transcript.json

{
  "items": [
    {
      "speaker_name": "Christopher",
      "text": "on its own and and it has this sort of like a it's like a you know old tree in the forest, you know, kind of thing that you've built, so.",
      "timestamp": "00:00"
    },
    {
      "speaker_name": "Simon",
      "text": "There's also like I feel like with online writing, never ever like stick something online just expect people to find it. You have to So one of the great things about having a blog is I can be in a conversation about something and somebody ask a question, I can say, oh, I wrote about that two and a half years ago and give people a link.",
      "timestamp": "00:06"
    },
    {
      "speaker_name": "Simon",
      "text": "So I'm constantly giving people links to things I've talked about in the past.",
      "timestamp": "00:21"
    },
    {
      "speaker_name": "Christopher",
      "text": "It's kind of like your projects uh on GitHub also.",
      "timestamp": "00:25"
    },
    {
      "speaker_name": "Simon",
      "text": "Exactly.",
      "timestamp": "00:28"
    },
    {
      "speaker_name": "Christopher",
      "text": "I know, I guess people always said that before where they're like start searching for something that and then find the result.",
      "timestamp": "00:29"
    },
    {
      "speaker_name": "Christopher",
      "text": "Oh, I wrote about that.",
      "timestamp": "00:35"
    },
    {
      "speaker_name": "Simon",
      "text": "Oh, completely. That happens to me so much. Honestly, I've got, like I said, I've got 850 projects, which means that sometimes I will forget a project exists and I will go looking for a solution to something, there will be a library that I wrote that I had fallen out of my head.",
      "timestamp": "00:36"
    },
    {
      "speaker_name": "Simon",
      "text": "That's that's deeply entertaining when that happens.",
      "timestamp": "00:51"
    },
    {
      "speaker_name": "Christopher",
      "text": "Yeah, yeah.",
      "timestamp": "00:54"
    },
    {
      "speaker_name": "Christopher",
      "text": "Do you think it's easier than ever to start a blog?",
      "timestamp": "00:54"
    },
    {
      "speaker_name": "Simon",
      "text": "Well, I don't know. Like, one of the things I haven't quite got my head around is I keep on hearing rumors that Google doesn't credit new sites nearly as much as it used to.",
      "timestamp": "00:57"
    },
    {
      "speaker_name": "Simon",
      "text": "But I but these like it's SEO, there are rumors about everything.",
      "timestamp": "01:07"
    },
    {
      "speaker_name": "Simon",
      "text": "So it might be that because my blog has existed effectively for 20 years, I've got so much sort of built up like credibility with Google that I get",
      "timestamp": "01:10"
    },
    {
      "speaker_name": "Christopher",
      "text": "Yeah. credentials.",
      "timestamp": "01:18"
    },
    {
      "speaker_name": "Simon",
      "text": "I get results. And I if that is the case, I say start your blog now and in 10 years time,",
      "timestamp": "01:19"
    },
    {
      "speaker_name": "Christopher",
      "text": "Yeah, yeah.",
      "timestamp": "01:24"
    },
    {
      "speaker_name": "Simon",
      "text": "Yeah, that that that investment starts paying off in terms of the the search ranking. Although who knows what search will look like in three years time at this point, you know.",
      "timestamp": "01:25"
    },
    {
      "speaker_name": "Christopher",
      "text": "Yeah, I feel like the benefits that you outlined already are there too though. The the idea that it's this repository of you know, what you're doing, what you've created. you do a lot of link blogging, which is interesting. So it's kind of like this powerful notepad and tool.",
      "timestamp": "01:32"
    },
    {
      "speaker_name": "Christopher",
      "text": "And then you also social media it's just who knows how stable it's going to be. You know, it's just crazy.",
      "timestamp": "01:48"
    },
    {
      "speaker_name": "Christopher",
      "text": "And so like all the stuff that you've written in those places, if you've done any kind of work and made big link type of stuff, that stuff should be on a blog or, you know, links to it.",
      "timestamp": "01:57"
    },
    {
      "speaker_name": "Simon",
      "text": "Absolutely. Like I love there's that philosophy, I forget the acronym, but there's a a philosophy where you publish on your own site and oh posse, p o s s e, publish on own site syndicate elsewhere.",
      "timestamp": "02:07"
    },
    {
      "speaker_name": "Simon",
      "text": "So everything goes on your blog first and then you post a link to it on all of the other platforms. Of course some of the platforms like the Twitter algorithm penalizes links these days.",
      "timestamp": "02:16"
    },
    {
      "speaker_name": "Christopher",
      "text": "Yeah, I know. Yeah.",
      "timestamp": "02:26"
    },
    {
      "speaker_name": "Simon",
      "text": "Very frustrating. Blue sky doesn't, right?",
      "timestamp": "02:27"
    },
    {
      "speaker_name": "Simon",
      "text": "So and down. So we've got our own ways around this now.",
      "timestamp": "02:28"
    },
    {
      "speaker_name": "Simon",
      "text": "And the other thing I think that's really important, I keep on focusing on the idea of credibility. Like building credibility is so important.",
      "timestamp": "02:33"
    },
    {
      "speaker_name": "Simon",
      "text": "Like when I'm looking for sources of information, I look for people who have earned credibility with me and I want to earn credibility myself with other people.",
      "timestamp": "02:40"
    },
    {
      "speaker_name": "Simon",
      "text": "And having like 20 years of blog content gives you instant credibility.",
      "timestamp": "02:48"
    },
    {
      "speaker_name": "Simon",
      "text": "Like I can point you to my SQL light tag on my blog, which goes back to 2003 when I first heard about SQL light, you know.",
      "timestamp": "02:51"
    },
    {
      "speaker_name": "Christopher",
      "text": "Right. Yeah.",
      "timestamp": "02:58"
    },
    {
      "speaker_name": "Simon",
      "text": "And that so I love that.",
      "timestamp": "02:58"
    },
    {
      "speaker_name": "Simon",
      "text": "I feel like and that's the kind of thing where credibility is accumulated over time. And it doesn't take much like a link blog about a subject, run that for six months and you will become one of the top 0.1% people on earth for credibility on that subject, just from publishing a few notes and linking to a bunch of things about it.",
      "timestamp": "03:00"
    },
    {
      "speaker_name": "Christopher",
      "text": "Yeah. You got to start. That's the trick.",
      "timestamp": "03:18"
    },
    {
      "speaker_name": "Simon",
      "text": "Yeah.",
      "timestamp": "03:21"
    },
    {
      "speaker_name": "Christopher",
      "text": "As you started this process of writing about and researching LLMs, I guess maybe we can we can cover",
      "timestamp": "03:22"
    },
    {
      "speaker_name": "Christopher",
      "text": "some one of these things that you've written about recently, at least on social media, how people have been saying, Oh, you're a shill about LLMs, which I think is really kind of fascinating because",
      "timestamp": "03:28"
    },
    {
      "speaker_name": "Christopher",
      "text": "in a way, there's like these camps, you know, like people who are completely one side or the other and you know, either they're, you know, they're completely useless or, you know, or they're, you know, going to change every single thing that's out there.",
      "timestamp": "03:39"
    },
    {
      "speaker_name": "Christopher",
      "text": "There's a lot of there's a real huge hype uh cycle that's happening.",
      "timestamp": "03:54"
    },
    {
      "speaker_name": "Christopher",
      "text": "And my co-host Christoph Chadeau, he's been programming longer than me. You know, we're similar age, but I went off and did a whole career with music and other things and then I kind of got back into programming over the last uh five, six years.",
      "timestamp": "03:58"
    },
    {
      "speaker_name": "Christopher",
      "text": "And so he talks about AI winters and and says, oh, we're headed for another one.",
      "timestamp": "04:11"
    },
    {
      "speaker_name": "Christopher",
      "text": "And I don't know. Like I don't know kind of what to look at and so forth there, but I I kind of wonder like where do you feel like you fit on the AI hype meter?",
      "timestamp": "04:16"
    },
    {
      "speaker_name": "Simon",
      "text": "Gotcha. between things. Yeah.",
      "timestamp": "04:24"
    },
    {
      "speaker_name": "Simon",
      "text": "So, I've just started I just realized that I kind of think of it as a grid where you've got two axes. You've got the useless to useful access. And then you've got the the evil to to to opposite of evil access access.",
      "timestamp": "04:26"
    },
    {
      "speaker_name": "Simon",
      "text": "And I think I am very far across on the youth, like the one argument I will I the one thing I will not accept is people saying, no, these things are useless.",
      "timestamp": "04:40"
    },
    {
      "speaker_name": "Simon",
      "text": "Like that. Okay.",
      "timestamp": "04:48"
    },
    {
      "speaker_name": "Simon",
      "text": "That I have a very strong opinion. They are useful if you understand how to use them, which is very non-obvious and unintuitive.",
      "timestamp": "04:49"
    },
    {
      "speaker_name": "Christopher",
      "text": "Yeah, I think we want to talk about that a lot today.",
      "timestamp": "04:57"
    },
    {
      "speaker_name": "Simon",
      "text": "Yeah, as far as how it connects with Python, yeah.",
      "timestamp": "04:58"
    },
    {
      "speaker_name": "Simon",
      "text": "So I'm very hard very far over on the No, these things are useful if you know what you're doing with them.",
      "timestamp": "05:01"
    },
    {
      "speaker_name": "Simon",
      "text": "And then in terms of the evil to to good, I think I am right in the middle.",
      "timestamp": "05:05"
    },
    {
      "speaker_name": "Simon",
      "text": "Like all of the neutral. I think yeah, absolutely because almost all of the negative things that people say about about LLMs are true.",
      "timestamp": "05:09"
    },
    {
      "speaker_name": "Simon",
      "text": "Like almost all of them.",
      "timestamp": "05:18"
    },
    {
      "speaker_name": "Simon",
      "text": "Um they do make things up all the time. The environmental impact of them is is it is is big. They are trained on a giant pile of unlicensed data.",
      "timestamp": "05:20"
    },
    {
      "speaker_name": "Simon",
      "text": "Like you can call them a plagiarism machine, it's not exactly there's a lot of truth to that.",
      "timestamp": "05:27"
    },
    {
      "speaker_name": "Christopher",
      "text": "Right.",
      "timestamp": "05:32"
    },
    {
      "speaker_name": "Simon",
      "text": "And the way people can use there are many harmful things that you can do with them.",
      "timestamp": "05:33"
    },
    {
      "speaker_name": "Christopher",
      "text": "Right.",
      "timestamp": "05:36"
    },
    {
      "speaker_name": "Simon",
      "text": "On the flip side, I think a lot of there are a lot of really positive like like uses that people don't people who are completely anti LLM don't really consider.",
      "timestamp": "05:37"
    },
    {
      "speaker_name": "Simon",
      "text": "A couple of my favorite examples are firstly, for translation, oh my goodness. Like every human language, we now have a translator that won't just do a straight up Google translate style translation. It'll answer follow-up questions.",
      "timestamp": "05:46"
    },
    {
      "speaker_name": "Simon",
      "text": "You can say, oh, that seems a little bit vague, which if this is um like Mexican Spanish as opposed to Guatemalan Spanish, could this word have a different meaning?",
      "timestamp": "06:00"
    },
    {
      "speaker_name": "Simon",
      "text": "Those kinds of things. Like that's phenomenal.",
      "timestamp": "06:07"
    },
    {
      "speaker_name": "Simon",
      "text": "It's terrible news if you're a professional translator.",
      "timestamp": "06:10"
    },
    {
      "speaker_name": "Christopher",
      "text": "Like Yeah.",
      "timestamp": "06:12"
    },
    {
      "speaker_name": "Simon",
      "text": "That's but",
      "timestamp": "06:13"
    },
    {
      "speaker_name": "Simon",
      "text": "on that point, I kind of feel there are seven billion people on earth who need translation abilities made presented to them, automating those does make a huge impact.",
      "timestamp": "06:14"
    },
    {
      "speaker_name": "Simon",
      "text": "And then the other one that I keep coming back to is our society is set up such that having like good formal writing skills is a incredible superpower and it's often used to discriminate against people. Like if you need to write to the local town council complaining about a street light outside of your house, you need to know how to compose a formal letter and all of that kind of junk.",
      "timestamp": "06:24"
    },
    {
      "speaker_name": "Christopher",
      "text": "Yeah. So it doesn't get filed away in the circular bin. Yeah.",
      "timestamp": "06:46"
    },
    {
      "speaker_name": "Simon",
      "text": "That's solved as well. Like if if if I need to coach somebody with English as a second language into writing a formal letter complaining about a pot hole, these tools will do that for them really well. And I love that.",
      "timestamp": "06:49"
    },
    {
      "speaker_name": "Simon",
      "text": "I love that we've broken the relationship between ability to write in a certain sort of formal way and, you know, ability to to actually have an impact on the world.",
      "timestamp": "06:59"
    },
    {
      "speaker_name": "Simon",
      "text": "There are plenty of ways that could go wrong as well. But honestly, like that's such a thing to be celebrated.",
      "timestamp": "07:09"
    },
    {
      "speaker_name": "Christopher",
      "text": "Yeah.",
      "timestamp": "07:14"
    },
    {
      "speaker_name": "Christopher",
      "text": "Yeah, so I feel like that's kind of where like the writing part is directly right into code there.",
      "timestamp": "07:14"
    },
    {
      "speaker_name": "Christopher",
      "text": "And what's sort of fascinating to me and very hard for gosh, the layman, the person kind of coming into this or who I speak to a lot with the podcast, beginner and intermediate coder, wow, there's so many tools. You know, there's like this power ranking chart that you linked to from time to time.",
      "timestamp": "07:20"
    },
    {
      "speaker_name": "Christopher",
      "text": "And then it's like, well, where do I begin? And, you know, what are tools that kind of work in Python code?",
      "timestamp": "07:35"
    },
    {
      "speaker_name": "Christopher",
      "text": "And so I don't even know quite where to kind of dig into this topic.",
      "timestamp": "07:43"
    },
    {
      "speaker_name": "Christopher",
      "text": "Do you have a suggestion of like where we might start to think of like, okay, well, I want to write Python code with an LLM?",
      "timestamp": "07:47"
    },
    {
      "speaker_name": "Simon",
      "text": "Absolutely. Yeah, where would you start?",
      "timestamp": "07:55"
    },
    {
      "speaker_name": "Simon",
      "text": "So the the good news is the two best languages for LLMs are Python and JavaScript because there's so much example code out there in the in the the training sets.",
      "timestamp": "07:56"
    },
    {
      "speaker_name": "Simon",
      "text": "So, actually, genuinely, you cannot go wrong with picking an LLM for Python. If you pick one of the the the sort of more powerful, the sort of top tier ones, they all do an amazing job.",
      "timestamp": "08:05"
    },
    {
      "speaker_name": "Christopher",
      "text": "Okay. They've all been trained on that stuff.",
      "timestamp": "08:14"
    },
    {
      "speaker_name": "Simon",
      "text": "They've all been trained on huge amounts of this stuff.",
      "timestamp": "08:16"
    },
    {
      "speaker_name": "Simon",
      "text": "So, the top ones right now, it's um uh GPT 40, that's the open AI chat GPT one. Claude 3.5 Sonic from Anthropic, Gemini 1.5 Pro from Google.",
      "timestamp": "08:18"
    },
    {
      "speaker_name": "Simon",
      "text": "though and then the new entrant is Deepseek V3, this one that was released on Christmas day for free by a Chinese AI lab and they didn't even document it. They literally dumped this giant blob on Christmas day and didn't write about it. It was amazing. It was the most cyberpunk thing ever.",
      "timestamp": "08:28"
    },
    {
      "speaker_name": "Christopher",
      "text": "That's a weird Christmas gift.",
      "timestamp": "08:46"
    },
    {
      "speaker_name": "Simon",
      "text": "It really is.",
      "timestamp": "08:48"
    },
    {
      "speaker_name": "Christopher",
      "text": "Yeah.",
      "timestamp": "08:49"
    },
    {
      "speaker_name": "Simon",
      "text": "So the the llama models from Meta, which are openly licensed, those are really good for Python as well.",
      "timestamp": "08:50"
    },
    {
      "speaker_name": "Simon",
      "text": "So, given that they're all good at it, the one that I'd pick first is actually um Chat GPT because of this feature it has called code interpreter.",
      "timestamp": "08:55"
    },
    {
      "speaker_name": "Christopher",
      "text": "Okay.",
      "timestamp": "09:03"
    },
    {
      "speaker_name": "Simon",
      "text": "This is the thing where Chat GPT can not just write Python, it can then run the Python in little like Kubernetes sandbox and it can see what comes back. And if it gets error messages, it will rewrite the Python to fix them.",
      "timestamp": "09:04"
    },
    {
      "speaker_name": "Simon",
      "text": "So you can actually you can literally give it a challenge and you can watch it write some code and then try it and it doesn't work and then it'll fix it and try it again in this little loop.",
      "timestamp": "09:15"
    },
    {
      "speaker_name": "Simon",
      "text": "It's amazing.",
      "timestamp": "09:24"
    },
    {
      "speaker_name": "Christopher",
      "text": "Okay. Like you can literally watch it debug itself.",
      "timestamp": "09:25"
    },
    {
      "speaker_name": "Simon",
      "text": "because people will tell you, these things they hallucinate, they they come up with with in terms of program languages, they might invent a library or a method that doesn't work.",
      "timestamp": "09:27"
    },
    {
      "speaker_name": "Simon",
      "text": "That hallucination problem is mostly fixed if they can then test the code themselves because they'll go, oh, I didn't realize that that library can't do that thing. I'll try something else.",
      "timestamp": "09:35"
    },
    {
      "speaker_name": "Christopher",
      "text": "Hm.",
      "timestamp": "09:44"
    },
    {
      "speaker_name": "Simon",
      "text": "So on that basis, Chat and I can't remember if the free version of Chat GPT has code interpreter.",
      "timestamp": "09:45"
    },
    {
      "speaker_name": "Simon",
      "text": "I hope I think it does.",
      "timestamp": "09:50"
    },
    {
      "speaker_name": "Christopher",
      "text": "Okay. So this is like the basic paid one, maybe the $20 month because I know there's like a $200 one that's a little steep for like a basic",
      "timestamp": "09:51"
    }
  ]
}