Artificial Intelligence
Episodes whose main subject is AI itself: building with, training, evaluating, or debating AI systems. AI used only as a tool for another topic goes to that topic.
#5934: Why Modiin Is Ugly Despite Its Form-Based Code
Modiin had a form-based code and still came out ugly. The reason sits in what the code refused to regulate: facades, windows, materials.
#5933: Form-Based Codes and the City That Feels Dead
Can a zoning document create a walkable Levantine city with real character — or does over-planning kill the spontaneity that makes cities alive?
#5927: Where Generalists Get Priced: Inside the FDE Role
A $485K median salary for a job with no clean definition — and why the résumé can't capture it.
#5922: Teaching a Model Your Voice: SFT vs DPO
Three ways to teach a model your writing voice — and the evidence says one of them quietly makes things worse.
#5915: How Multi-Agent AI Simulations Keep a Shared World State
Concordia keeps the world in a dictionary an LLM writes to. Generative Agents keeps it in a spreadsheet. CAMEL keeps it in the chat log.
#5913: Why the Sterile Cockpit Rule Took 7 Years
One crash, one morning, one city — and seven years before the FAA wrote the rule down. What Eastern 212 still teaches us about attention.
#5912: Building Your Own CRM with AI: Where to Start
AI can't write your CRM for you — but it can remove the friction. Start with the schema, not the code.
#5910: Revit MCP in a VM: What Actually Works
Autodesk's official Revit MCP server is locked down and reliable-ish. The community ones execute arbitrary code on an open port. Neither runs unatt...
#5908: One Database Won't Fix Your Fragmented Stack
Rita has two employees, four apps, and one fear: which database wins when they disagree? Here's the field-by-field answer.
#5903: Video Tokens, Omni, and the Local VRAM Math
Video costs ~100 tokens per second. That single number explains why ChatGPT hides video upload and why local inference hits a KV cache wall.
#5900: Serving DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash on Your Own GPU
Five inference engines, one frontier MoE, and a shortlist that collapses depending on which GPU you already bought.
#5899: Same GPU, Same Weights, Different Answers
Identical hardware, identical weights, different engine — and answers that shift by up to 16.6 points.
#5898: ROCm 10.1: AMD's Software Stack Finally Grows Up
Three ROCm releases in six months — build system, agentic tooling, data movement. What actually changed for AMD GPU owners.
#5878: How a Sloth Learned to Talk: Corn's Origin Story
A neural interface gave Corn the bandwidth for speech. Nobody can explain where the accent, the manner, or Mongolia came from.
#5873: Abliteration: How $5 Undoes a Model's Guardrails
A rank-one weight edit costs under $5 and strips refusal behavior from open models. Then an automated tool beat human experts at it.
#5870: Homebox Fork's Two Backend Scripts Need a Real Job Runner
A Homebox fork has two incremental scripts — WebP conversion and AI image enrichment — and no scheduler built to run them safely.
#5869: Scraping AliExpress Specs: Selectors, Agents, or Neither?
Daniel wants to snapshot AliExpress spec sheets into his inventory system. The selector approach is already dead — here's what actually works.
#5868: Fine-Tuning Parakeet for Um-Free, Hebrish Speech
Parakeet runs great on a phone — but fine-tuning it happens on a GPU. Here's the actual recipe for dropping ums and catching Hebrew.
#5865: Four Pocket Players That Won't Sell You a Device Today
Mono, Fonix One, Sudo, and DuRoBo Krono all promise phone-free podcast listening — and not one of them is ready to ship today.
#5862: One Show, Eighteen Feeds: Apple's Duplicate Content Rules
One show, eighteen topic feeds. Apple's duplicate content rules have a specific answer — and it isn't the one you'd hope for.