Beyond the AI Hype with Jason Strimpel

In this episode of The Hedgineer Podcast, host Michael Watson sits down with Jason Strimpel, founder of PyQuant News, long-time Pythonista, and AI enthusiast.

They dive deep into the practical and philosophical implications of artificial intelligence in both asset management and daily life. They break down how the agentic loop works with the Anthropic Agent SDK, the components of good evaluation frameworks, and even how to talk to your kids about AI

Key topics covered in this episode:

• Drugs, Sex, and AI: Jason shares his thoughts for new parents: the three things you now need to talk to your kids about are drugs, sex, and AI. Michael and Jason then discuss the difficulty of explaining the difference between humans and AI-powered avatars or toys to children.

• The "Agentic Loop": The discussion breaks down the simplicity and power of the agentic loop, identifying it as the "core substrate" of modern agentic frameworks. This framework allows a language model to loop, use tools, and determine when to exit to solve complex problems.

• "Evals are the Product": Michael and Jason iterate on the concept that a robust set of evaluations is the real product. If you can use evals to demonstrate that an agent has harnessed intelligence to solve a specific problem space, you "own that problem".

• AI vs. Python's Rise: They draw parallels between the current AI boom and the rise of Python in the early 2010s. Both technologies were initially met with skepticism for being "black box" interpreted systems, yet they unlocked massive productivity boosts.

• Capital Allocation and Moats: The conversation tackles the modern challenge of allocating capital and defending a "software moat" when new AI tools and infrastructure are being commoditized by hyperscalers at an incredible speed.

• The PyQuant News Story: Jason shares the origin story of his popular PyQuant newsletter, which started as a personal WordPress site for bookmarking research papers and grew into a major resource for the quantitative finance community.

Hosted by Michael Watson, The Hedgineer Podcast dives into AI technology and data in the hedge fund, asset management, and prop trading space.

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Kuzu, Knowledge Graphs, and the AI Revolution with Prashanth Rao

In this episode of the Hedgineer Podcast, host Michael Watson is joined by Prashanth Rao, AI Engineer at Kuzu, for a deep dive into the world of embedded graph databases and their pivotal role in the age of AI. Building on the previous week's discussion of the columnar database DuckDB, this conversation explores Kuzu, a parallel concept focused on creating high-performance, embedded graph databases.

Michael and Prashanth explore why Kuzu's unique architecture—an embedded, columnar, and strictly-typed system—is delivering incredible speed and scalability for complex analytical queries. They discuss the resurgence of interest in knowledge graphs, driven by the need to impose structure on data for modern AI and LLM workflows. Prashanth explains how LLMs are revolutionizing both the upstream construction of graphs from unstructured data and the downstream querying of these graphs by translating natural language into the Cypher query language.

Tune in to learn about:

• What Kuzu Is: An in-process, embedded graph database designed from the ground up for query speed and scalability, blending the benefits of columnar processing with the property graph data model.
• AI and Graph Synergy: How large language models (LLMs) assist in both building knowledge graphs through structured output extraction and accessing them via natural language to Cypher translation.
• Modern Data Stack Integration: The role of Kuzu as a powerful secondary semantic layer that interoperates seamlessly with primary data stores in data lakes (like Parquet files on S3), DuckDB, and Postgres.
• Programming with LLMs using DSPy: A detailed look into using DSPy to create structured, modular, and optimizable prompts for more reliable LLM applications, bridging the gap between deterministic code and fully agentic workflows.
• The Enterprise Knowledge Graph: A discussion on how a knowledge graph can become the single source of truth for understanding complex organizational workflows, data lineage, and interdependencies across an entire enterprise.
• The Future of Kuzu: A preview of what's next for the Kuzu project, including new graph algorithm capabilities and enhanced concurrency for reads and writes.

Whether you're a data engineer, AI practitioner, or a leader in the asset management space, this episode provides a masterclass on leveraging modern database technology to build powerful, scalable, and intelligent applications.

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In this episode of The Hedgineer Podcast, host Michael Watson is joined by special guest Rusty Conover, the world's most prolific DuckDB extension builder, for a masterclass on building the next generation of real-time, large-scale data systems.

Rusty, who has an extensive career in data engineering, including at multi-manager hedge funds, pulls back the curtain on what makes DuckDB so revolutionary for developers and data engineers. They explore how its blazingly fast, in-process, C++-based architecture is challenging the big data status quo. The conversation provides a deep dive into the powerful ecosystem growing around DuckDB, from the Apache Arrow columnar format to the evolving landscape of open table formats like Iceberg, Delta Lake, and the new DuckLake.

Join them for a detailed discussion on the nitty-gritty of modern data infrastructure, whether you're building enterprise data platforms or looking for the most efficient tools for your analytics workload.

In this episode, you will learn about:

The DuckDB Revolution: What makes this "blazingly fast" in-process database a game-changer that can simplify and replace entire ETL stacks.

A Tour of DuckDB Extensions: A look inside some of the 15 extensions Rusty has built, from Airport for integrating with Apache Arrow, to Crypto, ShellFS, and TextPlot.

Diving into Apache Arrow: An explanation of the columnar in-memory data format, zero-copy operations, and the Arrow Flight RPC mechanism for efficiently moving data.

The Battle of Open Table Formats: A comparison of Iceberg, Delta Lake, and the new database-centric approach of DuckLake.

DuckDB vs. The World: How DuckDB stacks up against KDB for financial data, ClickHouse for analytics, and its role alongside large-scale compute engines like Apache Spark.

Parquet Deep Dive: The key differences between Parquet V1 and V2 and the importance of modern compression strategies and encodings.

The Future of DuckDB: A sneak peek at powerful upcoming features like time travel and the MERGE INTO statement for simplifying change data capture (CDC) pipelines.

Hosted by Michael Watson, The Hedgineer Podcast dives into AI technology and data in the hedge fund, asset management, and prop trading space.

Follow The Hedgineer Podcast:

YouTube: (https://www.youtube.com/@hedgineer)

LinkedIn: (https://www.linkedin.com/company/90976838)

Twitter: (https://x.com/hedgineering)

Instagram: (https://www.instagram.com/hedgineer/)

Don't forget to like, subscribe, and hit the notification bell to stay updated on our latest episodes!

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