https://purecommunity.purestorage.com/category/pure-user-groups Check out the new Everpure digital customer community to join the conversation with peers and Pure experts: https://purecommunity.purestorage.com/ 00:00 Intro and Welcome 00:49 Everpure and Nutanix with Davis Stevens 06:01 Value of User Groups 09:15 Rob McCafferty from Expedient 17:01 Don Poorman from Everpure 20:42 Community Momentum 26:09 Pittsburgh SE Adam Hill

Max and Q cover the latest happenings in the world of Bitcoin, privacy and much more. AOBPrimeNew letter from KeonneQ vibing hardNEWSGrapheneOS announces Motorola partnershipTrump's "American Cyber Strategy" Puts Crypto on National Security MapSon of U.S. government contractor, accused of stealing millions in seized crypto, arrested in FranceTreasury tells congress mixers have valid privacy usesStrike now available in New YorkSolo Satoshi - Bitaxe TouchBitwise to donate $233,000 to open source Bitcoin devsUPDATES/RELEASESTailrelayA Docker container that exposes local services to your Tailscale network. Combines Tailscale VPN, Caddy reverse proxy, socat TCP relays, and a Web UI for browser-based management.https://github.com/sudocarlos/tailrelayStealth AnnouncedA privacy audit tool for Bitcoin wallets. Stealth analyzes the transaction history of a wallet descriptor and surfaces privacy findings from real on-chain heuristics.https://github.com/LORDBABUINO/stealth/tree/mainCake Wallet v6.0.0 / v6.0.1 — 27 Feb / 6 Mar 2026Major release: complete UI redesign plus self-custodial Bitcoin Lightning integration via Breez SDK and Spark protocol. Privacy-first defaults — Lightning invoices don't embed Spark addresses, transaction data not published to public explorers by default. Custom @cake.cash Lightning addresses. Enhanced Monero syncing.https://github.com/cake-tech/cake_wallet/releasesZeus v0.12.4 / v0.12.5 — 2 March 2026Bug fix releases addressing Android SQLite database issues for new wallets (sync past block 123,000), iOS safe area fixes, and crash prevention when returning from LSPS1 view.https://github.com/ZeusLN/zeus/releasesBlueWallet v7.2.6 — 23 February 2026Added BBQR support for Coldcard, simpler settings UI, and dates on transaction list.https://github.com/BlueWallet/BlueWallet/releasesFrostsnap v0.2.1 — 23 February 2026QR camera scanning now works on all platforms (Linux, macOS desktop). Fixed Electrum connectivity on IPv6 networks using "Happy Eyeballs" algorithm. Device erasure black screen fix and macOS app signing improvements.https://github.com/frostsnap/frostsnap/releasesPhoenix v2.7.5 — 25 Feb (Android) / 26 Feb (iOS) 2026Maintenance release for both platforms. Release notes were sparse — Q may want to check changelog manually.https://github.com/ACINQ/phoenix/releasesLNBits v1.5.0 — 4 March 2026Stable release (up from v1.4.2). Full changelog not detailed in release notes — worth checking manually if covering.https://github.com/lnbits/lnbits/releasesPeach Bitcoin v0.69.0 — 23 Feb / 3 Mar 2026New accounts now generate PGP keypairs from seed phrases, payment details encrypted and backed up to servers. Added M-Pesa payment method. Transaction IDs now copyable. Fixed Android wallet emptying bug.https://github.com/Peach2Peach/peach-app/releasesBitkey App Release 2026.2.0 — 23 February 2026Block/Square's hardware wallet app update. Detailed release notes not available from feed.https://github.com/proto-at-block/bitkey/releasesMempool v3.3.0-beta — 21 February 2026Beta release of v3.3.0. Details sparse.https://github.com/mempool/mempool/releasesStart9 StartOS v0.4.0-alpha.20 — 6 March 2026Alpha release with error info propagation, AI agent docs, preferred external ports beyond 443, SSH config fixes, WiFi deprecation handling.https://github.com/Start9Labs/start-os/releasesBlitz Wallet 4.0Payment poolshttps://x.com/BlitzWalletApp/status/2028867592065105932?s=20EDUCATIONLightning is dead, long live Lightning - Roy from BreezHater to builder - Seth from CakeHELP GET SAMOURAI A PARDONSIGN THE PETITION ----> https://www.change.org/p/stand-up-for-freedom-pardon-the-innocent-coders-jailed-for-building-privacy-tools DONATE TO THE FAMILIES ----> https://www.givesendgo.com/billandkeonneSUPPORT ON SOCIAL MEDIA ---> https://billandkeonne.org/VALUE FOR VALUEThanks for listening you Ungovernable Misfits, we appreciate your continued support and hope you enjoy the shows.You can support this episode using your time, talent or treasure.TIME:- create fountain clips for the show- create a meetup- help boost the signal on social mediaTALENT:- create ungovernable misfit inspired art, animation or music- design or implement some software that can make the podcast better- use whatever talents you have to make a contribution to the show!TREASURE:- BOOST IT OR STREAM SATS on the Podcasting 2.0 apps @ https://podcastapps.com- DONATE via Monero @ https://xmrchat.com/ugmf- BUY SOME STICKERS @ https://www.ungovernablemisfits.com/shop/FOUNDATIONhttps://foundation.xyz/ungovernableFoundation builds Bitcoin-centric tools that empower you to reclaim your digital sovereignty.As a sovereign computing company, Foundation is the antithesis of today's tech conglomerates. Returning to cypherpunk principles, they build open source technology that “can't be evil”.Thank you Foundation Devices for sponsoring the show!Use code: Ungovernable for $10 off of your purchaseCAKE WALLEThttps://cakewallet.comCake Wallet is an open-source, non-custodial wallet available on Android, iOS, macOS, and Linux.Features:- Built-in Exchange: Swap easily between Bitcoin and Monero.- User-Friendly: Simple interface for all users.Monero Users:- Batch Transactions: Send multiple payments at once.- Faster Syncing: Optimized syncing via specified restore heights- Proxy Support: Enhance privacy with proxy node options.Bitcoin Users:- Coin Control: Manage your transactions effectively.- Silent Payments: Static bitcoin addresses- Batch Transactions: Streamline your payment process.Thank you Cake Wallet for sponsoring the show!MYNYMBOXhttps://mynymbox.ioYour go-to for anonymous server hosting solutions, featuring: virtual private & dedicated servers, domain registration and DNS parking. We don't require any of your personal information, and you can purchase using Bitcoin, Lightning, Monero and many other cryptos.Explore benefits such as No KYC, complete privacy & security, and human support.(00:00) INTRO(00:57) THANK YOU FOUNDATION(01:38) THANK YOU CAKE WALLET(02:43) Vibe Cornin'(17:42) PRIME TIME(19:58) Notes From The Inside: The Skinwalker(23:43) Motorola Graphene(26:44) The Cyber Strategy(29:30) John "Lick" Daghita Arrested for Crypto Crimes(31:39) US Treasury Acknowledges Cryptocurrency 'Mixers'(33:50) Strike Obtains a Bit License (34:43) Bitaxe Touch Released(36:40) Bitwise to Donate $233,000 to BTC Open Source(37:32) BOOSTS(43:41) Tail Relay (45:02) Stealth Announced(47:39) The Big Cake 6.0.1 Release(48:41) The Rest of the Software Updates(52:14) Blixt Payment Pools(54:48) THANK YOU MYNYMBOX

Turbopuffer came out of a reading app.In 2022, Simon was helping his friends at Readwise scale their infra for a highly requested feature: article recommendations and semantic search. Readwise was paying ~$5k/month for their relational database and vector search would cost ~$20k/month making the feature too expensive to ship. In 2023 after mulling over the problem from Readwise, Simon decided he wanted to “build a search engine” which became Turbopuffer.We discuss:• Simon's path: Denmark → Shopify infra for nearly a decade → “angel engineering” across startups like Readwise, Replicate, and Causal → turbopuffer almost accidentally becoming a company • The Readwise origin story: building an early recommendation engine right after the ChatGPT moment, seeing it work, then realizing it would cost ~$30k/month for a company spending ~$5k/month total on infra and getting obsessed with fixing that cost structure • Why turbopuffer is “a search engine for unstructured data”: Simon's belief that models can learn to reason, but can't compress the world's knowledge into a few terabytes of weights, so they need to connect to systems that hold truth in full fidelity • The three ingredients for building a great database company: a new workload, a new storage architecture, and the ability to eventually support every query plan customers will want on their data • The architecture bet behind turbopuffer: going all in on object storage and NVMe, avoiding a traditional consensus layer, and building around the cloud primitives that only became possible in the last few years • Why Simon hated operating Elasticsearch at Shopify: years of painful on-call experience shaped his obsession with simplicity, performance, and eliminating state spread across multiple systems • The Cursor story: launching turbopuffer as a scrappy side project, getting an email from Cursor the next day, flying out after a 4am call, and helping cut Cursor's costs by 95% while fixing their per-user economics • The Notion story: buying dark fiber, tuning TCP windows, and eating cross-cloud costs because Simon refused to compromise on architecture just to close a deal faster • Why AI changes the build-vs-buy equation: it's less about whether a company can build search infra internally, and more about whether they have time especially if an external team can feel like an extension of their own • Why RAG isn't dead: coding companies still rely heavily on search, and Simon sees hybrid retrieval semantic, text, regex, SQL-style patterns becoming more important, not less • How agentic workloads are changing search: the old pattern was one retrieval call up front; the new pattern is one agent firing many parallel queries at once, turning search into a highly concurrent tool call • Why turbopuffer is reducing query pricing: agentic systems are dramatically increasing query volume, and Simon expects retrieval infra to adapt to huge bursts of concurrent search rather than a small number of carefully chosen calls • The philosophy of “playing with open cards”: Simon's habit of being radically honest with investors, including telling Lachy Groom he'd return the money if turbopuffer didn't hit PMF by year-end • The “P99 engineer”: Simon's framework for building a talent-dense company, rejecting by default unless someone on the team feels strongly enough to fight for the candidate —Simon Hørup Eskildsen• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sirupsen• X: https://x.com/Sirupsen• https://sirupsen.com/aboutturbopuffer• https://turbopuffer.com/Full Video PodTimestamps00:00:00 The PMF promise to Lachy Groom00:00:25 Intro and Simon's background00:02:19 What turbopuffer actually is00:06:26 Shopify, Elasticsearch, and the pain behind the company00:10:07 The Readwise experiment that sparked turbopuffer00:12:00 The insight Simon couldn't stop thinking about00:17:00 S3 consistency, NVMe, and the architecture bet00:20:12 The Notion story: latency, dark fiber, and conviction00:25:03 Build vs. buy in the age of AI00:26:00 The Cursor story: early launch to breakout customer00:29:00 Why code search still matters00:32:00 Search in the age of agents00:34:22 Pricing turbopuffer in the AI era00:38:17 Why Simon chose Lachy Groom00:41:28 Becoming a founder on purpose00:44:00 The “P99 engineer” philosophy00:49:30 Bending software to your will00:51:13 The future of turbopuffer00:57:05 Simon's tea obsession00:59:03 Tea kits, X Live, and P99 LiveTranscriptSimon Hørup Eskildsen: I don't think I've said this publicly before, but I just called Lockey and was like, local Lockie. Like if this doesn't have PMF by the end of the year, like we'll just like return all the money to you. But it's just like, I don't really, we, Justine and I don't wanna work on this unless it's really working.So we want to give it the best shot this year and like we're really gonna go for it. We're gonna hire a bunch of people. We're just gonna be honest with everyone. Like when I don't know how to play a game, I just play with open cards. Lockey was the only person that didn't, that didn't freak out. He was like, I've never heard anyone say that before.Alessio: Hey everyone, welcome to the Leading Space podcast. This is Celesio Pando, Colonel Laz, and I'm joined by Swix, editor of Leading Space.swyx: Hello. Hello, uh, we're still, uh, recording in the Ker studio for the first time. Very excited. And today we are joined by Simon Eski. Of Turbo Farer welcome.Simon Hørup Eskildsen: Thank you so much for having me.swyx: Turbo Farer has like really gone on a huge tear, and I, I do have to mention that like you're one of, you're not my newest member of the Danish AHU Mafia, where like there's a lot of legendary programmers that have come out of it, like, uh, beyond Trotro, Rasmus, lado Berg and the V eight team and, and Google Maps team.Uh, you're mostly a Canadian now, but isn't that interesting? There's so many, so much like strong Danish presence.Simon Hørup Eskildsen: Yeah, I was writing a post, um, not that long ago about sort of the influences. So I grew up in Denmark, right? I left, I left when, when I was 18 to go to Canada to, to work at Shopify. Um, and so I, like, I've, I would still say that I feel more Danish than, than Canadian.This is also the weird accent. I can't say th because it, this is like, I don't, you know, my wife is also Canadian, um, and I think. I think like one of the things in, in Denmark is just like, there's just such a ruthless pragmatism and there's also a big focus on just aesthetics. Like, they're like very, people really care about like where, what things look like.Um, and like Canada has a lot of attributes, US has, has a lot of attributes, but I think there's been lots of the great things to carry. I don't know what's in the water in Ahu though. Um, and I don't know that I could be considered part of the Mafi mafia quite yet, uh, compared to the phenomenal individuals we just mentioned.Barra OV is also, uh, Danish Canadian. Okay. Yeah. I don't know where he lives now, but, and he's the PHP.swyx: Yeah. And obviously Toby German, but moved to Canada as well. Yes. Like this is like import that, uh, that, that is an interesting, um, talent move.Alessio: I think. I would love to get from you. Definition of Turbo puffer, because I think you could be a Vector db, which is maybe a bad word now in some circles, you could be a search engine.It's like, let, let's just start there and then we'll maybe run through the history of how you got to this point.Simon Hørup Eskildsen: For sure. Yeah. So Turbo Puffer is at this point in time, a search engine, right? We do full text search and we do vector search, and that's really what we're specialized in. If you're trying to do much more than that, like then this might not be the right place yet, but Turbo Buffer is all about search.The other way that I think about it is that we can take all of the world's knowledge, all of the exabytes and exabytes of data that there is, and we can use those tokens to train a model, but we can't compress all of that into a few terabytes of weights, right? Compress into a few terabytes of weights, how to reason with the world, how to make sense of the knowledge.But we have to somehow connect it to something externally that actually holds that like in full fidelity and truth. Um, and that's the thing that we intend to become. Right? That's like a very holier than now kind of phrasing, right? But being the search engine for unstructured, unstructured data is the focus of turbo puffer at this point in time.Alessio: And let's break down. So people might say, well, didn't Elasticsearch already do this? And then some other people might say, is this search on my data, is this like closer to rag than to like a xr, like a public search thing? Like how, how do you segment like the different types of search?Simon Hørup Eskildsen: The way that I generally think about this is like, there's a lot of database companies and I think if you wanna build a really big database company, sort of, you need a couple of ingredients to be in the air.We don't, which only happens roughly every 15 years. You need a new workload. You basically need the ambition that every single company on earth is gonna have data in your database. Multiple times you look at a company like Oracle, right? You will, like, I don't think you can find a company on earth with a digital presence that it not, doesn't somehow have some data in an Oracle database.Right? And I think at this point, that's also true for Snowflake and Databricks, right? 15 years later it's, or even more than that, there's not a company on earth that doesn't, in. Or directly is consuming Snowflake or, or Databricks or any of the big analytics databases. Um, and I think we're in that kind of moment now, right?I don't think you're gonna find a company over the next few years that doesn't directly or indirectly, um, have all their data available for, for search and connect it to ai. So you need that new workload, like you need something to be happening where there's a new workload that causes that to happen, and that new workload is connecting very large amounts of data to ai.The second thing you need. The second condition to build a big database company is that you need some new underlying change in the storage architecture that is not possible from the databases that have come before you. If you look at Snowflake and Databricks, right, commoditized, like massive fleet of HDDs, like that was not possible in it.It just wasn't in the air in the nineties, right? So you just didn't, we just didn't build these systems. S3 and and and so on was not around. And I think the architecture that is now possible that wasn't possible 15 years ago is to go all in on NVME SSDs. It requires a particular type of architecture for the database that.It's difficult to retrofit onto the databases that are already there, including the ones you just mentioned. The second thing is to go all in on OIC storage, more so than we could have done 15 years ago. Like we don't have a consensus layer, we don't really have anything. In fact, you could turn off all the servers that Turbo Buffer has, and we would not lose any data because we have all completely all in on OIC storage.And this means that our architecture is just so simple. So that's the second condition, right? First being a new workload. That means that every company on earth, either indirectly or directly, is using your database. Second being, there's some new storage architecture. That means that the, the companies that have come before you can do what you're doing.I think the third thing you need to do to build a big database company is that over time you have to implement more or less every Cory plan on the data. What that means is that you. You can't just get stuck in, like, this is the one thing that a database does. It has to be ever evolving because when someone has data in the database, they over time expect to be able to ask it more or less every question.So you have to do that to get the storage architecture to the limit of what, what it's capable of. Those are the three conditions.swyx: I just wanted to get a little bit of like the motivation, right? Like, so you left Shopify, you're like principal, engineer, infra guy. Um, you also head of kernel labs, uh, inside of Shopify, right?And then you consulted for read wise and that it kind of gave you that, that idea. I just wanted you to tell that story. Um, maybe I, you've told it before, but, uh, just introduce the, the. People to like the, the new workload, the sort of aha moment for turbo PufferSimon Hørup Eskildsen: For sure. So yeah, I spent almost a decade at Shopify.I was on the infrastructure team, um, from the fairly, fairly early days around 2013. Um, at the time it felt like it was growing so quickly and everything, all the metrics were, you know, doubling year on year compared to the, what companies are contending with today. It's very cute in growth. I feel like lot some companies are seeing that month over month.Um, of course. Shopify compound has been compounding for a very long time now, but I spent a decade doing that and the majority of that was just make sure the site is up today and make sure it's up a year from now. And a lot of that was really just the, um, you know, uh, the Kardashians would drive very, very large amounts of, of data to, to uh, to Shopify as they were rotating through all the merch and building out their businesses.And we just needed to make sure we could handle that. Right. And sometimes these were events, a million requests per second. And so, you know, we, we had our own data centers back in the day and we were moving to the cloud and there was so much sharding work and all of that that we were doing. So I spent a decade just scaling databases ‘cause that's fundamentally what's the most difficult thing to scale about these sites.The database that was the most difficult for me to scale during that time, and that was the most aggravating to be on call for, was elastic search. It was very, very difficult to deal with. And I saw a lot of projects that were just being held back in their ambition by using it.swyx: And I mean, self-hosted.Self-hosted. ‘causeSimon Hørup Eskildsen: it's, yeah, and it commercial, this is like 2015, right? So it's like a very particular vintage. Right. It's probably better at a lot of these things now. Um, it was difficult to contend with and I'm just like, I just think about it. It's an inverted index. It should be good at these kinds of queries and do all of this.And it was, we, we often couldn't get it to do exactly what we needed to do or basically get lucine to do, like expose lucine raw to, to, to what we needed to do. Um, so that was like. Just something that we did on the side and just panic scaled when we needed to, but not a particular focus of mine. So I left, and when I left, I, um, wasn't sure exactly what I wanted to do.I mean, it spent like a decade inside of the same company. I'd like grown up there. I started working there when I was 18.swyx: You only do Rails?Simon Hørup Eskildsen: Yeah. I mean, yeah. Rails. And he's a Rails guy. Uh, love Rails. So good. Um,Alessio: we all wish we could still work in Rails.swyx: I know know. I know, but some, I tried learning Ruby.It's just too much, like too many options to do the same thing. It's, that's my, I I know there's a, there's a way to do it.Simon Hørup Eskildsen: I love it. I don't know that I would use it now, like given cloud code and, and, and cursor and everything, but, um, um, but still it, like if I'm just sitting down and writing a teal code, that's how I think.But anyway, I left and I wasn't, I talked to a couple companies and I was like, I don't. I need to see a little bit more of the world here to know what I'm gonna like focus on next. Um, and so what I decided is like I was gonna, I called it like angel engineering, where I just hopped around in my friend's companies in three months increments and just helped them out with something.Right. And, and just vested a bit of equity and solved some interesting infrastructure problem. So I worked with a bunch of companies at the time, um, read Wise was one of them. Replicate was one of them. Um, causal, I dunno if you've tried this, it's like a, it's a spreadsheet engine Yeah. Where you can do distribution.They sold recently. Yeah. Um, we've been, we used that in fp and a at, um, at Turbo Puffer. Um, so a bunch of companies like this and it was super fun. And so we're the Chachi bt moment happened, I was with. With read Wise for a stint, we were preparing for the reader launch, right? Which is where you, you cue articles and read them later.And I was just getting their Postgres up to snuff, like, which basically boils down to tuning, auto vacuum. So I was doing that and then this happened and we were like, oh, maybe we should build a little recommendation engine and some features to try to hook in the lms. They were not that good yet, but it was clear there was something there.And so I built a small recommendation engine just, okay, let's take the articles that you've recently read, right? Like embed all the articles and then do recommendations. It was good enough that when I ran it on one of the co-founders of Rey's, like I found out that I got articles about, about having a child.I'm like, oh my God, I didn't, I, I didn't know that, that they were having a child. I wasn't sure what to do with that information, but the recommendation engine was good enough that it was suggesting articles, um, about that. And so there was, there was recommendations and uh, it actually worked really well.But this was a company that was spending maybe five grand a month in total on all their infrastructure and. When I did the napkin math on running the embeddings of all the articles, putting them into a vector index, putting it in prod, it's gonna be like 30 grand a month. That just wasn't tenable. Right?Like Read Wise is a proudly bootstrapped company and it's paying 30 grand for infrastructure for one feature versus five. It just wasn't tenable. So sort of in the bucket of this is useful, it's pretty good, but let us, let's return to it when the costs come down.swyx: Did you say it grows by feature? So for five to 30 is by the number of, like, what's the, what's the Scaling factor scale?It scales by the number of articles that you embed.Simon Hørup Eskildsen: It does, but what I meant by that is like five grand for like all of the other, like the Heroku, dinos, Postgres, like all the other, and this then storage is 30. Yeah. And then like 30 grand for one feature. Right. Which is like, what other articles are related to this one.Um, so it was just too much right to, to power everything. Their budget would've been maybe a few thousand dollars, which still would've been a lot. And so we put it in a bucket of, okay, we're gonna do that later. We'll wait, we will wait for the cost to come down. And that haunted me. I couldn't stop thinking about it.I was like, okay, there's clearly some latent demand here. If the cost had been a 10th, we would've shipped it and. This was really the only data point that I had. Right. I didn't, I, I didn't, I didn't go out and talk to anyone else. It was just so I started reading Right. I couldn't, I couldn't help myself.Like I didn't know what like a vector index is. I, I generally barely do about how to generate the vectors. There was a lot of hype about, this is a early 2023. There was a lot of hype about vector databases. There were raising a lot of money and it's like, I really didn't know anything about it. It's like, you know, trying these little models, fine tuning them.Like I was just trying to get sort of a lay of the land. So I just sat down. I have this. A GitHub repository called Napkin Math. And on napkin math, there's just, um, rows of like, oh, this is how much bandwidth. Like this is how many, you know, you can do 25 gigabytes per second on average to dram. You can do, you know, five gigabytes per second of rights to an SSD, blah blah.All of these numbers, right? And S3, how many you could do per, how much bandwidth can you drive per connection? I was just sitting down, I was like, why hasn't anyone build a database where you just put everything on O storage and then you puff it into NVME when you use the data and you puff it into dram if you're, if you're querying it alive, it's just like, this seems fairly obvious and you, the only real downside to that is that if you go all in on o storage, every right will take a couple hundred milliseconds of latency, but from there it's really all upside, right?You do the first go, it takes half a second. And it sort of occurred to me as like, well. The architecture is really good for that. It's really good for AB storage, it's really good for nvm ESSD. It's, well, you just couldn't have done that 10 years ago. Back to what we were talking about before. You really have to build a database where you have as few round trips as possible, right?This is how CPUs work today. It's how NVM E SSDs work. It's how as, um, as three works that you want to have a very large amount of outstanding requests, right? Like basically go to S3, do like that thousand requests to ask for data in one round trip. Wait for that. Get that, like, make a new decision. Do it again, and try to do that maybe a maximum of three times.But no databases were designed that way within NVME as is ds. You can drive like within, you know, within a very low multiple of DRAM bandwidth if you use it that way. And same with S3, right? You can fully max out the network card, which generally is not maxed out. You get very, like, very, very good bandwidth.And, but no one had built a database like that. So I was like, okay, well can't you just, you know, take all the vectors right? And plot them in the proverbial coordinate system. Get the clusters, put a file on S3 called clusters, do json, and then put another file for every cluster, you know, cluster one, do js O cluster two, do js ON you know that like it's two round trips, right?So you get the clusters, you find the closest clusters, and then you download the cluster files like the, the closest end. And you could do this in two round trips.swyx: You were nearest neighbors locally.Simon Hørup Eskildsen: Yes. Yes. And then, and you would build this, this file, right? It's just like ultra simplistic, but it's not a far shot from what the first version of Turbo Buffer was.Why hasn't anyone done thatAlessio: in that moment? From a workload perspective, you're thinking this is gonna be like a read heavy thing because they're doing recommend. Like is the fact that like writes are so expensive now? Oh, with ai you're actually not writing that much.Simon Hørup Eskildsen: At that point I hadn't really thought too much about, well no actually it was always clear to me that there was gonna be a lot of rights because at Shopify, the search clusters were doing, you know, I don't know, tens or hundreds of crew QPS, right?‘cause you just have to have a human sit and type in. But we did, you know, I don't know how many updates there were per second. I'm sure it was in the millions, right into the cluster. So I always knew there was like a 10 to 100 ratio on the read write. In the read wise use case. It's, um, even, even in the read wise use case, there'd probably be a lot fewer reads than writes, right?There's just a lot of churn on the amount of stuff that was going through versus the amount of queries. Um, I wasn't thinking too much about that. I was mostly just thinking about what's the fundamentally cheapest way to build a database in the cloud today using the primitives that you have available.And this is it, right? You just, now you have one machine and you know, let's say you have a terabyte of data in S3, you paid the $200 a month for that, and then maybe five to 10% of that data and needs to be an NV ME SSDs and less than that in dram. Well. You're paying very, very little to inflate the data.swyx: By the way, when you say no one else has done that, uh, would you consider Neon, uh, to be on a similar path in terms of being sort of S3 first and, uh, separating the compute and storage?Simon Hørup Eskildsen: Yeah, I think what I meant with that is, uh, just build a completely new database. I don't know if we were the first, like it was very much, it was, I mean, I, I hadn't, I just looked at the napkin math and was like, this seems really obvious.So I'm sure like a hundred people came up with it at the same time. Like the light bulb and every invention ever. Right. It was just in the air. I think Neon Neon was, was first to it. And they're trying, they're retrofitted onto Postgres, right? And then they built this whole architecture where you have, you have it in memory and then you sort of.You know, m map back to S3. And I think that was very novel at the time to do it for, for all LTP, but I hadn't seen a database that was truly all in, right. Not retrofitting it. The database felt built purely for this no consensus layer. Even using compare and swap on optic storage to do consensus. I hadn't seen anyone go that all in.And I, I mean, there, there, I'm sure there was someone that did that before us. I don't know. I was just looking at the napkin mathswyx: and, and when you say consensus layer, uh, are you strongly relying on S3 Strong consistency? You are. Okay.SoSimon Hørup Eskildsen: that is your consensus layer. It, it is the consistency layer. And I think also, like, this is something that most people don't realize, but S3 only became consistent in December of 2020.swyx: I remember this coming out during COVID and like people were like, oh, like, it was like, uh, it was just like a free upgrade.Simon Hørup Eskildsen: Yeah.swyx: They were just, they just announced it. We saw consistency guys and like, okay, cool.Simon Hørup Eskildsen: And I'm sure that they just, they probably had it in prod for a while and they're just like, it's done right.And people were like, okay, cool. But. That's a big moment, right? Like nv, ME SSDs, were also not in the cloud until around 2017, right? So you just sort of had like 2017 nv, ME SSDs, and people were like, okay, cool. There's like one skew that does this, whatever, right? Takes a few years. And then the second thing is like S3 becomes consistent in 2020.So now it means you don't have to have this like big foundation DB or like zookeeper or whatever sitting there contending with the keys, which is how. You know, that's what Snowflake and others have do so muchswyx: for goneSimon Hørup Eskildsen: Exactly. Just gone. Right? And so just push to the, you know, whatever, how many hundreds of people they have working on S3 solved and then compare and swap was not in S3 at this point in time,swyx: by the way.Uh, I don't know what that is, so maybe you wanna explain. Yes. Yeah.Simon Hørup Eskildsen: Yes. So, um, what Compare and swap is, is basically, you can imagine that if you have a database, it might be really nice to have a file called metadata json. And metadata JSON could say things like, Hey, these keys are here and this file means that, and there's lots of metadata that you have to operate in the database, right?But that's the simplest way to do it. So now you have might, you might have a lot of servers that wanna change the metadata. They might have written a file and want the metadata to contain that file. But you have a hundred nodes that are trying to contend with this metadata that JSON well, what compare and Swap allows you to do is basically just you download the file, you make the modifications, and then you write it only if it hasn't changed.While you did the modification and if not you retry. Right? Should just have this retry loops. Now you can imagine if you have a hundred nodes doing that, it's gonna be really slow, but it will converge over time. That primitive was not available in S3. It wasn't available in S3 until late 2024, but it was available in GCP.The real story of this is certainly not that I sat down and like bake brained it. I was like, okay, we're gonna start on GCS S3 is gonna get it later. Like it was really not that we started, we got really lucky, like we started on GCP and we started on GCP because tur um, Shopify ran on GCP. And so that was the platform I was most available with.Right. Um, and I knew the Canadian team there ‘cause I'd worked with them at Shopify and so it was natural for us to start there. And so when we started building the database, we're like, oh yeah, we have to build a, we really thought we had to build a consensus layer, like have a zookeeper or something to do this.But then we discovered the compare and swap. It's like, oh, we can kick the can. Like we'll just do metadata r json and just, it's fine. It's probably fine. Um, and we just kept kicking the can until we had very, very strong conviction in the idea. Um, and then we kind of just hinged the company on the fact that S3 probably was gonna get this, it started getting really painful in like mid 2024.‘cause we were closing deals with, um, um, notion actually that was running in AWS and we're like, trust us. You, you really want us to run this in GCP? And they're like, no, I don't know about that. Like, we're running everything in AWS and the latency across the cloud were so big and we had so much conviction that we bought like, you know, dark fiber between the AWS regions in, in Oregon, like in the InterExchange and GCP is like, we've never seen a startup like do like, what's going on here?And we're just like, no, we don't wanna do this. We were tuning like TCP windows, like everything to get the latency down ‘cause we had so high conviction in not doing like a, a metadata layer on S3. So those were the three conditions, right? Compare and swap. To do metadata, which wasn't in S3 until late 2024 S3 being consistent, which didn't happen until December, 2020.Uh, 2020. And then NVMe ssd, which didn't end in the cloud until 2017.swyx: I mean, in some ways, like a very big like cloud success story that like you were able to like, uh, put this all together, but also doing things like doing, uh, bind our favor. That that actually is something I've never heard.Simon Hørup Eskildsen: I mean, it's very common when you're a big company, right?You're like connecting your own like data center or whatever. But it's like, it was uniquely just a pain with notion because the, um, the org, like most of the, like if you're buying in Ashburn, Virginia, right? Like US East, the Google, like the GCP and, and AWS data centers are like within a millisecond on, on each other, on the public exchanges.But in Oregon uniquely, the GCP data center sits like a couple hundred kilometers, like east of Portland and the AWS region sits in Portland, but the network exchange they go through is through Seattle. So it's like a full, like 14 milliseconds or something like that. And so anyway, yeah. It's, it's, so we were like, okay, we can't, we have to go through an exchange in Portland.Yeah. Andswyx: you'd rather do this than like run your zookeeper and likeSimon Hørup Eskildsen: Yes. Way rather. It doesn't have state, I don't want state and two systems. Um, and I think all that is just informed by Justine, my co-founder and I had just been on call for so long. And the worst outages are the ones where you have state in multiple places that's not syncing up.So it really came from, from a a, like just a, a very pure source of pain, of just imagining what we would be Okay. Being woken up at 3:00 AM about and having something in zookeeper was not one of them.swyx: You, you're talking to like a notion or something. Do they care or do they just, theySimon Hørup Eskildsen: just, they care about latency.swyx: They latency cost. That's it.Simon Hørup Eskildsen: They just cared about latency. Right. And we just absorbed the cost. We're just like, we have high conviction in this. At some point we can move them to AWS. Right. And so we just, we, we'll buy the fiber, it doesn't matter. Right. Um, and it's like $5,000. Usually when you buy fiber, you buy like multiple lines.And we're like, we can only afford one, but we will just test it that when it goes over the public internet, it's like super smooth. And so we did a lot of, anyway, it's, yeah, it was, that's cool.Alessio: You can imagine talking to the GCP rep and it's like, no, we're gonna buy, because we know we're gonna turn, we're gonna turn from you guys and go to AWS in like six months.But in the meantime we'll do this. It'sSimon Hørup Eskildsen: a, I mean, like they, you know, this workload still runs on GCP for what it's worth. Right? ‘cause it's so, it was just, it was so reliable. So it was never about moving off GCP, it was just about honesty. It was just about giving notion the latency that they deserved.Right. Um, and we didn't want ‘em to have to care about any of this. We also, they were like, oh, egress is gonna be bad. It was like, okay, screw it. Like we're just gonna like vvc, VPC peer with you and AWS we'll eat the cost. Yeah. Whatever needs to be done.Alessio: And what were the actual workloads? Because I think when you think about ai, it's like 14 milliseconds.It's like really doesn't really matter in the scheme of like a model generation.Simon Hørup Eskildsen: Yeah. We were told the latency, right. That we had to beat. Oh, right. So, so we're just looking at the traces. Right. And then sort of like hand draw, like, you know, kind of like looking at the trace and then thinking what are the other extensions of the trace?Right. And there's a lot more to it because it's also when you have, if you have 14 versus seven milliseconds, right. You can fit in another round trip. So we had to tune TCP to try to send as much data in every round trip, prewarm all the connections. And there was, there's a lot of things that compound from having these kinds of round trips, but in the grand scheme it was just like, well, we have to beat the latency of whatever we're up against.swyx: Which is like they, I mean, notion is a database company. They could have done this themselves. They, they do lots of database engineering themselves. How do you even get in the door? Like Yeah, just like talk through that kind of.Simon Hørup Eskildsen: Last time I was in San Francisco, I was talking to one of the engineers actually, who, who was one of our champions, um, at, AT Notion.And they were, they were just trying to make sure that the, you know, per user cost matched the economics that they needed. You know, Uhhuh like, it's like the way I think about, it's like I have to earn a return on whatever the clouds charge me and then my customers have to earn a return on that. And it's like very simple, right?And so there has to be gross margin all the way up and that's how you build the product. And so then our customers have to make the right set of trade off the turbo Puffer makes, and if they're happy with that, that's great.swyx: Do you feel like you're competing with build internally versus buy or buy versus buy?Simon Hørup Eskildsen: Yeah, so, sorry, this was all to build up to your question. So one of the notion engineers told me that they'd sat and probably on a napkin, like drawn out like, why hasn't anyone built this? And then they saw terrible. It was like, well, it literally that. So, and I think AI has also changed the buy versus build equation in terms of, it's not really about can we build it, it's about do we have time to build it?I think they like, I think they felt like, okay, if this is a team that can do that and they, they feel enough like an extension of our team, well then we can go a lot faster, which would be very, very good for them. And I mean, they put us through the, through the test, right? Like we had some very, very long nights to to, to do that POC.And they were really our biggest, our second big customer off the cursor, which also was a lot of late nights. Right.swyx: Yeah. That, I mean, should we go into that story? The, the, the sort of Chris's story, like a lot, um, they credit you a lot for. Working very closely with them. So I just wanna hear, I've heard this, uh, story from Sole's point of view, but like, I'm curious what, what it looks like from your side.Simon Hørup Eskildsen: I actually haven't heard it from Sole's point of view, so maybe you can now cross reference it. The way that I remember it was that, um, the day after we launched, which was just, you know, I'd worked the whole summer on, on the first version. Justine wasn't part of it yet. ‘cause I just, I didn't tell anyone that summer that I was working on this.I was just locked in on building it because it's very easy otherwise to confuse talking about something to actually doing it. And so I was just like, I'm not gonna do that. I'm just gonna do the thing. I launched it and at this point turbo puffer is like a rust binary running on a single eight core machine in a T Marks instance.And me deploying it was like looking at the request log and then like command seeing it or like control seeing it to just like, okay, there's no request. Let's upgrade the binary. Like it was like literally the, the, the, the scrappiest thing. You could imagine it was on purpose because just like at Shopify, we did that all the time.Like, we like move, like we ran things in tux all the time to begin with. Before something had like, at least the inkling of PMF, it was like, okay, is anyone gonna hear about this? Um, and one of the cursor co-founders Arvid reached out and he just, you know, the, the cursor team are like all I-O-I-I-M-O like, um, contenders, right?So they just speak in bullet points and, and facts. It was like this amazing email exchange just of, this is how many QPS we have, this is what we're paying, this is where we're going, blah, blah, blah. And so we're just conversing in bullet points. And I tried to get a call with them a few times, but they were, so, they were like really writing the PMF bowl here, just like late 2023.And one time Swally emails me at like five. What was it like 4:00 AM Pacific time saying like, Hey, are you open for a call now? And I'm on the East coast and I, it was like 7:00 AM I was like, yeah, great, sure, whatever. Um, and we just started talking and something. Then I didn't know anything about sales.It was something that just comp compelled me. I have to go see this team. Like, there's something here. So I, I went to San Francisco and I went to their office and the way that I remember it is that Postgres was down when I showed up at the office. Did SW tell you this? No. Okay. So Postgres was down and so it's like they were distracting with that.And I was trying my best to see if I could, if I could help in any way. Like I knew a little bit about databases back to tuning, auto vacuum. It was like, I think you have to tune out a vacuum. Um, and so we, we talked about that and then, um, that evening just talked about like what would it look like, what would it look like to work with us?And I just said. Look like we're all in, like we will just do what we'll do whatever, whatever you tell us, right? They migrated everything over the next like week or two, and we reduced their cost by 95%, which I think like kind of fixed their per user economics. Um, and it solved a lot of other things. And we were just, Justine, this is also when I asked Justine to come on as my co-founder, she was the best engineer, um, that I ever worked with at Shopify.She lived two blocks away and we were just, okay, we're just gonna get this done. Um, and we did, and so we helped them migrate and we just worked like hell over the next like month or two to make sure that we were never an issue. And that was, that was the cursor story. Yeah.swyx: And, and is code a different workload than normal text?I, I don't know. Is is it just text? Is it the same thing?Simon Hørup Eskildsen: Yeah, so cursor's workload is basically, they, um, they will embed the entire code base, right? So they, they will like chunk it up in whatever they would, they do. They have their own embedding model, um, which they've been public about. Um, and they find that on, on, on their evals.It. There's one of their evals where it's like a 25% improvement on a very particular workload. They have a bunch of blog posts about it. Um, I think it works best on larger code basis, but they've trained their own embedding model to do this. Um, and so you'll see it if you use the cursor agent, it will do searches.And they've also been public around, um, how they've, I think they post trained their model to be very good at semantic search as well. Um, and that's, that's how they use it. And so it's very good at, like, can you find me on the code that's similar to this, or code that does this? And just in, in this queries, they also use GR to supplement it.swyx: Yeah.Simon Hørup Eskildsen: Um, of courseswyx: it's been a big topic of discussion like, is rag dead because gr you know,Simon Hørup Eskildsen: and I mean like, I just, we, we see lots of demand from the coding company to ethicsswyx: search in every part. Yes.Simon Hørup Eskildsen: Uh, we, we, we see demand. And so, I mean, I'm. I like case studies. I don't like, like just doing like thought pieces on this is where it's going.And like trying to be all macroeconomic about ai, that's has turned out to be a giant waste of time because no one can really predict any of this. So I just collect case studies and I mean, cursor has done a great job talking about what they're doing and I hope some of the other coding labs that use Turbo Puffer will do the same.Um, but it does seem to make a difference for particular queries. Um, I mean we can also do text, we can also do RegX, but I should also say that cursors like security posture into Tur Puffer is exceptional, right? They have their own embedding model, which makes it very difficult to reverse engineer. They obfuscate the file paths.They like you. It's very difficult to learn anything about a code base by looking at it. And the other thing they do too is that for their customers, they encrypt it with their encryption keys in turbo puffer's bucket. Um, so it's, it's, it's really, really well designed.swyx: And so this is like extra stuff they did to work with you because you are not part of Cursor.Exactly like, and this is just best practice when working in any database, not just you guys. Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. I think for me, like the, the, the learning is kind of like you, like all workloads are hybrid. Like, you know, uh, like you, you want the semantic, you want the text, you want the RegX, you want sql.I dunno. Um, but like, it's silly to like be all in on like one particularly query pattern.Simon Hørup Eskildsen: I think, like I really like the way that, um, um, that swally at cursor talks about it, which is, um, I'm gonna butcher it here. Um, and you know, I'm a, I'm a database scalability person. I'm not a, I, I dunno anything about training models other than, um, what the internet tells me and what.The way he describes is that this is just like cash compute, right? It's like you have a point in time where you're looking at some particular context and focused on some chunk and you say, this is the layer of the neural net at this point in time. That seems fundamentally really useful to do cash compute like that.And, um, how the value of that will change over time. I'm, I'm not sure, but there seems to be a lot of value in that.Alessio: Maybe talk a bit about the evolution of the workload, because even like search, like maybe two years ago it was like one search at the start of like an LLM query to build the context. Now you have a gentech search, however you wanna call it, where like the model is both writing and changing the code and it's searching it again later.Yeah. What are maybe some of the new types of workloads or like changes you've had to make to your architecture for it?Simon Hørup Eskildsen: I think you're right. When I think of rag, I think of, Hey, there's an 8,000 token, uh, context window and you better make it count. Um, and search was a way to do that now. Everything is moving towards the, just let the agent do its thing.Right? And so back to the thing before, right? The LLM is very good at reasoning with the data, and so we're just the tool call, right? And that's increasingly what we see our customers doing. Um, what we're seeing more demand from, from our customers now is to do a lot of concurrency, right? Like Notion does a ridiculous amount of queries in every round trip just because they can't.And I'm also now, when I use the cursor agent, I also see them doing more concurrency than I've ever seen before. So a bit similar to how we designed a database to drive as much concurrency in every round trip as possible. That's also what the agents are doing. So that's new. It means just an enormous amount of queries all at once to the dataset while it's warm in as few turns as possible.swyx: Can I clarify one thing on that?Simon Hørup Eskildsen: Yes.swyx: Is it, are they batching multiple users or one user is driving multiple,Simon Hørup Eskildsen: one user driving multiple, one agent driving.swyx: It's parallel searching a bunch of things.Simon Hørup Eskildsen: Exactly.swyx: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So yeah, the clinician also did, did this for the fast context thing, like eight parallel at once.Simon Hørup Eskildsen: Yes.swyx: And, and like an interesting problem is, well, how do you make sure you have enough diversity so you're not making the the same request eight times?Simon Hørup Eskildsen: And I think like that's probably also where the hybrid comes in, where. That's another way to diversify. It's a completely different way to, to do the search.That's a big change, right? So before it was really just like one call and then, you know, the LLM took however many seconds to return, but now we just see an enormous amount of queries. So the, um, we just see more queries. So we've like tried to reduce query, we've reduced query pricing. Um, this is probably the first time actually I'm saying that, but the query pricing is being reduced, like five x.Um, and we'll probably try to reduce it even more to accommodate some of these workloads of just doing very large amounts of queries. Um, that's one thing that's changed. I think the right, the right ratio is still very high, right? Like there's still a, an enormous amount of rights per read, but we're starting probably to see that change if people really lean into this pattern.Alessio: Can we talk a little bit about the pricing? I'm curious, uh, because traditionally a database would charge on storage, but now you have the token generation that is so expensive, where like the actual. Value of like a good search query is like much higher because they're like saving inference time down the line.How do you structure that as like, what are people receptive to on the other side too?Simon Hørup Eskildsen: Yeah. I, the, the turbo puffer pricing in the beginning was just very simple. The pricing on these on for search engines before Turbo Puffer was very server full, right? It was like, here's the vm, here's the per hour cost, right?Great. And I just sat down with like a piece of paper and said like, if Turbo Puffer was like really good, this is probably what it would cost with a little bit of margin. And that was the first pricing of Turbo Puffer. And I just like sat down and I was like, okay, like this is like probably the storage amp, but whenever on a piece of paper I, it was vibe pricing.It was very vibe price, and I got it wrong. Oh. Um, well I didn't get it wrong, but like Turbo Puffer wasn't at the first principle pricing, right? So when Cursor came on Turbo Puffer, it was like. Like, I didn't know any VCs. I didn't know, like I was just like, I don't know, I didn't know anything about raising money or anything like that.I just saw that my GCP bill was, was high, was a lot higher than the cursor bill. So Justine and I was just like, well, we have to optimize it. Um, and I mean, to the chagrin now of, of it, of, of the VCs, it now means that we're profitable because we've had so much pricing pressure in the beginning. Because it was running on my credit card and Justine and I had spent like, like tens of thousands of dollars on like compute bills and like spinning off the company and like very like, like bad Canadian lawyers and like things like to like get all of this done because we just like, we didn't know.Right. If you're like steeped in San Francisco, you're just like, you just know. Okay. Like you go out, raise a pre-seed round. I, I never heard a word pre-seed at this point in time.swyx: When you had Cursor, you had Notion you, you had no funding.Simon Hørup Eskildsen: Um, with Cursor we had no funding. Yeah. Um, by the time we had Notion Locke was, Locke was here.Yeah. So it was really just, we vibe priced it 100% from first Principles, but it wasn't, it, it was not performing at first principles, so we just did everything we could to optimize it in the beginning for that, so that at least we could have like a 5% margin or something. So I wasn't freaking out because Cursor's bill was also going like this as they were growing.And so my liability and my credit limit was like actively like calling my bank. It was like, I need a bigger credit. Like it was, yeah. Anyway, that was the beginning. Yeah. But the pricing was, yeah, like storage rights and query. Right. And the, the pricing we have today is basically just that pricing with duct tape and spit to try to approach like, you know, like a, as a margin on the physical underlying hardware.And we're doing this year, you're gonna see more and more pricing changes from us. Yeah.swyx: And like is how much does stuff like VVC peering matter because you're working in AWS land where egress is charged and all that, you know.Simon Hørup Eskildsen: We probably don't like, we have like an enterprise plan that just has like a base fee because we haven't had time to figure out SKU pricing for all of this.Um, but I mean, yeah, you can run turbo puffer either in SaaS, right? That's what Cursor does. You can run it in a single tenant cluster. So it's just you. That's what Notion does. And then you can run it in, in, in BYOC where everything is inside the customer's VPC, that's what an for example, philanthropic does.swyx: What I'm hearing is that this is probably the best CRO job for somebody who can come in and,Simon Hørup Eskildsen: I mean,swyx: help you with this.Simon Hørup Eskildsen: Um, like Turbo Puffer hired, like, I don't know what, what number this was, but we had a full-time CFO as like the 12th hire or something at Turbo Puffer, um, I think I hear are a lot of comp.I don't know how they do it. Like they have a hundred employees and not a CFO. It's like having a CFO is like a runningswyx: business man. Like, you know,Simon Hørup Eskildsen: it's so good. Yeah, like money Mike, like he just, you know, just handles the money and a lot of the business stuff and so he came in and just hopped with a lot of the operational side of the business.So like C-O-O-C-F-O, like somewhere in between.swyx: Just as quick mention of Lucky, just ‘cause I'm curious, I've met Lock and like, he's obviously a very good investor and now on physical intelligence, um, I call it generalist super angel, right? He invests in everything. Um, and I always wonder like, you know, is there something appealing about focusing on developer tooling, focusing on databases, going like, I've invested for 10 years in databases versus being like a lock where he can maybe like connect you to all the customers that you need.Simon Hørup Eskildsen: This is an excellent question. No, no one's asked me this. Um, why lockey? Because. There was a couple of people that we were talking to at the time and when we were raising, we were almost a little, we were like a bit distressed because one of our, one of our peers had just launched something that was very similar to Turbo Puffer.And someone just gave me the advice at the time of just choose the person where you just feel like you can just pick up the phone and not prepare anything. And just be completely honest, and I don't think I've said this publicly before, but I just called Lockey and was like local Lockie. Like if this doesn't have PMF by the end of the year, like we'll just like return all the money to you.But it's just like, I don't really, we, Justine and I don't wanna work on this unless it's really working. So we want to give it the best shot this year and like we're really gonna go for it. We're gonna hire a bunch of people and we're just gonna be honest with everyone. Like when I don't know how to play a game, I just play with open cards and.Lockey was the only person that didn't, that didn't freak out. He was like, I've never heard anyone say that before. As I said, I didn't even know what a seed or pre-seed round was like before, probably even at this time. So I was just like very honest with him. And I asked him like, Lockie, have you ever have, have you ever invested in database company?He was just like, no. And at the time I was like, am I dumb? Like, but I think there was something that just like really drew me to Lockie. He is so authentic, so honest, like, and there was something just like, I just felt like I could just play like, just say everything openly. And that was, that was, I think that that was like a perfect match at the time, and, and, and honestly still is.He was just like, okay, that's great. This is like the most honest, ridiculous thing I've ever heard anyone say to me. But like that, like that, whyswyx: is this ridiculous? Say competitor launch, this may not work out. It wasSimon Hørup Eskildsen: more just like. If this doesn't work out, I'm gonna close up shop by the end of the mo the year, right?Like it was, I don't know, maybe it's common. I, I don't know. He told me it was uncommon. I don't know. Um, that's why we chose him and he'd been phenomenal. The other people were talking at the, at the time were database experts. Like they, you know, knew a lot about databases and Locke didn't, this turned out to be a phenomenal asset.Right. I like Justine and I know a lot about databases. The people that we hire know a lot about databases. What we needed was just someone who didn't know a lot about databases, didn't pretend to know a lot about databases, and just wanted to help us with candidates and customers. And he did. Yeah. And I have a list, right, of the investors that I have a relationship with, and Lockey has just performed excellent in the number of sub bullets of what we can attribute back to him.Just absolutely incredible. And when people talk about like no ego and just the best thing for the founder, I like, I don't think that anyone, like even my lawyer is like, yeah, Lockey is like the most friendly person you will find.swyx: Okay. This is my most glow recommendation I've ever heard.Alessio: He deserves it.He's very special.swyx: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Amazing.Alessio: Since you mentioned candidates, maybe we can talk about team building, you know, like, especially in sf, it feels like it's just easier to start a company than to join a company. Uh, I'm curious your experience, especially not being n SF full-time and doing something that is maybe, you know, a very low level of detail and technical detail.Simon Hørup Eskildsen: Yeah. So joining versus starting, I never thought that I would be a founder. I would start with it, like Turbo Puffer started as a blog post, and then it became a project and then sort of almost accidentally became a company. And now it feels like it's, it's like becoming a bigger company. That was never the intention.The intentions were very pure. It's just like, why hasn't anyone done this? And it's like, I wanna be the, like, I wanna be the first person to do it. I think some founders have this, like, I could never work for anyone else. I, I really don't feel that way. Like, it's just like, I wanna see this happen. And I wanna see it happen with some people that I really enjoy working with and I wanna have fun doing it and this, this, this has all felt very natural on that, on that sense.So it was never a like join versus versus versus found. It was just dis found me at the right moment.Alessio: Well I think there's an argument for, you should have joined Cursor, right? So I'm curious like how you evaluate it. Okay, I should actually go raise money and make this a company versus like, this is like a company that is like growing like crazy.It's like an interesting technical problem. I should just build it within Cursor and then they don't have to encrypt all this stuff. They don't have to obfuscate things. Like was that on your mind at all orSimon Hørup Eskildsen: before taking the, the small check from Lockie, I did have like a hard like look at myself in the mirror of like, okay, do I really want to do this?And because if I take the money, I really have to do it right. And so the way I almost think about it's like you kind of need to ha like you kind of need to be like fucked up enough to want to go all the way. And that was the conversation where I was like, okay, this is gonna be part of my life's journey to build this company and do it in the best way that I possibly can't.Because if I ask people to join me, ask people to get on the cap table, then I have an ultimate responsibility to give it everything. And I don't, I think some people, it doesn't occur to me that everyone takes it that seriously. And maybe I take it too seriously, I don't know. But that was like a very intentional moment.And so then it was very clear like, okay, I'm gonna do this and I'm gonna give it everything.Alessio: A lot of people don't take it this seriously. But,swyx: uh, let's talk about, you have this concept of the P 99 engineer. Uh, people are 10 x saying, everyone's saying, you know, uh, maybe engineers are out of a job. I don't know.But you definitely see a P 99 engineer, and I just want you to talk about it.Simon Hørup Eskildsen: Yeah, so the P 99 engineer was just a term that we started using internally to talk about candidates and talk about how we wanted to build the company. And you know, like everyone else is, like we want a talent dense company.And I think that's almost become trite at this point. What I credit the cursor founders a lot with is that they just arrived there from first principles of like, we just need a talent dense, um, talent dense team. And I think I've seen some teams that weren't talent dense and like seemed a counterfactual run, which if you've run in been in a large company, you will just see that like it's just logically will happen at a large company.Um, and so that was super important to me and Justine and it's very difficult to maintain. And so we just needed, we needed wording for it. And so I have a document called Traits of the P 99 Engineer, and it's a bullet point list. And I look at that list after every single interview that I do, and in every single recap that we do and every recap we end with.End with, um, some version of I'm gonna reject this candidate completely regardless of what the discourse was, because I wanna see people fight for this person because the default should not be, we're gonna hire this person. The default should be, we're definitely not hiring this person. And you know, if everyone was like, ah, maybe throw a punch, then this is not the right.swyx: Do, do you operate, like if there's one cha there must have at least one champion who's like, yes, I will put my career on, on, on the line for this. You know,Simon Hørup Eskildsen: I think career on the line,swyx: maybe a chair, butSimon Hørup Eskildsen: yeah. You know, like, um, I would say so someone needs to like, have both fists up and be like, I'd fight.Right? Yeah. Yeah. And if one person said, then, okay, let's do it. Right?swyx: Yeah.Simon Hørup Eskildsen: Um. It doesn't have to be absolutely everyone. Right? And like the interviews are always the sign that you're checking for different attributes. And if someone is like knocking it outta the park in every single attribute, that's, that's fairly rare.Um, but that's really important. And so the traits of the P 99 engineer, there's lots of them. There's also the traits of the p like triple nine engineer and the quadruple nine engineer. This is like, it's a long list.swyx: Okay.Simon Hørup Eskildsen: Um, I'll give you some samples, right. Of what we, what we look for. I think that the P 99 engineer has some history of having bent, like their trajectory or something to their will.Right? Some moment where it was just, they just, you know, made the computer do what it needed to do. There's something like that, and it will, it will occur to have them at some point in their career. And, uh. Hopefully multiple times. Right.swyx: Gimme an example of one of your engineers that like,Simon Hørup Eskildsen: I'll give an eng.Uh, so we, we, we launched this thing called A and NV three. Um, we could, we're also, we're working on V four and V five right now, but a and NV three can search a hundred billion vectors with a P 50 of around 40 milliseconds and a p 99 of 200 milliseconds. Um, maybe other people have done this, I'm sure Google and others have done this, but, uh, we haven't seen anyone, um, at least not in like a public consumable SaaS that can do this.And that was an engineer, the chief architect of Turbo Puffer, Nathan, um, who more or less just bent this, the software was not capable of this and he just made it capable for a very particular workload in like a, you know, six to eight week period with the help of a lot of the team. Right. It's been, been, there's numerous of examples of that, like at, at turbo puff, but that's like really bending the software and X 86 to your will.It was incredible to watch. Um. You wanna see some moments like that?swyx: Isn't that triple nine?Simon Hørup Eskildsen: Um, I think Nathan, what's calledAlessio: group nine, that was only nine. I feel like this is too high forSimon Hørup Eskildsen: Nathan. Nathan is, uh, Nathan is like, yeah, there's a lot of nines. Okay. After that p So I think that's one trait. I think another trait is that, uh, the P 99 spends a lot of time looking at maps.Generally it's their preferred ux. They just love looking at maps. You ever seen someone who just like, sits on their phone and just like, scrolls around on a map? Or did you not look at maps A lot? You guys don't look atswyx: maps? I guess I'm not feeling there. I don't know, butSimon Hørup Eskildsen: you just dis What about trains?Do you like trains?swyx: Uh, I mean they, not enough. Okay. This is just like weapon nice. Autism is what I call it. Like, like,Simon Hørup Eskildsen: um, I love looking at maps, like, it's like my preferred UX and just like I, you know, I likeswyx: lotsAlessio: of, of like random places, soswyx: like,youswyx: know.Alessio: Yes. Okay. There you go. So instead of like random places, like how do you explore the maps?Simon Hørup Eskildsen: No, it's, it's just a joke.swyx: It's autism laugh. It's like you are just obsessed by something and you like studying a thing.Simon Hørup Eskildsen: The origin of this was that at some point I read an interview with some IOI gold medalistswyx: Uhhuh,Simon Hørup Eskildsen: and it's like, what do you do in your spare time? I was just like, I like looking at maps.I was like, I feel so seen. Like, I just like love, like swirling out. I was like, oh, Canada is so big. Where's Baffin Island? I don't know. I love it. Yeah. Um, anyway, so the traits of P 99, P 99 is obsessive, right? Like, there's just like, you'll, you'll find traits of that we do an interview at, at, at, at turbo puffer or like multiple interviews that just try to screen for some of these things.Um, so. There's lots of others, but these are the kinds of traits that we look for.swyx: I'll tell you, uh, some people listen for like some of my dere stuff. Uh, I do think about derel as maps. Um, you draw a map for people, uh, maps show you the, uh, what is commonly agreed to be the geographical features of what a boundary is.And it shows also shows you what is not doing. And I, I think a lot of like developer tools, companies try to tell you they can do everything, but like, let's, let's be real. Like you, your, your three landmarks are here, everyone comes here, then here, then here, and you draw a map and, and then you draw a journey through the map.And like that. To me, that's what developer relations looks like. So I do think about things that way.Simon Hørup Eskildsen: I think the P 99 thinks in offs, right? The P 99 is very clear about, you know, hey, turbo puffer, you can't run a high transaction workload on turbo puffer, right? It's like the right latency is a hundred milliseconds.That's a clear trade off. I think the P 99 is very good at articulating the trade offs in every decision. Um. Which is exactly what the map is in your case, right?swyx: Uh, yeah, yeah. My, my, my world. My world.Alessio: How, how do you reconcile some of these things when you're saying you bend the will the computer versus like the trade

In this episode of The Counseling Psychologist podcast series, Ms. Tessi Muskrat and Mrs. Maddi Worley talk about their article recently published in TCP titled, ""Being Yourself is a Sin": The Impact of Evangelical Purity Culture on Sexual and Gender Minority People Socialized as Women."

Big thank you to Infoblox for sponsoring this video. For more information on Infoblox have a look at their website: https://www.infoblox.com/ // Get Wireshark Certified // Check out the official training course

“Personalization” has become one of the most overused words in wealth management and one of the hardest promises to actually deliver. Clients want portfolios that reflect their goals, values, tax realities, and life events. Firms want scale, efficiency, and fewer operational landmines. Too often, those two goals collide. In this episode of The WealthStack Podcast, host Shannon Rosic sits down with Joshua Allen, CEO of TCP Asset Management, to unpack what real portfolio personalization looks like inside a fast-growing RIA and why most firms underestimate the operational cost of getting it wrong. Josh shares how TCP moved beyond model-only workflows, where automation actually helps (and where it doesn't), and why saying no to most technology is critical to scaling personalization without creating an ops headache. Key takeaways: How hiring a director of advisory services strengthened tech integration Why deeper use of existing tech beats adding more tools to the stack How personalized portfolios are driving referrals across generations Why most “personalized portfolios” still feel identical to clients What's real vs hype when it comes to AI in portfolio management Resources: Listen to WealthStack on Wealth Management Subscribe and listen to WealthStack on Apple Podcasts Subscribe and listen to WealthStack on Spotify Connect with Shannon Rosic: Shannon Rosic WealthStack website Wealth Management Connect with Joshua Allen: LinkedIn: TCP Asset Management Website: TCP Asset Management About Our Guest: As a founding Partner and  Chief Executive Officer of TCP Asset Management, Josh Allen is charged with leading a team of wealth advisors in practice management, business development, and innovative planning solutions. These solutions have provided our clients with the resources and flexibility needed to deliver a personalized financial planning experience that is fluid and dynamic. Josh and his team have developed and refined a process that is comprehensive in nature and ties together: investment management, risk management, retirement income planning, estate planning, business and family legacy planning, and philanthropy. This exclusive process allows them to put together all the pieces of the financial puzzle for their clients as their lives unfold and be engaged when their needs evolve. Josh received a Bachelor of Science degree from The Ohio State University in Family Resource Management. He also received a certificate in Financial Planning from Boston University. Upon completion of the education, examination and experience requirements, Josh obtained the Certified Financial Planner, CRPC® and CRPS® designations. His securities licenses include the series 7,9,10 and 66 and State of Ohio insurance license. Josh is married to Branda, who is also one of his business partners. They together have three children, two dogs and two cats. As a family they love the outdoors, whether it is on the beach or in the mountains, they are always up for an adventure.

In this episode of The Counseling Psychologist podcast series, Ms. Sally Ye Jin Lee talks about the article recently published in TCP titled, "What is Humility Good For? A Meta-Analysis of Humility, Health, and Well-Being."

In this episode of The Counseling Psychologist podcast series, Dr. Danice Brown, Dr. Kimberly Langrehr, Dr. Christa Schmidt, Dr. Sha'Kema Blackmon, and Ms. Nia Jones talk about the article recently published in TCP titled, "The Relationship Between Black Women's Gendered Racial Socialization, Self-Evaluation, and Subjective Well-Being." 

TCP's inaugural episode features Suraj Yengde and Anupama Rao, two scholars whose academic work and activism have helped to set the parameters of the contemporary debate on caste. In our conversation, we addressed the challenge of defining caste, their individual pathways into researching and writing on the caste question, and the virtues and limitations of comparing caste and race as two enduring forms of social stratification. We ended with a discussion of Isabel Wilkerson's Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, the runaway bestseller that made caste and its relationship to race a topic of mainstream debate in the United States. Guests: Suraj Yengde: scholar, public intellectual, and anti-caste activist. Anupama Rao: Professor of History and Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies, Columbia University Mentioned in the episode: B.R. Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste IITs: the Indian Institutes of Technology IIMs: the Indian Institutes of Management Reserved candidates: beneficiaries of India's system of affirmative action B.R. Ambedkar, “Castes in India” Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents Anupama Rao, The Caste Question Suraj Yengde, Caste Matters Suraj Yengde, Caste: A Global Story Shaadi.com: an Indian matrimonial website Phule: Jyotirao Phule was an anti-caste social reformer and writer from Maharashtra. Periyar: E.V. Ramasamy Naicker, commonly known as Periyar, was a writer, social revolutionary, and politician who was one of the principal ideologues of the Self-Respect Movement. Begumpura, or “city without sorrow” expresses the notion of a casteless, classless utopia and was first formulated by Sant Ravidas (c. 1450-1520). Dalit Panthers was a revolutionary, anti-caste organization founded in 1972. It was based in Maharashtra and drew inspiration from the American Black Panther Party. Oliver Cox, Caste, Class, and Race: A Study in Social Dynamics (1948) Divya Cherian, Merchants of Virtue Meet the Savarnas: 2025 book by Ravikant Kisana Ramesh Bairy, Being Brahmin, Being Modern Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus Daniel Immerwahr, “Caste of Colony?” Nico Slate, Colored Cosmopolitanism W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction Ajantha Subramanian is Professor of Anthropology at CUNY Graduate Center and host of The Caste Pod. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

TCP's inaugural episode features Suraj Yengde and Anupama Rao, two scholars whose academic work and activism have helped to set the parameters of the contemporary debate on caste. In our conversation, we addressed the challenge of defining caste, their individual pathways into researching and writing on the caste question, and the virtues and limitations of comparing caste and race as two enduring forms of social stratification. We ended with a discussion of Isabel Wilkerson's Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, the runaway bestseller that made caste and its relationship to race a topic of mainstream debate in the United States. Guests: Suraj Yengde: scholar, public intellectual, and anti-caste activist. Anupama Rao: Professor of History and Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies, Columbia University Mentioned in the episode: B.R. Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste IITs: the Indian Institutes of Technology IIMs: the Indian Institutes of Management Reserved candidates: beneficiaries of India's system of affirmative action B.R. Ambedkar, “Castes in India” Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents Anupama Rao, The Caste Question Suraj Yengde, Caste Matters Suraj Yengde, Caste: A Global Story Shaadi.com: an Indian matrimonial website Phule: Jyotirao Phule was an anti-caste social reformer and writer from Maharashtra. Periyar: E.V. Ramasamy Naicker, commonly known as Periyar, was a writer, social revolutionary, and politician who was one of the principal ideologues of the Self-Respect Movement. Begumpura, or “city without sorrow” expresses the notion of a casteless, classless utopia and was first formulated by Sant Ravidas (c. 1450-1520). Dalit Panthers was a revolutionary, anti-caste organization founded in 1972. It was based in Maharashtra and drew inspiration from the American Black Panther Party. Oliver Cox, Caste, Class, and Race: A Study in Social Dynamics (1948) Divya Cherian, Merchants of Virtue Meet the Savarnas: 2025 book by Ravikant Kisana Ramesh Bairy, Being Brahmin, Being Modern Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus Daniel Immerwahr, “Caste of Colony?” Nico Slate, Colored Cosmopolitanism W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction Ajantha Subramanian is Professor of Anthropology at CUNY Graduate Center and host of The Caste Pod. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

TCP's inaugural episode features Suraj Yengde and Anupama Rao, two scholars whose academic work and activism have helped to set the parameters of the contemporary debate on caste. In our conversation, we addressed the challenge of defining caste, their individual pathways into researching and writing on the caste question, and the virtues and limitations of comparing caste and race as two enduring forms of social stratification. We ended with a discussion of Isabel Wilkerson's Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, the runaway bestseller that made caste and its relationship to race a topic of mainstream debate in the United States. Guests: Suraj Yengde: scholar, public intellectual, and anti-caste activist. Anupama Rao: Professor of History and Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies, Columbia University Mentioned in the episode: B.R. Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste IITs: the Indian Institutes of Technology IIMs: the Indian Institutes of Management Reserved candidates: beneficiaries of India's system of affirmative action B.R. Ambedkar, “Castes in India” Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents Anupama Rao, The Caste Question Suraj Yengde, Caste Matters Suraj Yengde, Caste: A Global Story Shaadi.com: an Indian matrimonial website Phule: Jyotirao Phule was an anti-caste social reformer and writer from Maharashtra. Periyar: E.V. Ramasamy Naicker, commonly known as Periyar, was a writer, social revolutionary, and politician who was one of the principal ideologues of the Self-Respect Movement. Begumpura, or “city without sorrow” expresses the notion of a casteless, classless utopia and was first formulated by Sant Ravidas (c. 1450-1520). Dalit Panthers was a revolutionary, anti-caste organization founded in 1972. It was based in Maharashtra and drew inspiration from the American Black Panther Party. Oliver Cox, Caste, Class, and Race: A Study in Social Dynamics (1948) Divya Cherian, Merchants of Virtue Meet the Savarnas: 2025 book by Ravikant Kisana Ramesh Bairy, Being Brahmin, Being Modern Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus Daniel Immerwahr, “Caste of Colony?” Nico Slate, Colored Cosmopolitanism W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction Ajantha Subramanian is Professor of Anthropology at CUNY Graduate Center and host of The Caste Pod. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

TCP's inaugural episode features Suraj Yengde and Anupama Rao, two scholars whose academic work and activism have helped to set the parameters of the contemporary debate on caste. In our conversation, we addressed the challenge of defining caste, their individual pathways into researching and writing on the caste question, and the virtues and limitations of comparing caste and race as two enduring forms of social stratification. We ended with a discussion of Isabel Wilkerson's Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, the runaway bestseller that made caste and its relationship to race a topic of mainstream debate in the United States. Guests: Suraj Yengde: scholar, public intellectual, and anti-caste activist. Anupama Rao: Professor of History and Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies, Columbia University Mentioned in the episode: B.R. Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste IITs: the Indian Institutes of Technology IIMs: the Indian Institutes of Management Reserved candidates: beneficiaries of India's system of affirmative action B.R. Ambedkar, “Castes in India” Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents Anupama Rao, The Caste Question Suraj Yengde, Caste Matters Suraj Yengde, Caste: A Global Story Shaadi.com: an Indian matrimonial website Phule: Jyotirao Phule was an anti-caste social reformer and writer from Maharashtra. Periyar: E.V. Ramasamy Naicker, commonly known as Periyar, was a writer, social revolutionary, and politician who was one of the principal ideologues of the Self-Respect Movement. Begumpura, or “city without sorrow” expresses the notion of a casteless, classless utopia and was first formulated by Sant Ravidas (c. 1450-1520). Dalit Panthers was a revolutionary, anti-caste organization founded in 1972. It was based in Maharashtra and drew inspiration from the American Black Panther Party. Oliver Cox, Caste, Class, and Race: A Study in Social Dynamics (1948) Divya Cherian, Merchants of Virtue Meet the Savarnas: 2025 book by Ravikant Kisana Ramesh Bairy, Being Brahmin, Being Modern Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus Daniel Immerwahr, “Caste of Colony?” Nico Slate, Colored Cosmopolitanism W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction Ajantha Subramanian is Professor of Anthropology at CUNY Graduate Center and host of The Caste Pod. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

TCP's inaugural episode features Suraj Yengde and Anupama Rao, two scholars whose academic work and activism have helped to set the parameters of the contemporary debate on caste. In our conversation, we addressed the challenge of defining caste, their individual pathways into researching and writing on the caste question, and the virtues and limitations of comparing caste and race as two enduring forms of social stratification. We ended with a discussion of Isabel Wilkerson's Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, the runaway bestseller that made caste and its relationship to race a topic of mainstream debate in the United States. Guests: Suraj Yengde: scholar, public intellectual, and anti-caste activist. Anupama Rao: Professor of History and Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies, Columbia University Mentioned in the episode: B.R. Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste IITs: the Indian Institutes of Technology IIMs: the Indian Institutes of Management Reserved candidates: beneficiaries of India's system of affirmative action B.R. Ambedkar, “Castes in India” Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents Anupama Rao, The Caste Question Suraj Yengde, Caste Matters Suraj Yengde, Caste: A Global Story Shaadi.com: an Indian matrimonial website Phule: Jyotirao Phule was an anti-caste social reformer and writer from Maharashtra. Periyar: E.V. Ramasamy Naicker, commonly known as Periyar, was a writer, social revolutionary, and politician who was one of the principal ideologues of the Self-Respect Movement. Begumpura, or “city without sorrow” expresses the notion of a casteless, classless utopia and was first formulated by Sant Ravidas (c. 1450-1520). Dalit Panthers was a revolutionary, anti-caste organization founded in 1972. It was based in Maharashtra and drew inspiration from the American Black Panther Party. Oliver Cox, Caste, Class, and Race: A Study in Social Dynamics (1948) Divya Cherian, Merchants of Virtue Meet the Savarnas: 2025 book by Ravikant Kisana Ramesh Bairy, Being Brahmin, Being Modern Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus Daniel Immerwahr, “Caste of Colony?” Nico Slate, Colored Cosmopolitanism W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction Ajantha Subramanian is Professor of Anthropology at CUNY Graduate Center and host of The Caste Pod. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

In this episode of The Counseling Psychologist podcast series, Dr. Han Na Lee talks about the article recently published in TCP titled, "Coalition or Othering? Asian Americans' Experiences of Discrimination, Collective Identity, and Intergroup Solidarity." 

In this episode of The Counseling Psychologist podcast series, Dr. Y. Joel Wong talks about the article recently published in TCP titled, "Cross-Racial Microaffirmations: Concepts and Applications." 

In this episode of The Counseling Psychologist podcast series, Dr. Alexander Fietzer talks about the article recently published in TCP titled, "A Review and Guide to Structural Equation Modeling in Counseling Psychology Research."

Topics covered in this episode: port-killer How we made Python's packaging library 3x faster CodSpeed Extras Joke Watch on YouTube About the show Sponsored by us! Support our work through: Our courses at Talk Python Training The Complete pytest Course Patreon Supporters Connect with the hosts Michael: @mkennedy@fosstodon.org / @mkennedy.codes (bsky) Brian: @brianokken@fosstodon.org / @brianokken.bsky.social Show: @pythonbytes@fosstodon.org / @pythonbytes.fm (bsky) Join us on YouTube at pythonbytes.fm/live to be part of the audience. Usually Monday at 11am PT. Older video versions available there too. Finally, if you want an artisanal, hand-crafted digest of every week of the show notes in email form? Add your name and email to our friends of the show list, we'll never share it. Michael #1: port-killer A powerful cross-platform port management tool for developers. Monitor ports, manage Kubernetes port forwards, integrate Cloudflare Tunnels, and kill processes with one click. Features:

Ben's new TCP backpressure explanation: conveyor belts full. Matt zooms out and mistakes his factory for a Pentium 2. Ben plans to switch to Linux gaming; Matt's start bar keeps popping up and he's had it.

In this episode of Wellness: Rebranded, we explore one of the most memorable emotional intelligence analogies you'll ever hear: “Emotions are like farts.” It's funny, unexpected, and shockingly accurate and it opens the door to a deeper conversation about what emotions really are, why they matter, and how to build a healthier relationship with them. Join us as we break down why emotions aren't “good” or “bad,” why suppressing them always backfires, and how understanding your emotional patterns becomes your internal GPS for living a more aligned, grounded life. In this episode: Why emotions are natural, unavoidable, and meant to be felt The real meaning of emotional intelligence (and why it matters for mental health) How fear shows up in everyday decision-making How to identify emotions beyond the basic five Why naming emotions increases self-awareness and reduces stress How childhood, modeling, and family dynamics shape emotional expression Why your reaction — not the emotion itself — determines the outcome Simple tools to start recognizing your emotions, including the feelings wheel and journaling   This episode is brought to you by TCP Youth Empowerment. Every child deserves someone in their corner. To sponsor a child, visit TCP to 44-321 or visit https://www.tcpyouthempowerment.org/   Connect with us!    The Ultimate Self Care Planner: https://elizabethharrisnutrition.ck.page/9e817ab37e   Elizabeth Harris, MS, RDN, LDN FB: Health and Healing with Intuitive Eating community https://www.facebook.com/groups/healthandhealingwithintuitiveeating Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ElizabethHarrisNutrition Free download to break up with diet culture: https://elizabethharrisnutrition.com/invisible-diet   Tara De Leon, Master Personal Trainer Email: FitnessTrainer19@hotmail.com Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tara_de_leon_fitness Join Tara's Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/5290e3f13e08/email-signup   Maria Winters, LCPC, NCC Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/coaching_therapist/ FB: https://www.facebook.com/MWcoachingtherapy Website: www.thecoachingtherapist.com

This is a recap of the top 10 posts on Hacker News on November 15, 2025. This podcast was generated by wondercraft.ai (00:30): Our investigation into the suspicious pressure on Archive.todayOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45936460&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(01:52): AirPods libreated from Apple's ecosystemOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45941596&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(03:14): TCP, the workhorse of the internetOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45935503&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(04:37): AMD GPUs Go BrrrOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45934416&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(05:59): I can't recommend Grafana anymoreOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45934940&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(07:21): Nevada Governor's office covered up Boring Co safety violationsOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45939798&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(08:44): Messing with scraper botsOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45935729&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(10:06): Spec-Driven Development: The Waterfall Strikes BackOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45935763&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(11:28): Windhawk Windows classic theme mod for Windows 11Original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45938723&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(12:51): One Handed KeyboardOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45936262&utm_source=wondercraft_aiThis is a third-party project, independent from HN and YC. Text and audio generated using AI, by wondercraft.ai. Create your own studio quality podcast with text as the only input in seconds at app.wondercraft.ai. Issues or feedback? We'd love to hear from you: team@wondercraft.ai

Review of lead II ECG characteristics, rules to identify first and third degree heart blocks, and treatment following the ACLS Bradycardia algorithm.To pass ACLS, you will need to be able to identify common rhythms on a monitor during your mega code and ECG strips on your written exam.Review of normal ECG morphology in lead II.Characteristics of first-degree heart block.Characteristics of third-degree (complete) AV block.Treatment of unstable patients in third degree block following the ACLS Bradycardia algorithm.Special considerations for use of Atropine when patients are in a third-degree heart block.The use of TCP, Dopamine, & Epinephrine drip for unstable bradycardic patients refractory to Atropine.Good luck with your ACLS class!Links: Buy Me a Coffee at https://buymeacoffee.com/paultaylor Free Prescription Discount Card - Get your free drug discount card to save money on prescription medications for you and your pets: https://safemeds.vip/savePass ACLS Web Site - Other ACLS-related resources: https://passacls.com@Pass-ACLS-Podcast on LinkedIn

Scans for WSUS: Port 8530/8531 TCP, CVE-2025-59287 We did observe an increase in scans for TCP ports 8530 and 8531. These ports are associated with WSUS and the scans are likely looking for servers vulnerable to CVE-2025-59287 https://isc.sans.edu/diary/Scans%20for%20Port%208530%208531%20%28TCP%29.%20Likely%20related%20to%20WSUS%20Vulnerability%20CVE-2025-59287/32440 BADCANDY Webshell Implant Deployed via The Australian Signals Directorate warns that they still see Cisco IOS XE devices not patches for CVE-2023-20198. A threat actor is now using this vulnerability to deploy the BADCANDY implant for persistent access https://www.cyber.gov.au/about-us/view-all-content/alerts-and-advisories/badcandy Improvements to Open VSX Security In reference to the Glassworm incident, OpenVSX published a blog post outlining some of the security improvements they will make to prevent a repeat of this incident. https://blogs.eclipse.org/post/mika l-barbero/open-vsx-security-update-october-2025

This week the crew sits down with Brian London, Sommelier and wine buyer for one of Sonoma County's most beloved spots, Table Culture Provisions. Known for its eclectic and adventurous wine list, TCP has become a favorite among locals and winemakers alike — and Brian is the man behind its carefully curated selections. After falling in love with France during a trip with his fiancée, Brian began importing small-production wines to the States, eventually launching 4Play Wines, a boutique distributorship focused on producers with meticulous farming practices and distinct personalities. He shares stories from his travels, insights into sourcing hidden gems, and even kicks things off by pouring a 2014 Beaujolais and some White Burgundy — instantly winning over the hosts. Plus, a special drop-in from Isabel Gassier wraps up this lively and wine-soaked conversation. [Ep 389] @tcprovisions | @4playwines | @isabelgassierwine

Today we welcome Ellen Lunay, the founder of Here: A Pop-Up Shop in Annapolis, whose life took a dramatic turn when a routine mammogram in August 2022 revealed breast cancer. At 54, at the same moment she'd just dropped her oldest daughter off at college and was prepping for her fall pop-up shop, Ellen found herself walking through surgery, radiation, business care and motherhood all at once.  In this episode, El opens up about what carried her through: the power of community over competition, learning how to ask for help, embracing grace and boundaries, and why sharing your story matters. If you're navigating a health challenge, a business hurdle, or wondering how to build meaningful connections in your life, you'll want to hear this. In this episode: How Ellen discovered the diagnosis and how she responded immediately. Why the community she built through her business became one of her greatest supports. The difference between being the giver and being willing to receive help. How naming your story actually helps calm your nervous system and guide decisions. Why rest, grace and boundaries are essential — especially when you're used to “hustle.” What's changed for Ellen for the better since her diagnosis — how she now shows up differently in business, in motherhood, in life. Words of encouragement for anyone facing big change or a health scare: how to breathe, how to advocate, how to accept help. This episode was brought to you by Leading Lady Coaching. Learn more here: https://leadinglady-coaching.com/ This episode is brought to you by TCP Youth Empowerment. Every child deserves someone in their corner. To sponsor a child, visit TCP to 44-321 or visit https://www.tcpyouthempowerment.org/   Connect with El: Website: https://www.hereapopupshop.com/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hereapopupshop/ Read El's Chapter in We Lead: https://www.amazon.com/We-Lead-Connection-Community-Collaboration/dp/1961493527   Connect with us!    The Ultimate Self Care Planner: https://elizabethharrisnutrition.ck.page/9e817ab37e   Elizabeth Harris, MS, RDN, LDN FB: Health and Healing with Intuitive Eating community https://www.facebook.com/groups/healthandhealingwithintuitiveeating Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ElizabethHarrisNutrition Free download to break up with diet culture: https://elizabethharrisnutrition.com/invisible-diet   Tara De Leon, Master Personal Trainer Email: FitnessTrainer19@hotmail.com Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tara_de_leon_fitness Join Tara's Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/5290e3f13e08/email-signup Maria Winters, LCPC, NCC Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/coaching_therapist/ FB: https://www.facebook.com/MWcoachingtherapy Website: www.thecoachingtherapist.com

When you think about health, you probably picture food and exercise. But the truth is, health is shaped far more by social determinants of health—the conditions in which we live, learn, work, and connect. In this episode we break down what social determinants of health really are, why they matter, and how they can shape your wellbeing just as much (or more) than diet and exercise. By understanding the social determinants of health, you can drop the shame, find more compassion, and focus on the areas of wellness that truly support your life. You'll learn: What social determinants of health mean and why they're often overlooked in wellness culture The surprising impact of your zip code and neighborhood on life expectancy How education and income level are tied to long-term health outcomes The role of community and social support in reducing risk of early death Why chronic stress and financial wellbeing can affect every organ system How sleep, creativity, volunteering, and career satisfaction improve wellbeing beyond the gym or kitchen What NEAT (non-exercise activity thermogenesis) means and why everyday movement matters If you've ever felt pressured to “eat perfectly” or “work out more” to be healthy, this episode will help you zoom out. You'll see how whole-person wellbeing is shaped by environment, relationships, and access—not just personal choices.    Wellness: Rebranded is turning 3 years old! We are hosting a live birthday party on October 23rd in Annapolis and would love for you to join. Learn more about the party here: [LINK] This episode was brought to you by Leading Lady Coaching. Learn more here: https://leadinglady-coaching.com/ This episode is brought to you by TCP Youth Empowerment. Every child deserves someone in their corner. To sponsor a child, visit TCP to 44-321 or visit https://www.tcpyouthempowerment.org/ Resources:  Our episode on 10k steps: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/wellness-rebranded-intuitive-eating-diet-culture-mental/id1651744916?i=1000716434613 Intuitive Eating Starter Kit: Use code PODCAST to get this for just $14 https://elizabethharrisnutrition.com/starterkit Tara's in-person Progressive Relaxation class – November 18th at 7 PM – Relax and Renew: An Hour of Progressive Relaxation with Tara: https://checkout.square.site/merchant/FAFGA8EEASMD9/checkout/OQPHVJYKUKEMAJPRBFIJ2QDX Connect with us!    The Ultimate Self Care Planner: https://elizabethharrisnutrition.ck.page/9e817ab37e   Elizabeth Harris, MS, RDN, LDN FB: Health and Healing with Intuitive Eating community https://www.facebook.com/groups/healthandhealingwithintuitiveeating Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ElizabethHarrisNutrition Free download to break up with diet culture: https://elizabethharrisnutrition.com/invisible-diet   Tara De Leon, Master Personal Trainer Email: FitnessTrainer19@hotmail.com Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tara_de_leon_fitness Join Tara's Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/5290e3f13e08/email-signup Maria Winters, LCPC, NCC Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/coaching_therapist/ FB: https://www.facebook.com/MWcoachingtherapy Website: www.thecoachingtherapist.com

Start Your Transformation Now  In this inspiring episode of the Transformational Interview Series, Jim speaks with Sarah Johnson, a former TCP student whose journey from fear and self-doubt to authenticity and empowerment will resonate with anyone who's ever felt “not enough.” Once trapped in comparison and victim mentality, Sarah discovered through TCP how to let go of judgment, stop blaming others, and take full responsibility for her life. The result? A more peaceful mind, a thriving marriage, and a new career aligned with her purpose.  Sarah opens up about the struggles that held her back—fear of judgment, financial scarcity, and a lifelong tendency to please others—and how TCP gave her the tools to finally see her blind spots. She shares how shifting her focus from “What will people think?” to “How can I help others?” unlocked her authentic voice, healed her relationships, and led her to build her own business helping others uncover the hidden gifts in their shadows. If you've ever felt stuck in fear, blamed your circumstances, or struggled with money and self-worth, Sarah's story will show you that transformation is possible when you decide to step fully into responsibility and courage.  What You'll Discover in This Episode:  Facing the Fear of Being Seen (03:09) How Sarah's fear of judgment and comparison kept her small—and the simple shift Jim gave her that changed everything.  Letting Go of “What People Think” (08:17) The powerful breakthrough that allowed Sarah to stop ruminating, show up authentically, and care less about outside opinions.  From Blame to Responsibility (09:45) How releasing blame toward her husband and others gave her peace of mind and transformed her marriage.  Money Struggles and Scarcity (21:17) Sarah's cycle of debt and chasing “the next course”—and how TCP helped her take ownership and turn things around.  Rising Self-Worth (25:16) Her journey from a self-worth score of 2 to a 10, and why taking courageous action made all the difference.  The Gift of Helping Others (27:06) Why her true transformation came from serving others and stepping into her purpose of helping people see their shadows.  Listen, apply, and enjoy!  Transformational Takeaway  Transformation begins when you step out of fear and take full responsibility for your life. Sarah's story shows that even the deepest patterns of victimhood, blame, and scarcity can be rewritten into empowerment, authenticity, and abundance. The very fears that hold you back are the doorways to your growth—if you're willing to walk through them.  Let's Connect:  Instagram | Facebook | YouTube | LinkedIn  LIKED THE EPISODE?  If you're the kind of person who likes to help others, then share this with your friends and family. If you have found value, they will too. Please leave a review on Apple Podcasts so we can reach more people.  Listening on Spotify? Please leave a comment below. We would love to hear from you!  With gratitude, Jim 

Start Your Transformation Now  In this powerful episode of the Transformational Interview Series, Jim sits down with Gail Freis, a commercial insurance agent and entrepreneur from Chicago, whose life was turned upside down by an unimaginable tragedy. Four minutes into her wedding ceremony, her fiancé's sister collapsed and passed away. The ripple effect shattered Gail's relationship, finances, and self-worth. But through TCP, she rebuilt her life, doubling her income year after year, discovering her true values, and transforming from victim mentality into empowerment and resourcefulness.  Gail candidly shares her struggles with money, scarcity, and self-sabotage, and how TCP helped her uncover subconscious patterns, release victimhood, and step into responsibility. Her story highlights the pivotal role of mindset, boundaries, and self-worth in creating financial freedom and emotional healing.  If you've ever felt stuck in scarcity, overwhelmed by tragedy, or trapped in victim thinking, this episode will inspire you to find your resourcefulness and reclaim your power. What You'll Discover in This Episode:  The Wedding Tragedy That Changed Everything (05:04) How one shocking moment during her wedding ceremony forced Gail into survival mode and became the catalyst for her transformation.  Breaking Free from Victim Mentality (16:00) The subtle ways she lived in victimhood without realizing it—and the moment she finally took full responsibility.  Rewriting Scarcity and Money Stories (18:59) How Gail dismantled her lifelong money struggles and shifted into abundance and resourcefulness.  The $40,000 Lesson (20:30) Why a devastating betrayal became her turning point for never allowing lack or exploitation to control her again.  Doubling Her Income Every Year (25:43) The mindset shifts and responsibility that led Gail to double her income annually since TCP.  Boundaries That Reshape Relationships (27:00) How learning to set boundaries eliminated toxic people and invited healthier connections.  From Scarcity to a Porsche (31:28) How reclaiming self-worth and resourcefulness allowed Gail to create abundance—and even drive her dream car.  Listen, apply, and enjoy!  Transformational Takeaway  Your past tragedies and limiting stories don't define your future—your choices do. As Gail discovered, freedom begins when you release victimhood, set clear boundaries, and take radical responsibility for how you show up. Transformation isn't about avoiding pain; it's about finding the resourcefulness to rise above it and create the life you truly deserve.  Let's Connect:  Instagram | Facebook | YouTube | LinkedIn  LIKED THE EPISODE?  If you're the kind of person who likes to help others, then share this with your friends and family. If you have found value, they will too. Please leave a review on Apple Podcasts so we can reach more people.  Listening on Spotify? Please leave a comment below. We would love to hear from you!  With gratitude, Jim 

Start Your Transformation Now  In this inspiring episode of the Transformational Interview Series, Jim sits down with Sally McMurray, a TCP graduate from Sydney, Australia, who turned around three of the biggest areas in her life—health, marriage, and money. From living with Crohn's disease for over 40 years to being on the brink of divorce and feeling stuck in her business, Sally's journey is a testament to the power of mindset shifts, responsibility, and self-healing.  Sally opens up about how stress-triggered Crohn's was controlling her life, the control patterns that nearly destroyed her 30-year marriage, and the fear-based thinking that kept her business small. She shares the pivotal TCP tools—like self-hypnosis, letting go of control, and redefining her identity—that have helped her heal physically, reconnect with her husband, and embrace her business as a true career.  If you've ever felt trapped by a diagnosis, stuck in a strained relationship, or overwhelmed by money anxiety, this episode will show you how lasting transformation is possible when you're willing to be honest with yourself and take action.  What You'll Discover in This Episode:  Healing Is an Inside Job (07:12) Why calming the mind allowed Sally's body to finally start healing from a decades-long chronic condition.  Letting Go of Control to Save a Marriage (10:33) How releasing the need to control everything transformed her 30-year relationship.  From Red Hot Mess to Responsibility (12:43) The TCP module that revealed her own patterns—and shifted her from blaming to owning her actions.  Treating Business Like a Career, Not a Hobby (21:02) The mindset shift that helped Sally commit fully to her jewelry business.  Living as a ‘Polished Rock' (28:24) How letting life's challenges roll off her has brought true freedom and lightness.  The Power of the TCP Community (34:19) Why support, accountability, and shared breakthroughs accelerate personal transformation.  Listen, apply, and enjoy!  Transformational Takeaway  Your diagnosis, relationship status, or financial situation does not define you—your mindset does. As Sally discovered, lasting change comes from within. By letting go of control, calming your mind, and committing fully to your own growth, you create the space for healing, deeper connection, and greater abundance. Transformation isn't about avoiding life's challenges—it's about meeting them as your most powerful self.  Let's Connect:  Instagram | Facebook | YouTube | LinkedIn  LIKED THE EPISODE?  If you're the kind of person who likes to help others, then share this with your friends and family. If you have found value, they will too. Please leave a review on Apple Podcasts so we can reach more people.  Listening on Spotify? Please leave a comment below. We would love to hear from you!  With gratitude, Jim 

Start Your Transformation Now  In this inspiring episode of the Transformational Interview Series, Jim sits down with Roel Van Oostenbruggen, a TCP graduate who transformed his life by confronting his deepest fears. From feeling the pressure to “do it right” to overcoming lifelong patterns of anxiety and self-doubt, Roel's story is a raw, relatable look at what it takes to break free from fear-driven living and reclaim your personal power.  Roel shares how his fear showed up in hidden ways—in his marriage, parenting, money mindset, and even in starting his business—and how TCP gave him the tools to finally stop letting fear dictate his choices. You'll hear the pivotal moments when he recognized that anger was masking fear, the mindset shifts that allowed him to become more present with his family, and how embracing discomfort opened the door to authentic confidence and connection.  If you've ever let fear keep you from living fully—or doubted your ability to change—this conversation will show you that transformation is possible when you're willing to see yourself clearly and step into your power.  What You'll Discover in This Episode:  The “Stick Behind the Door” Approach to Showing Up Fully (03:13) Why investing in yourself creates the commitment needed for deep transformation.  From Perfectionism to Progress (07:32) How Roel broke free from the need to “do it right” and started embracing growth over perfection.  Recognizing Fear in Disguise (10:19) The moment Roel realized that his anger was actually fear—and how that awareness changed everything.  How Facing Fear Strengthened His Marriage and Parenting (17:58) The surprising ways personal transformation improved his relationship and parenting presence.  The Turning Point in His Business Confidence (27:07) How he stopped avoiding self-promotion and began naturally attracting clients.  Why Pressure Can Be the Forge for Your Potential (28:14) Reframing pressure as a growth tool instead of something to avoid.  The Master Thought Formula in Action (31:09) How Roel used this TCP tool to handle a stressful business situation with clarity and calm.  Listen, apply, and enjoy!  Transformational Takeaway  Fear will rob you of your highest potential if you let it. As Roel discovered, the key isn't to eliminate fear—it's to stop making decisions from it. When you recognize fear for what it is and choose to act from your values instead, you step into your true power. Life becomes less about avoiding discomfort and more about leaning into it, knowing you have the strength to handle whatever comes your way.  Let's Connect:  Instagram | Facebook | YouTube | LinkedIn  LIKED THE EPISODE?  If you're the kind of person who likes to help others, then share this with your friends and family. If you have found value, they will too. Please leave a review on Apple Podcasts so we can reach more people.  Listening on Spotify? Please leave a comment below. We would love to hear from you!  With gratitude, Jim