YouSaid · the spoken record

Peter Wang

lines on the record
202
first
2021-12-23
most recent
2021-12-23
sittings or episodes
1
sources
podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

  1. “If there is such a thing, if we were to hypothesize such a thing, it could be that the purpose of our lives is to imbue as many things with that love as possible.”

    2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Technical objects, the phone is a technical object, it does not really receive attention or intimacy and then allow itself to be transformed by it. But if it's a piece of wood, if it's the handle of a knife that your mother used for 20 years to make dinner for you, right? What if it's a keyboard that you banged out your world transforming software library on? These are technical objects and these are physical objects, but somehow there's something to them. We feel an attraction to these objects as if we have imbued them with life energy. So, if you walk that thought experiment through, what happens when we touch another person, when we hug them, when we hold them? And the reason this ties into my answer for your question is that.”

    2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “If there actually was some quantum magnetic crystal and energy field thing that just by touching this can, this can has changed a little bit somehow. And it's not much unless you put a lot into it and you touch it all the time, like your phone, right? These things, they gain meaning to you a little bit. But what if there's something that”

    2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “That everything that we touch with our hands, that we pay attention to, that we actually give intimacy to, what if there's actually all the mumbo jumbo like people with the magnetic healing crystals and all this other kind of stuff and quantum energy stuff? What if that was a thing? What if when literally when your hand touches an object, when you really look at something and you concentrate and you focus on it and you really give it attention, you actually give it, there is some physical residue of something, a part of you, a bit of your life force that goes into it. Now, this is, of course, completely mumbo-jumbo stuff. This is not like, I don't actually think this is real, but let's do the thought experiment. What if it was?”

    2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “I don't know if I can answer the why. Any why that I come up with, I think, is going to be. I'd have to think about that a little more. Maybe get back to you on that. But I will say this we do look at the world through a traditional, I think most people look at the world through what I would say is a subject object kind of metaphysical lens that we have our own subjectivity and then there's all of these object things that are not us. So I'm me and these things are not me, right? And I'm interacting with them. I'm doing things to them. But a different view of the world that looks at it as much more connected, that realizes, oh, I'm really quite embedded in a soup of other things. And I'm simply almost like a standing wave pattern of different things, right? So when you look at the world and that kind of connected sense, I've recently taken a shine to this particular thought experiment, which is, what if it was the case?”

    2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “There are a lot of good people out there trying to put words around the current technological, social economic crises that we're facing. And the space of a few short years, I think there has been a lot of great content produced around this stuff for people who want to see, want to find out more or think more about this. We're popularizing certain kinds of philosophical ideas that move field beyond just the, oh, you're a communist, oh, you're capitalist kind of stuff. Like it's sort of, we're way past that now. That also gives me hope that I feel like I myself am getting a handle on how to think about these things. It makes me feel like I can, you know, hopefully affect change for the better.”

    2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “It is, it is. We're in a mode now where we can do that. I think also, you know, part of what I try to do is in coming to podcasts like yours and then spamming with all this philosophical stuff that I've got going on.”

    2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “So, I think these are the kinds of things that are getting in the supply chain disruptions, getting more people to think about how do we actually just make stuff. This is all good. But the concern is that it's still going to take a while for these things, for people to learn how to be a gentic again and to be in right relationship with each other and with the world. So the message of hope is still people are resilient and we are building some really amazing technology.”

    2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “These early shocks of COVID lockdowns and remote work and all these different kinds of things, I think it's getting people to a point where They're sort of no longer in the reverie, right? As my friend Jim Rutt says, there's more people with ears to hear now, right? With pandemic and education, everyone's like, wait, wait, what have you guys been doing with my kids? Like, how are you teaching them? What is this crap you're giving them as homework, right?”

    2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “So we are fine there. The issue with the social media, as we call it now, is they're actually just new amplification systems. Now, it's benefit of certain people like yourself who have interesting content to be amplified. So let's create a creator economy. And that's cool. There's a lot of great content out there. But giving everyone a shot at the fame lottery, saying, hey, you could also have your, if you wiggle your butt the right way on TikTok, you could have your 15 seconds of microfame. That's not healthy for society at large. So I think if we can create tools that help people be conscientious about their attention, spend time looking at the past and really retrieving memory and culling, not culling, but processing and thinking about that. I think that's certainly possible. And hopefully that's what we get. So the bigger picture, the bigger question about that you're asking about what gives me hope is that”

    2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Well, the thing about it is that when you have extractive return on returns, capital coming in and saying, look, you own a network, give me some exponential dynamics out of this network. What are you going to do? You're going to just basically put a toll keeper at every single node and every single graph edge, every node, every vertex, every edge. But if you don't have that need for it, if no one's sitting there saying, hey, Wikipedia, monetize every character, every bite, every phrase, then generative human dynamics will naturally sort of arise, assuming we do respect a few principles around online communications. So the greatest ambiguous social network in the world is still email SMS, right?”

    2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Gives me hope is that we have little tremors now shaking people out of the reverie of the fiction of modernity that they've been living in kind of a late 20th century style modernity. That's good, I think, because And also to your point earlier, people are burning out on some of the social media stuff. They're sort of seeing the ugly side, especially the latest news with Facebook and the whistleblower, right? It's quite clear these things are not all they're cracked up to be.”

    2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Power economic fortunes. And the way they make the people who are left behind okay with their lot in life is they create lottery systems. They make you take part in the narrative of your own being trapped in your own economic sort of zone. So avoiding those kinds of things is really important. Knowing when someone is running game on you basically. So these are things I would tell young people. It's a dark message, but it's realism. I mean, it's what I see.”

    2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “An integral human being if you want to have your agency and you want to find your own way in the world, when you're young would be a great time to spend time looking at some of the classics around what it means to live a good life, what it means to build connection with people. And so much of the status games, so much of the stuff, you know, one of the things that I sort of talk about as we create more and more technology, There's a gradient technology and a gradient technology always leads to a gradient in power. And this is Jacques Lul's point to some extent as well. That gradient of power is not going to go away. The technologies are going so fast that even people like me who helped create some of this stuff, I'm being left behind. That's on the cutting-edge research. I don't know what's going on in Gantz today. You know, I go read some proceedings. So as the world gets more and more technological, it will create more and more gradients where people will seize.”

    2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Is the result of the last few generations of humans agreeing to play certain kinds of games? A lot of those games no longer No longer operate according to the rules they used to. Collapse is nonlinear, but it will be managed. And so if you are in a particular social caste or economic caste, and it's not, I think it's not kosher to say that about America, but America is a very stratified and classist society. There's some mobility, but it's really quite classist. And in America, unless you're in the upper middle class, you are headed to very choppy waters. So it is really, really good to think and understand the fundamentals of what you need to build a meaningful life for you, your loved ones, with your family, and almost all of the technology being created that's consumer facing is designed to own people, to take the four stack of people, to delaminate them, and to own certain portions of that stack. And so if you want to be”

    2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “May be where I get into trouble a little bit. We are coming to the end. We're rapidly entering a time between worlds. So we have a world now that's starting to really crumble under the weight of aging institutions that no longer even pretend to serve the purposes they were created for. We are creating technologies that are hurdling billions of people headlong into philosophical crises who they don't even know the philosophical operating systems in their firmware and they're heading into a time when that gets vaporized. So for people in high school, and certainly I tell my son this as well, he's in middle school, people in college, you are going to have to find your own way. You're going to have to have a pioneer spirit, even if you live in the middle of the most dense urban environment. All of human reality around you”

    2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “I do a little bit. Honestly, the last thing I did was I had written, I was working with my son descripts and Minecraft stuff. So I was doing a little bit of that. That was literally the last code I wrote. Maybe I did.”

    2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “You know, also Kinesis fan, Wes McKinney, the creator of Pandas. He banged out pandas on a kinesis keyboard, I believe. I don't know if he's still using one, maybe, but certainly 10 years ago, he was.”

    2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “I mean, my keyboard was just not working. Like, literally, my keyboard just wasn't working, right? I had this touch bar, didn't have a physical escape button like I needed to because I used Vim, and now I think we're back.”

    2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Well, the Linux stuff, Windows Subsystem for Linux is very tempting, but there's still the windows on the outside where I don't know where, and I've been, okay, I've been, I've used DOS since version 1.11 or 1.21 or something. So I've been a longtime Microsoft user. And I will say that it's really hard for me to know where anything is, how to get to the details behind something when something screws up as it invariably does. And just things like changing group permissions on some shared folders and stuff, just everything seems a little bit more awkward, more clicks than it needs to be. Not to say that there aren't weird things like hidden attributes and all this other happy stuff on Mac, but for the most part, and well, actually, especially now with the new hardware coming out on Mac, that'll be very interesting, you know, with the new M1, there were some dark years in the last few years when I was like, I think maybe I have to move off of Mac as a platform.”

    2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Main one is the standing desk so that I can have a teleprompter set up and everything else. And then I've got my iMac and then EGPU and then Windows PC. The reason I moved to Mac was it's got a Linux prompt, or no, sorry, it's got a Uni prompt. It's got a Unix prompt so I can do all my stuff. But then I don't have to worry like when I'm presenting for clients or investors or whatever, like it, I don't have to worry about any like ACPI related FSIC things in the middle of a presentation like none of that. It just will always wake from sleep and it won't kernel panic on me. And this is not a dig against Linux except that I just feel really bad. I feel like a traitor to my community saying this, right? In 2012, I was just like, okay, sorry, my own company, what do I get? And Linux laptops were just not quite there”

    2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Using Linux and Windows? No, I actually have a Windows box as well on the next table over, but I have three desks, right? Yeah.”

    2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Every option of everything. I will say that that worked out for me for a while, although I don't do it anymore. In terms of programming setup, I had a 27 inch high DPI set up that I really liked, but then I moved to a curved monitor just because when I moved to the new house, I wanted to have a bit more screen for Zoom plus communications plus various kinds of things.”

    2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Right Go to bed for a few hours and you wake up, it's like you had an extra day in the middle And I'd read somewhere that humans naturally have biphasic sleep or something. I don't know.”

    2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “Yes, able to live normal society. Oh, yeah, because on the nights that wasn't out hang out with people or whatever, going to bed at nine, no one cares. Yeah. I wake up at two. I'm still responding to their Slacks, emails, whatever. And shit posting on Twitter or whatever at two in the morning is great.”

    2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “Wake up at like 2 a.m., work till 5, sleep three hours, wake up at 8. Like that was actually interesting. It wasn't too bad. Was good. I didn't keep it up for years, but once I've traveled, then everything goes out the window, right? Because then you're like time zones and all these things.”

    2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Yeah, I think I've gotten a little bit better balance. I have a really great leadership team now supporting me, and so that takes a lot of the day-to-day stuff Off my plate. And my kids are getting a little older, so that helps. So, and of course, I have a wonderful wife who takes care of a lot of the things that I'm not able to take care of. And she's great. I try to get to sleep earlier now because I have to get up every morning at 6 to take my kid down to the bus stop. So there's a hard thing. For a while, I was doing polyphasic sleep, which is really interesting. Like, I go to bed at nine.”

    2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “Mold covers so much stuff, you have to respect the different things that are growing in different areas and different niches. Now at some point that has to come together and the central body has to provide resources. The principle here is subsidiarity. Give resources to the various groups to then allocate as they see fit in their niches. That would be a really helpful dynamic. But again, it's a volunteer community. It's not like that many resources to start with.”

    2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “Right. Well, you know, for a while, PyCon, people in the scientific Python, in the Py Data community, they would submit talks. Those early 2010s, mid-2010s, they would submit talks for PyCon and the talks would all be rejected because there was the separate sort of Pi Data conferences. And they're like, well, these probably belong more to Pi Data. And instead, there'd be yet another talk about threads and whatever, some web framework. And it's like that was an interesting dynamic to see that there was, I mean, at the time, it was a little annoying because we wanted to try to get more users and get more people talking about these things. And PyCon is a huge venue, right? It's thousands of Python programmers. But then also came to appreciate that, you know, parallel, having an ecosystem that allows parallel innovation is not bad, right? There are people doing embedded Python stuff. There's people doing web programming, people doing scripting, there's cyber uses of Python. I think ultimately at some point, if your slide mode...”

    2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “It really depends on the people what style leadership is best. And it depends on the programming community. I think for the Python community, servant leadership is one of the values. At the end of the day, the leader has to also be the high priest of values. So any kind of collection of people has values of their living. And if you want to maintain certain values, and those values help you as an organization become more powerful, then the leader has to live those values unequivocally and has to hold the values. So in our case, in this collaborative community around Python, I think that the humility is one of those values. Servant leadership, you actually have to kind of do the stuff. You have to walk the walk, not just talk the talk. I don't feel like the Python community really demands that much from a vision standpoint.”

    2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “Yeah, belief means a few things. Belief means here's what we need to do, and this is a valid thing to do, and we can do it. You have to be able to drive that belief. And every step of leadership along the way has to help you amplify that belief to more people. I mean, I think at a fundamental level, that's what it is. You have to have a vision. You have to be able to show people that, or you have to convince people to believe in the vision and to get behind you. And that's where the loyalty part comes in and the experience part comes in.”

    2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “Leadership is a big topic. And I didn't, you know, I'm not one of these guys that went to NBA school and said, I'm going to be an entrepreneur and I'm going to be a leader and I'm going to read all these Harvard Business Review articles on leadership and all this other stuff. Like I was a physicist turned into a software nerd who then really nerded out on Python. No, I am entrepreneurial, right? I saw a business opportunity around the use of Python for data. But for me, what has been interesting over this journey with the last 10 years is how much I started really enjoying the understanding, thinking deeper about organizational dynamics and leadership. And leadership does come down to a few core things. Number one, a leader has to create belief or at least has to dispel disbelief.”

    2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “And you've brought us back to consciousness again. The collaboration is a swarm emergent dynamic Humility lets these people work together without anyone troubling anyone else. How do they, you know, in consciousness, there's the question of the binding problem. How does a singular attention, how does that emerge from billions of neurons? So, how can you have a swarm of people emerge a consensus that has a singular vision to say, we will do this, and most importantly, we're not going to do these things Emerging a coherent, pointed, focused leadership dynamic from a collaboration, being able to do that, and then dissolve it so people can still do the swarm thing. A problem is there's”

    2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “Comes next, and how do we seize, you know, we've caught the tiger by the tail, how to make sure we keep up with it as it goes forward.”

    2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “And actually, PyCon's last physical PyCon I went to Russell Keith Magee gave a great keynote about very much along the lines of the challenges I have, which is Python for a language that doesn't actually, that can't put an interface up on the most popular computing devices, it's done really well as a language, hasn't it? You can't write a web front end with Python, really. I mean, everyone uses JavaScript. You certainly can't write native apps. So, for a language that you can't actually write apps in any front and runtime environments, Python's done exceedingly well. And so that wasn't to pat ourselves in the back. That was to challenge ourselves as a community to say, we, through our current volunteer dynamic, have gotten to this point.”

    2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “Humility is one of the values that we have at Anaconda at the company, but it's also one of the values in the community. It's been breached a little bit in the last few years, but in general people are quite decent and reasonable and nice. And that humility prevents them from seeing. The greatness that they could have I don't know how many people in the core Python community really understand that they stand perched at the edge of an opportunity to transform how people use computers”

    2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “Actually, quite a lot of precision over precisely what we mean about this data set, that data set. And it's the fact that we can have that precision that lets Python be powerful over as a duct tape for data. You give me a TSV or a CSV, and if you give me some massively expensive vendor tool for data transformation, I don't know I'm going to be able to solve your problem. But if you give me a Python prompt, you can throw whatever data you want at me. I will be able to mash it into shape. So that ability to take it as sort of this machete out into the data jungle is really powerful. And I think that's why at some level, we're not going to get away from some of these expressions and APIs in libraries in Python for data transformation.”

    2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “This do this, and this, and every other Friday, right? We probably will get there somewhere, and Apple's always had these ideas, you know, there's the Apple script in the menu that no one ever uses, but you can do these kinds of things. But when you start doing that kind of scripting, the challenge isn't learning the type system or even the syntax of the language. The challenge is all of the dictionaries on all the objects of all their properties and attributes, and parameters, like who's got time to learn all that stuff, right? So that's when then programming by prototype or by example becomes the right way to get the user to express their desire. So there's a lot of these different ways that we can approach programming. But I do think, as you were talking about, the Adobe scripting thing, I was thinking about, you know, when we do use something like NumPy, when we use things in the Python data and scientific expression system, there's a reason we use that, which is that it gives us mathematical precision. It gives us”

    2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “Evaporated for a lot of people. So you see a little bit in parts in the current generation of youth around Minecraft or Roblox, right? And I think Python, CircuitPython, these things could be a renaissance of that, of people actually shaping and using their computers as computers, as an extension of their minds and their curiosity, their creativity. So you talk about scripting the Adobe suite with Python in the 3D graphics world. Python is a scripting language that some of these 3D graphics suites use. And I think that's great. We should better support those kinds of things. But ultimately, the idea that I should be able to have power over my computing environmentally all the time, I should be able to say that somehow to the computer, right? Now, whether the operating systems get there faster by having some Siri backed with OpenAI, with whatever. So you can just say, Siri.”

    2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “Well, you do, in fact. I think starting with the theory behind programming languages and types and all that, I mean, types are there to make the compiler writers' jobs easier. Types are not, I mean, heck, do you have an ontology of types or just the objects on this table? No. So types are there because compiler writers are human and they're limited in what they can do. I think that the beauty of scripting, like there's a Python book that's called Automate the Boring Stuff, which is exactly the right mentality. I grew up with computers in a time when I could, when Steve Job was still pitching these things as bicycles for the mine. They were supposed to not be just media consumption devices, but they were actually, you could write some code, you could write basic, you could write some stuff to do some things. And that feeling of a computer as the thing that we can use to extend ourselves has all been...”

    2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “Has to be easier to take some of those things they've written and flow those back into deployed systems or little apps or visualizations. I think if we don't do those things, then we will always be kept on a silo as sort of an expert user's tool and not a tool for the masses.”

    2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. “Operationalization methods that are much more seamless. And what I mean by that is, you know, right now you can't punch Python code into an Excel cell. I mean, there's some tools you can do to kind of do this. We even built a thing for doing this back in the day. But I feel like the total addressable market for Python users, if we do the things right, is on the order of the Excel users, which is a few hundred million. So I think Python has to get better at being embedded, you know, being a smaller thing that pulls in just the right parts of the ecosystem to run numerics and do data exploration, meeting people where they're already at with their data and their data tools. And then I think also”

    2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. “So, Anaconda Miniconda get downloaded about a million times a week. So, I think the idea that there's only 10 million Python programmers in the world is a little bit undercounting. There are a lot of people who escape traditional counting that are using Python and data in their jobs. I do believe that the future world for it to, well, the world I would like to see is one where people are data literate. So they are able to use tools that let them express their questions and ideas fluidly. And the data variety and data complexity will not go down. It will only keep increasing. So I think some level of code or code-like things will continue to be relevant. And so my hope is that we can build systems that allow people to more seamlessly integrate Python kinds of expressivity with data systems and”

    2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “But then for others, yeah, NumPy in particular, because it's at the base of the dependency stack for so many things, that was the final stick. That was a stick-shaped stick. People were saying, look, if I have to keep maintaining my releases for Python 2, that's that much less energy that I can put into making things better for the Python 3 folks in my new version, which is, of course, going to be Python 3. So people were also getting kind of pulled by this tension. So the overall community sort of had a lot of input into when the NumPy core folks decided they would end of life on Python 2.”

    2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  45. “Right, you don't want to cut off a lot of users unless you see the user momentum going too. So the decisions for the scientific community, for each of the different projects, you know, there's not a monolith. Some projects are like, we'll only be releasing new features on Python 3. That was more of a sticky carrot or a firm carrot, if you will, a firm carrot. Stick shaped”

    2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  46. “I would say the troubled execution of a good decision. It was a decision that was necessary. It's possible if we had more resources, we could have done it in a way that was a little bit smoother, but ultimately the arguments for Python 3, I bought them at the time and I buy them now, right? Having great text handling is like a non-negotiable table stakes thing. You need to have in a language. So that's great. But the execution, Python is the, it's volunteer driven. It's like now the most popular language on the planet, but it's all literally volunteers. So the lack of resources meant that they had to really do things in a very hamstrun way. And I think to carry the Python momentum and the language through that time, the data movement was a critical part of that.”

    2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  47. “Kept giving people an excuse to say, I'll put off to the next version. Two is working fine enough for me right now. So I think that's essentially what happened there. And I will say this, though, the strength of the Python data science movement, I think, is what kept Python alive in that transition because a lot of languages have died in left their user bases behind. If there wasn't the use of Python for data, there's a good chunk of Python users that during that transition would have just left for Go and Rust and stayed. In fact, some people did. They moved to Go and Rust and they just never looked back. The fact that we were able to grow by millions of users, the Python data community, that is what kept the momentum for Python going. And now the usage of Python for data is over 50% of the overall Python user base. So I will make, I'm happy to debate that on stage somewhere of Python with someone if they really.”

    2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  48. “This change was happening as Python, SciPy was starting to take off really like past like a hockey stick of adoption in the early data science era in the early 2010s. A lot of people were learning and onboarding in whatever just worked. And the teachers were like, well, yeah, these libraries I need are not support on Python 3 yet. I'm going to teach you Python 2. Took a lot of advocacy to get people to move over to Python 3. So I think it wasn't any particular single thing, but it was one of those death by a dozen cuts, which just really made it hard to move off of Python 2. And also Python 3 itself, as they were kind of breaking things and changing things around and reorganized the standard library, there's a lot of stuff that was happening there that”

    2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  49. “Looking back, some people perhaps underestimated how much adoption Python 2 had. Think some people also underestimated how much or they overestimated how much value some of the new features in Python 3 really provided, like the things they really loved about Python 3 just didn't matter to some of these people on Python”

    2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  50. “So we end up in this kind of problematic scenario, but it's okay because I think we're still our hearts in the right place. We're trying to move this forward as a community sort of affair. I think most of the people in the community also appreciate the work we've done over the years to try to move these things forward in a collaborative fashion.”

    2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source