Significant Bits

Josh Bleecher Snyder•sigpod.dev

Technology

Education

Courses

Substantive, in-depth technical conversations about software engineering (broadly construed).

Last refreshed: August 21st, 2025 at 1:35 AM ⓘ

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Episodes

Read/Write/Nil with Michael Knyszek and Michael Pratt

Please read important erratum at end of these notes! Astute listeners will notice that this is the first episode in over a year. I recorded not one but two awesome interviews...and then failed to edit and publish them. Guilt over this haunted me. I have finally accepted I must declare moral bankruptcy on this front to be able to continue the podcast; I apologize. (I may yet bring those episodes back to life, but I will no longer block on them.) In this episode, Michael, Michael, and I discuss an...

Jul 04, 2025•57 min•Ep. 6

Iota: whisper.cpp

Links: my little whisper.cpp bug fix why the logits were calculated inconsistently wav2vec2 on arxiv and huggingface the openai whisper asr model announcement beam search patience top notch guide to CTC the bitter lesson (and in meme form ) Errata: * I referred in the show to LLMs as encoder-decoder models. Most modern LLMs are decoder-only. * I messed up readability at Google. It means approvability, apparently. 🤷...

Mar 27, 2024•35 min•Ep. 5

Iota: Random algorithms

In which I ramble about randomness and random algorithms. Now with theme music! Paper Cuts planned reading: Habitability and Piecemeal Growth, in Patterns of Software (just pages 7–16 of the book, which is pages 25-32 of the PDF) Selected links: * SIEVE cache replacement algorithm * Power of two random choices * Marc Brooker's blog * Random forests * Count Min Sketch * Monte Carlo Simulation * Random projection * T-Digest * The fix for my embarrassing compiler bug...

Feb 15, 2024•22 min•Ep. 4

Write It Down with Shay Nehmad

Shay Nehmad on how writing is the key to becoming a better engineer, how to do it, and more. Links: * Cup O' Go podcast * Code Complete book * Shay's blog * Obsidian and Logseq

Feb 05, 2024•42 min•Ep. 3

Litestream and LiteFS with Ben Johnson

This was a fun and decidedly humbling conversation with Ben Johnson about SQLite, databases, Litestream, and LiteFS. Links: Ben on GitHub Litestream LiteFS

Jan 23, 2024•36 min•Ep. 2

Iota: Rolling Hashes and FastCDC

No guest for this inaugural episode--just me this round. I cover the basics of rolling hashes and FastCDC, which appears to be the state of the art in content defined chunking. Mentioned in the episode: 8 bit hash bug FastCDC paper Perkeep (once called Camlistore, oops) bup rsync I know the audio is slightly subpar (to say nothing of the content). But I think I know how to improve for next time. Finding my feet. :) Feedback welcome: josh@sigpod.dev...

Dec 31, 2023•23 min•Ep. 1

Trailer

The plan: Guests teach me substantive topics in software engineering, and I ask dumb questions. Please send guest suggestions, topic ideas, excitement, and monopoly money to josh@sigpod.dev

Nov 25, 2023•56 sec

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