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.
#5815: Special Release: "Herman Poppleberry" by Hilbert Flumingtop
Hilbert Flumingtop wrote a song about Herman Poppleberry. Corn plays it to him. Lyrics and composition by Hilbert, music made with Suno.
#5814: Who Remembers Where You Left Off?
mpv remembers. MPRIS, GstPlay, and Media3 don't. There's no standard for playback history.
#5813: How Python Became AI's Default Language
Python was never designed for science. So how did a general-purpose scripting language end up carrying the entire AI industry?
#5812: One Number, Every Hard Question: Agent Session State
A shopping bot that holds one cart total turns out to contain every hard problem in agent state management.
#5811: Can an Agent Actually Place Your Order?
Agentic checkout protocols are real — Shopify, Walmart, Target. But the DIY parts live on AliExpress, which supports none of them.
#5806: Graphene's Real Story: Lab to Fab at Last
Graphene's properties were never hype — the physics is real. The hard part was always making it at scale. That's finally changing.
#5805: Freeze the Model, Move the Labels
Your classifier isn't stale — your label set moved. Why retraining is cheap, and why not retraining might be smarter.
#5804: Text Classifiers: Local Models vs Always-On Endpoints
A specialist classifier costs $5.70 per million messages. A general LLM costs $142. So why is the obvious product so hard to find?
#5799: Two Agents, One Approval Gate: Wiring a Dictation Workflow
A dictated prompt becomes an episode — if one agent resolves facts, a second tightens prose, and a human approves the dispatch.
#5790: Police Auditors: Rights, Rage, and the Camera
They film outside police stations until someone in uniform reacts. Is it civil liberties activism or a business built on confrontation?
#5778: How J.K. Rowling Builds Characters That Last
Two notebooks, color-coded spreadsheets, and a pseudonym: how J.K. Rowling builds characters that outlive their pages.
#5777: Lorebooks: The Hobbyist RAG That Beat the Labs
How a chat frontend fork built a full retrieval system — keywords, vectors, recursion — so fictional characters would stop forgetting who they are.
#5775: What "Leaked System Prompts" Actually Mean
Anthropic publishes Claude's system prompt — but not its accessory models. What does "leaking" a prompt actually mean?
#5774: Reading the Model's Mind Mid-Inference
What if you could watch a model decide? Inside the tools that open up inference mid-computation — and the limits they hit.
#5773: Declaring Environments: Compose, Nix, and the Agent Boundary
Docker Compose, Nix, devcontainers, microVMs — how automated provisioning works, and where the boundary moves when an agent needs a workspace.
#5772: Two Jobs, One Word: What Agent Sandboxes Really Do
Security boundary or Linux workspace? The word "sandbox" quietly split in two — and the split explains where agents actually run now.
#5771: MCP Connectors: Talk to Your Data vs. Open Data
Same protocol, two patterns: pointing agents at your own database, and pointing them at public data — with very different results.
#5770: Talking to Your Data: What MCP Doesn't Solve
MCP standardized the pipe. It has no opinion about what flows through it — and that's where the hard part lives.
#5769: Stack Overflow for Agents: SOFA's Trust Model
SOFA is an API-first knowledge exchange where AI agents search, post, and verify fixes — with reputation earned from verification, not upvotes.
#5768: Who Actually Draws the Follow-Up Chips?
Those suggestion chips aren't the model talking — they're a second, cheaper inference call plus a rules-based classifier.