Runtime Arguments
Conversations about technology between two friends who disagree on plenty, and agree on plenty more.
Episodes
Wolf is at the "relies on tests" end of the spectrum. Jim is closer to the other end, somewhere around "how do I start?". He doesn’t need convincing. He just needs to get from zero (non-trivial) tests to one. Today’s episode is a candid discussion where Wolf addresses Jim’s obstacles and tries to "start Jim’s testing engine". With other stuff along the way (as always).
Links:
- Pandoc celebrates 20 years
...
Wolf and Jim open with two AI stories from the week. First, the report that an OpenAI model "escaped its sandbox" and went after Hugging Face — a story Wolf finds infuriating precisely because the words don't go together. Reading the actual joint statement, it turns out the incident happened during an internal evaluation explicitly designed to push models toward advanced exploitation; the model found a zero-day in the package...
High-points on Rust: how it’s different, how it might help you even if you never actually use it on a project, why people care. … And some things Jim and Wolf have (separately) been working on.
Links:
- SQL 'SELECT * (EXCEPT ...)' new functionality
https://peter.eisentraut.org/blog/2026/06/30/waiting-for-sql-202y-stockholm-meeting-report - Marlon recommended a book: “the book” (https://doc.rust-lang.org/boo...
Jim shares his adventure into running LLMs on his own hardware. For him it's less about saving money and more about privacy — working in healthcare, he can't send patient data to the cloud.
- App vs. model: Claude Code and Codex are applications, not models. Features like plan mode come from the app. (Wolf's "Opus Plan" is a Claude Code mode that uses Sonnet 4.6 for most work and Opus 4.8 for planning.)
- Ollama makes local mod...
You almost never have exactly the right amount of compute for the job. Either cores are sitting idle while your code runs on one, or you've got more problem than machine. This episode is about the two fundamental tools for closing that gap — and why picking the wrong one makes things slower, not faster.
Topics covered:
- Concurrency vs. parallelism — the core distinction: concurrency is a scheduling prob...
Jim talks about his struggles to get decent Wi-Fi in all corners of his house. The big issue is all of the numbers and codes and things they use to describe the different Wi-Fi technologies.
Hosts:
Jim McQuillan can be reached at jam@RuntimeArguments.fm
Wolf can be reached at wolf@RuntimeArguments.fm
Follow us on Mastodon: @RuntimeArguments@hachyderm.io
If you have feedback for us, please send it to feedback@Runtim...
- Don't let the language be the problem — let the problem be the problem.
- You're not picking a language; you're picking an ecosystem.
- Boring is a feature.
- Resume-driven development is real, it's expensive, and everyone has done it at least once.
- Python is slow. But is your service slow? And is it slow because of Python?
- If your team is debating the language, you may not be debating the right thing.
- The language is ...
From rsh to certificates: The story of how we learned to log in safely.
SSH has been around for a long time, over 30 years in fact. In this episode we talk about what came before and why SSH is such a huge improvement. We talk about choices you can make in using SSH, such as choosing the right key algorithm and how to securely store those private keys and how to distribute the public keys.
Hosts:
Jim McQuillan can be reached at ja...
You already have an editor. You already love it. Nothing we say is going to change that — and we know it. But your editor shapes how you think about editing, which means there are problems it could solve for you that you've never even thought to have. We walk through the real differences between editors, IDEs, and the technologies underneath them — TreeSitter, LSPs, the Debug Adapter Protocol — and talk honestly a...
If you've been using Linux on the desktop you almost certainly have been using the X Window System.
In this episode we dive into what that is, where it came from and what kinds of choices you have.
We get into the toolkits like GTK and Qt and talk about desktop environments like Gnome and KDE.
Then we get into the future, namely Wayland.
If you want to run an X client application on a remote server, you need to have an Xserver running ...
If you've ever debugged a program, looked for lost socks or tried to figure out why red spots are developing on your skin, then Bayes' rule was almost certainly used to help you on your journey. Even if you don't know anything about it. Humans have evolved to solve problems but along the way, we as a species sometimes fall for traps or fail to consider all the evidence when figuring things out.
In this episode, Wolf explains what Ba...
Containers have become the standard way for deploying applications on servers and the web and sometimes even on the desktop.
In this episode we dive into what containers are, how they work, how to build them and what you can do with them.
Whether you are using containers in your development environment, deploying on servers in your data center or as a cloud service, containers save time, handle dependencies, increase security and jus...
In episode 8, Wolf talks about using AI to write code; and a bit of the landscape around that. In this episode, he describes what he’s learned on his journey from just coding to using AI as a major tool in his toolbox for addressing friction in every area of (mostly) work and (a bit of) life.
Less about the landscape and more about the applications, the reasoning, the big-picture, and having the right expectations.
Links:
Jim brings his vast knowledge of Databases and dives into the history, some theory, some best practices and some choices you can make.
Links:
Claude best practices guide - https://code.claude.com/docs/en/best-practices
Passkeys Server and Client - https://github.com/Runtime-Arguments/passkeys-demo
Webassembly History - https://bytecodealliance.org/articles/ten-years-of-webassembly-a-retrospective
Git is an amazing tool for managing your source code. Lots of people use it every day but most people barely scratch the surface of what git can do.
In this episode, we dive in and explain lots of features from the simple to the complex.
Links:
Julia Evans Wizard Zines
https://wizardzines.com - The main page
https://wizardzines.com/comics/inside-git/ - The git specific 'Zine
Hosts:
Jim McQuillan can be reached at jam@RuntimeArguments....
Data centers are sprouting up every where. Do we really need more of them?
In this episode, Jim and Wolf talk about what data centers are, how prevalent they are and what it takes to build them.
We talk about the sizes and energy uses and all sorts of other things related to data centers.
It was a fun episode to research and very eye-opening.
Links:
This episode is a little different from our normal format.
When you listen to podcasts, watch Youtube videos or even sit in a conference room listening to a speaker, they almost always will mention things and assume you know what they are talking about. And lets face it, we don't always know what they are talking about.
In this episode, Jim asks Wolf questions. Questions about things you hear in other podcasts (maybe even...
When people talk about the power of their computers, we've heard all kinds of claims:
- I have more power on my desktop computer than the Apollo had to put a man on the moon
- The phone in my pocket has more power than the Apollo space program had
- I have more power on my wrist watch than the lunar lander
- And the latest one: I have more power in my key fob than the Apollo capsule had
Are any of these true? In this episode, we ...
Wolf has lots of great information about the tools you should consider using when developing software projects. Jim chimes in with his own ideas.
Takeaways
Just a few take-aways this episode and I hope by this point you have already internalized them and this is just a summary.
- I’ve presented categories: the tools you will absolutely need to get your job done. You will need an editor. You will need language. You will need a ...
Listen in as Jim describes what POSIX is, what it means to be "POSIX Compliant" and why you should (or shouldn't) care.
Hosts:
Jim McQuillan can be reached at jam@RuntimeArguments.fm
Wolf can be reached at wolf@RuntimeArguments.fm
Follow us on Mastodon: @RuntimeArguments@hachyderm.io
If you have feedback for us, please send it to feedback@RuntimeArguments.fm
Checkout our webpage at http://RuntimeArguments....
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