AI
Artificial intelligence, machine learning, and everything LLM
#3234: Who Should Sponsor This Podcast? Open-Book Economics
We open the books on our AI-generated podcast: $200/month costs, 180K plays, zero sponsors. Who should we pitch?
#3216: EFF's 36-Year Fight for Digital Rights
How the Electronic Frontier Foundation has fought for internet freedom since 1990 — from the Crypto Wars to border phone searches.
#3209: When Algorithms Become Censors
How SLAPP suits, libel tourism, and Google's algorithm chill journalism more effectively than any law.
#3184: The Prank That Fooled Us All
How a sophisticated hoax exploited emotional vulnerability and what it reveals about deception in the AI age.
#3183: Why Film Photography Is Surging in a Digital World
Film is growing 50% in 5 years. Here's the physics behind why analog looks different from digital.
#3171: How to Break an LLM's Bad Verbal Habits
Blacklists fail and regex inverts meaning. Here's what actually works to clean up AI writing tics.
#3170: Pharmacokinetics vs Neural Nets: Two Meanings of "Model
Two things called "models" that work completely differently — and why the confusion matters for patient safety.
#3167: DeFi vs Microlending: What Actually Works?
DeFi's $180B locked vs 1.7B unbanked. Where does credit actually help?
#3157: Opus 4.8: What Actually Changed Under the Hood
Anthropic dropped Opus 4.8 with no fanfare. New training data, faster inference, and smarter refusals — here's what changed.
#3154: What Actually Counts as the First Musical?
The Black Crook, The Beggar's Opera, or Show Boat? The origin of musical theater reveals what we value about the form.
#3150: Can Life Skills Prevent Crime Before It Starts?
The evidence is decades old — why aren't we teaching life skills before people offend?
#3149: Who Actually Decides to Prosecute?
The King’s name is on every indictment, but he’s never asked. So who really decides who gets charged?
#3131: Beyond Splitting the Difference: The Math of Fair Compromise
Most people treat compromise as splitting the difference. That's almost always wrong.
#3127: Crafting AI Characters That Feel Alive
Move beyond system prompts with structured character bibles that give AI personalities real inner lives.
#3121: Can You Benchmark Government Value for Money?
A century of attempts to measure whether citizens get a good deal on taxes — and why none have fully worked.
#3120: What Makes Agentic Search Tools Like Exa Actually Work?
Why swapping Google for Exa transformed our show's accuracy — and what agentic search does differently.
#3100: How Cars Predict Black Ice Before Your Foot Hits the Brake
From ABS to AI: how cars evolved from surviving crashes to predicting them before drivers notice danger.
#3099: How Car Mechanics Master 50 Vehicles a Week
The hidden systems thinking that lets mechanics fix any car and how you can apply it.
#3098: The Pilot with the Flashlight: Inside Aviation's Pre-Flight Walkaround
Why pilots still physically inspect planes before every flight — and what a 1979 crash taught us about trusting machines.
#3087: Inside the Conspiracy Mind: History, Belief, and Harm
Why do humans fall for conspiracy theories? History, psychology, and the surprising data on who actually believes.