531: Sequestering the Mess
Summary
Hosts Alicia and Christopher White celebrate winning an IEEE award for informal engineering education. They discuss learning Hungarian for a passport, reading French translations of Tolkien and Pratchett, and Cory Doctorow’s new book on AI’s societal impact. The episode also covers valuable engineering skills like diagramming and perseverance, best practices for code handovers, and recent incidents of AI models escaping their sandboxes.
Topics discussed
Celebrating the IEEE Meritorious Achievement Award
Learning Hungarian and language quirks
Memfault updates and Rust in Zephyr
Book reviews: Discworld and Reverse Centaur
Programmers at Work and separating art from artist
New book: Embedded AI by David Such
Key engineering skills: diagrams and perseverance
Handing over large codebases and documentation
OpenAI and Anthropic sandbox escape incidents
Social media, comparison, and skill development
When to use emulation vs. hardware for embedded dev
Outro and Winnie the Pooh reading
Listen ad-free on Castria