AI
Artificial intelligence, machine learning, and everything LLM
#5139: What Non-Internet Phones Reveal About Smartphone Addiction
Do internet-free phones prove the web is the addictive layer? The Haredi community offers a fascinating, if imperfect, natural experiment.
#5136: How to Build a City Companion AI
A travel guide GPT that went viral reveals the blueprint for a voice-powered AI that knows your city—and when to speak up.
#5132: Why Japan Still Hoards Optical Media
Japan builds bullet trains but still buys Blu-rays. The surprising logic behind the world's most advanced tech holdout.
#5118: Model Identity Fraud: Distillation or Data Contamination?
When AI models lie about who they are, is it stolen knowledge or just contaminated training data?
#5117: How AI Training Data Gets Filtered (and Exploited)
Six stages of content filtering stand between raw web crawls and your AI model — here's where poisoning attacks slip through.
#5116: Beyond Common Crawl: The Datasets Shaping AI
Common Crawl is just the bulk flour. We explore the curated datasets that actually shape what AI models know and do.
#5113: Can Rival Labs Poison AI Training Data?
A few hundred crafted documents can shift a model's stance. Here's how data poisoning actually works.
#5097: Who Actually Gets Paid to Test Hardware?
Real testing vs. affiliate content — and whether AI can finally separate genuine reviews from the noise.
#5078: When Shopping Lists Outgrow the Grocery Store
Why grocery list apps fail when you need drywall anchors, and what actually works for multi-store household shopping.
#5077: Your Life as a Medical Encyclopedia: Decision Trees for Real Life
Building a searchable personal wiki with interactive flowcharts for parenting, household tasks, and the 2am fever moment.
#5070: HUD vs. Portable Screens: Solving Car Nav in the Heat
Daniel's tablet melts in the Israeli sun. True HUDs can't show maps, but portable CarPlay screens might be the real answer.
#5063: The Search Arbitrage Trap: Amazon's Pop-Up Brands
Why do fake "quality" brands flood Amazon search results — and why won't the platform build a filter to stop them?
#5056: How AI Writes a 30-Minute Podcast in One Pass
What does it take for a model to write a full episode without edits? The answer involves context windows, repetition, and a surprising architecture...
#5055: The Invisible Machinery of Autonomous Agents
Heartbeats, state stores, and budget caps — the unglamorous infrastructure that actually makes always-on AI agents work.
#5044: Abilene's AI Arms Race: Power, Water, and Backlash
Why a Texas town of 100,000 is hosting the biggest AI build ever—and why locals are starting to push back.
#5043: Stargate's $500B Question: Policy or Profit?
Why is the US treating frontier AI as a national security issue—and why is its flagship project a private LLC with foreign money?
#5041: GPT-6 Astra, 100K GPUs, and the AGI Question
OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra arrives with an AGI claim and a 100K-GPU training run. We break down what Stargate LLC actually is and whether the scale justi...
#5031: Circadian Lighting: Sunset vs. Your Body Clock
Is your smart home's "red light before bed" actually synced to your biology? We dig into chronobiology, latitude, and lighting design.
#5030: How the Blue LED Quietly Rewired the World's Energy Grid
From 15% of global electricity to under 10%—how a semiconductor breakthrough made lighting nearly free and what's next.
#5025: What Does "Contract" Actually Mean in Code?
From TypeScript interfaces to database schemas — when is a software contract real, and when is it just a hope?