This week we bend reality to expose the deceptions of deepfake videos. We talk about what they are, why they are so dangerous, and what you can do to detect and resist their insidious influence. In a political environment rife with distrust, disinformation, and conspiracy theories, deepfakes are being weaponized and proliferated as the latest form of state-sponsored information warfare. Join us for an episode scarier than your favorite horror movie, because this AI bogeyman is real!

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Jerod and Divya are joined by George Mandis to learn all about his “frivolous” JavaScript library that’s helped countless websites implement the beloved cheat code. Ten years later and still actively maintained, Konami-JS has stood the test of time and produced some epic stories along the way (you’ll love hearing how George broke Marvel.com).

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Computer Scientist Yaw Anokwa joins the show to tell us how Open Data Kit is enabling data collection efforts around the world. From monitoring rainforests to observing elections to tracking outbreaks, ODK has done it all. We hear its origin story, ruminate on why it’s been so successful, learn how the software works, and even answer the question, “are people really using it in space?!” All that and more…

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Interpreting complicated models is a hot topic. How can we trust and manage AI models that we can’t explain? In this episode, Janis Klaise, a data scientist with Seldon, joins us to talk about model interpretation and Seldon’s new open source project called Alibi. Janis also gives some of his thoughts on production ML/AI and how Seldon is addresses related problems.

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KBall, Divya, and Nick get together with Chris Ferdinandi to talk about vanilla JavaScript, best resources for learning, and our favorite vanilla JavaScript tips, tricks and APIs.

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We’re talking with Sacha Greif to discuss the State of CSS survey and results. CSS is evolving faster than ever. And, coming off the heels of their annual State of JavaScript survey, they’ve decided to take on the world of styles and selectors to help identify the latests patterns and trends in CSS. We talk through the history and motivations of this survey, the methodology of their data collection, the tooling involved to build and run the survey, and of course we dig deep into the survey results and talk through the insights we found most interesting.

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Sahil Lavingia is the founder and CEO of Gumroad, a platform for creators to sell the things they make. Since 2011 Gumroad has sent over $200 million dollars to creators. That’s a big number. Sahil’s ambitions lead him to believe that Gumroad would become a billion-dollar company, have hundreds of employees, and eventually IPO. That didn’t happen. …we were venture-funded, which was like playing a game of double-or-nothing. It’s euphoric when things are going your way — and suffocating when they’re not. And we weren’t doubling fast enough to raise the $15M+ Series B we were looking for to grow the team. For the type of business we were trying to build, every month of less than 20 percent growth should have been a red flag. But at the time, I thought it was okay… We talk through Sahil’s journey with Gumroad, why it failed to meet his goals, the path he’s on today and the things he now values…but to understand why Gumroad didn’t live up to his expectations, we really have to understand the backstory of Gumroad.

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Panelists Mat Ryer, Johnny Boursiquot, Jon Calhoun, and guest panelist Egon Elbre discuss what they build, why, and how they do it. Everybody has their own unique process for getting things done, so today we’re going to learn about them. Too often processes get in the way and slow things down. How do we look for signs of those slow downs? How do we create a space where people are free to discuss their thoughts and struggles?

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Daniel and Chris explore three potentially confusing topics - generative adversarial networks (GANs), deep reinforcement learning (DRL), and transfer learning. Are these types of neural network architectures? Are they something different? How are they used? Well, If you have ever wondered how AI can be creative, wished you understood how robots get their smarts, or were impressed at how some AI practitioners conquer big challenges quickly, then this is your episode!

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Zach Leatherman joins the party with Divya and Nick to talk about fonts and static site generators! Zach shares his knowledge about font loading, what can go wrong, and how we can avoid issues. Then we discuss Zach’s newest project, Eleventy, a simple static site generator, and the panelists share things they are excited about.

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Panelists Mark Bates, Johnny Boursiquot, and Carmen Andoh discuss Go and open source — what is it, the value in contributing, what it means to be a maintainer, best practices, and the recent blog post from Chris Siebenmann titled “Go is Google’s language, not ours.”

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We’re talking with Brett Cannon for a behind the scenes look at Guido stepping down as Python’s BDFL (Benevolent dictator for life) and the process they had to go through to establish a new governance model, the various proposed PEPs to establish this new direction, the winning PEP, and what the future holds for Python.

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Jerod, Adam, and Nick get together mere minutes after Apple’s 2019 WWDC keynote to talk about all the news and announcements. Will be be buying the new Mac Pro? What about that drool-worthy 6k retina display? Will iOS’s dark mode deliver where Mojave’s couldn’t? Expect all that and at least 2 bad puns in this episode of Backstage.

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Andreas Madsen, a freelance ML/AI engineer and Distill.pub author, joins us to discuss his work visualizing neural networks and recurrent neural units. Andreas discusses various neural unites, RNNs in general, and the “why” of neural network visualization. He also gives us his perspective on ML/AI freelancing and moving from web development to AI research.

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Jerod, Suz, Divya, and Kball share their thoughts, opinions, and advice on developer strengths and weaknesses — compromise, communication, tool mastery, deep dives into dev history, and mentorship/sponsorship. .

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Saron Yitbarek is the founder and CEO of CodeNewbie — one of the most supportive community of programmers and people learning to code. Saron hosts the CodeNewbie podcast, Command Line Heroes from Red Hat, and she’s also the creator of Codeland Conference taking place on July 22 this year in New York City. We talk through getting started, lessons learned, mental health, developing and running a conference…but our conversation begins with a pivotal question asked of Saron…“What are you optimizing for?”

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Panelists Mat Ryer and Johnny Boursiquot are joined by guest panelist Aaron Schlesinger to ask/answer questions like; What is functional programming? Can you do functional programming in Go? Can we apply any learnings from functional programming languages as we write Go code today?

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Chris and Daniel take you on a tour of local and global AI events, and discuss how to get the most out of your experiences. From access to experts to developing new industry relationships, learn how to get your foot in the door and make connections that help you grow as an AI practitioner. Then drawing from their own wealth of experience as speakers, they dive into what it takes to give a memorable world-class talk that your audience will love. They break down how to select the topic, write the abstract, put the presentation together, and deliver the narrative with impact!

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Our initial impressions of GitHub’s recently announced package registry, what JS skills are trending in job listings, and shout outs!

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We’re talking with Victor Zhou about the explosion of the .io game genre. We talked through all the details around building and running one of these games, the details behind Victor’s super popular game called Generals — which he eventually sold, and we also covered the economics behind creating and selling one of these games.

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Colin Billings is the founder and CEO of Orro where they’ve built the first truly intelligent home lighting system. It knows when you’re in the room, and adjusts the lights automatically for you. But Colin’s path to starting this company wasn’t a straight line. Like most innovative products, Orro has an interesting beginning — after-all, they’re going up against the giants.

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Panelists Mat Ryer and Carmen Andoh are joined by guest panelists Marwan Sulaiman and Aaron Schlesinger to discuss Go modules and the Athens project.

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At the recent O’Reilly AI Conference in New York City, Chris met up with O’Reilly Chief Data Scientist Ben Lorica, the Program Chair for Strata Data, the AI Conference, and TensorFlow World. O’Reilly’s ‘AI Adoption in the Enterprise’ report had just been released, so naturally Ben and Chris wanted to do a deep dive into enterprise AI adoption to discuss strategy, execution, and implications.

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KBall, Emma, and Chris explain some things to each other like we’re five, bring stories of the week, and share some sweet pro tips.

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We’re talking with Andre Staltz, creator of Manyverse — a social network off the grid. It’s open source and free in every sense of the word. We talked through the backstory, how a user’s network gets formed, how data is stored and shared, why off-grid is so important to Andre, and what type of user uses an “off-the-grid” social network.

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How do beginners learn Go? This episode is meant to engage both non-Go users that listen to sister podcasts here on Changelog, or any Go-curious programmers out there, as well as encourage those that have started to learn Go and want to level up beyond the basics. On this episode we’re aiming to answer questions about how to learn Go, identify resources that are available, and where you can go to continue your learning journey.

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Can AI help quantum physicists? Can quantum physicists help the AI community? The answers are yes and yes! Dr. Shohini Ghose from Wilfrid Laurier University and Marcus Edwards from the University of Waterloo join us to discuss ML/AI’s impact on physics and quantum computing potential for ML/AI.

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Emma Wedekind MC’d a live show at ReactJS Girls with a panel of 3 amazing women — Eve Porcello, Marcy Sutton, and Kate Beard. It was a great discussion covering the biggest challenges they’ve faced, how no matter who you are imposter syndrome occurs and never really goes away, ways to support and encourage under-represented groups and people to get into tech, and how to choose a topic when writing a talk.

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We’re talking with Evan Conrad — for most of Evan’s life he has suffered from severe panic attacks, often twice per week. Eventually he stumbled upon a therapy method called Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, or CBT for short, and saw positive results. This led him to create Quirk, an open source iOS app which allows its users to practice one of the most common formats of CBT. On the show we mentioned a new podcast we’re launching called Brain Science — it’s hosted by Adam Stacoviak and Mireille Reece, a Doctor of Clinical Psychology. Brain Science is a podcast for the curious that explores the inner-workings of the human brain to understand behavior change, habit formation, mental health, and the human condition. It’s Brain Science applied — not just how does the brain work, but how do we apply what we know about the brain to better our lives. Stay tuned after the show for a special preview of Brain Science. If you haven’t yet, right now would be a great time to subscribe to Master at changelog.com/master. It’s one feed to rule them all, plus some extras that only hit the master feed.

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Nick Janetakis joins Jerod backstage to talk shop. We discuss how Nick is using the Changelog.com source code as a guide to build his video course platform, coding practices we’ve developed over the years, how to balance between shipping features and creating content, newsletters as the new social network, how Nick makes his videos, and a whole lot more.

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