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.
#5861: Inside Cloudflare's Bot Check: TLS, JA4, and the Sand-Timer
What actually happens during those two seconds of "Checking your browser"? The verdict is made before a single byte of JavaScript runs.
#5860: Who Can Actually Train an LLM From Scratch?
Only a handful of organizations can truly train a model from random weights. Here's why nobody can count them.
#5859: Slow Labs, Fast Ships: What Release Cadence Actually Tells Us
Anthropic ships premium models every 22.5 days — the fastest lab in the industry. So much for the slow-and-careful story.
#5858: Routing AI Models: When 3 Rules Beat a Trained Router
A deep dive into AI model routing — and why a learned router may not beat three rules you wrote by hand.
#5857: Building a Scorecard for Our Own AI Writers
Daniel wants a real scorecard for the agent that writes this show — repetition, dialogue quality, and whether the retrieval harness actually works.
#5853: Who Actually Competes With Hugging Face?
2.96 million model repos, and 85.6% have under 200 downloads. What ModelScope, Kaggle, and Ollama actually do differently.
#5851: The Earbud Assistant Problem Nobody Solves
The AI model is solved. So why does the assistant in your ear still fail? The answer is the unglamorous plumbing nobody demos.
#5850: Ambient Computing: Why Glasses Beat the Phone
Weiser's 1991 vision said tech should disappear. Thirty-five years later, the device that finally worked wasn't new — it was glasses.
#5847: Why One EQ Curve Can't Fix Two Voices
One static EQ curve can't serve two different voices — here's why, and what actually works instead.
#5846: Who Tells a Star the Show Is a Bad Idea?
Céline Dion's Paris return split critics down the middle — and one review got punished harder than the show itself.
#5845: The $700 Pin and Other AI Flops
Five AI misfires, from a $700 pin that overheats doing nothing to a flagship model nobody remembers.
#5842: When Your TTS Model Updates Itself
Resemble pushed new Chatterbox weights to Hugging Face. Our pipeline started using them without a single config change.
#5833: When GLP-1s Silence Hunger Cues
GLP-1s switch off hunger at the brainstem. For people with anorexia, that's not a side effect — it's the thing they came for.
#5832: When Your GPS Is Lying: Aviation's Spoofing Problem
GPS spoofing is feeding pilots fake positions — and the panel stays green. How crews detect it, and why the airport stand sign can't save you.
#5830: Serving Your Own Fine-Tuned Model in the Cloud
You fine-tuned an open-weight model. Now how does anyone actually talk to it? Dedicated GPUs vs serverless inference, and the math that decides it.
#5826: The Thread That Outlived Its Authors
A Debian bug filed in 1997 got its second reply 24 years later. What happens when a conversation outlives everyone who started it?
#5825: Why Voices Sound Good in Some Rooms and Not Others
Same words, opposite effect. What the research actually says about why some voices hold you and others make you reach for skip.
#5821: Free Speech's Outer Edge: Hate Speech Law
Brandenburg v. Ohio rewrote when speech becomes a crime. Which countries go furthest toward zero restrictions — and why none fully do.
#5819: What Happens to Retired London Buses?
A field guide to 50 Routemasters and their strange afterlives — tea rooms, circuses, a bus called The Potato Story.
#5817: When Agents Don't Need Your Pretty Buttons
Agents are becoming major software users — and they prefer raw command-line tools to polished interfaces. What replaces UX when your user can't see?