Programming Throwdown

Programming Throwdown

Patrick Wheeler and Jason Gauci

180: Reinforcement Learning

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Intro topic: Video Game Prices

News/Links:

Step one: Jump in the Lava - Abyssoft
- https://youtu.be/WdadpHLAfdA?si=oXYnhB0EdkR_RaPE
Scalable world models for continuous control
- https://www.tdmpc2.com/
Clever code is probably the worst code you could write - Engineer’s Codex
- https://read.engineerscodex.com/p/clever-code-is-probably-the-worst
A new, open source text-to-speech model called Dia has arrived to challenge ElevenLabs, OpenAI and more
- https://venturebeat.com/ai/a-new-open-source-text-to-speech-model-called-dia-has-arrived-to-challenge-elevenlabs-openai-and-more/

Book of the Show

Patrick
- The Muscle Ladder - Jeff Nippard
  - https://amzn.to/44Dznsz
Jason
- Metaphysics of War
  - https://amzn.to/4jMjvZ5

Patreon Plug https://www.patreon.com/programmingthrowdown?ty=h

Tool of the Show

Patrick
- Pokemon Trading Card Game Pocket
Jason
- Phi-4
  - https://huggingface.co/spaces/microsoft/phi-4-multimodal

Topic: Memory Management

Motivation
- Avoid thrashing / crashes
- Allocate resources efficiently
- Keep high uptime
Where
- OS Level
  - Heap management
  - Virtual Memory
- Language/Compiler Level
  - Cpp
  - Garbage collection
  - Ownership
Tools
- Instrumentation
  - Export to Datadog / Grafana
- Python: psutil & tracemalloc
- Valgrind
What to do when your program uses too much memory?
- Reduce data sizes
  - Compression
  - References
  - Lazy initializer
  - Generators & Back Pressure
- Ring buffers
- Arena allocators
- Disk based caching