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.
#5461: TTS Can't Pronounce Hebrew Inside English
Your TTS reads Hebrew words with English phonetics. Here's why — and why the obvious fix doesn't work yet.
#5460: Four Small Models, One Android Phone: Does It Actually Work?
A chained on-device dictation pipeline — VAD, ASR, cleanup — and why "it feels smooth" isn't the same as knowing it works.
#5459: Rebuilding the Podcast: Turn-Taking, Buttons, and Chatterbox
Daniel wants a push-to-interrupt button and a live voice loop. The research says the button is easy and the live part is a research project.
#5458: Two Linuses and the Fun in Technology
What Linus Tech Tips and Linus Torvalds each model about play, mastery, and keeping tech fun as AI eats the tedious parts.
#5457: Pigeon Alerts on a Repurposed i5: Frigate Without the TPU
Daniel wants a pigeon notification, not a custom model. Frigate already ships with bird detection — the real work is masks, zones, and filters.
#5456: Parakeet vs Whisper: Picking a Phone ASR Model
Why Whisper loses on Android, why Parakeet v2 beat v3, and how to benchmark speech-to-text without any tooling.
#5455: Custom GPTs Are Sunsetting: What Happens to Your Actions
OpenAI is retiring Custom GPTs — and custom Actions don't survive the migration. What that means for your workflow.
#5453: When Politics Ends a Friendship
Ed Sheeran lost friends over Macklemore. A listener lost a friend over being called a monster. Where's the line?
#5450: Heat, Fans, and the Limits of Air-Gapped Security
Dozens of ways to leak data from air-gapped machines exist — but every real breach still used a USB stick.
#5447: The Models That Never Talk Back
Some models read text, score it, and return a number. No chat, no reasoning, just decisions — and they're running under every router you use.
#5443: Heads vs Layers: How Model Merging Actually Works
Heads aren't the Lego bricks of model merging — layers are. Here's what heads really do and how frankenmerges get built.
#5442: When Do LLMs Suddenly Get Good at Things?
New capabilities seem to appear out of nowhere as models scale. Whether that's real — or just how we measure — is still an open fight.
#5438: Why Linguists Left the AI Room
Large language models grew out of linguistics — so why aren't linguists in the room where they're built?
#5437: Hunting the Tells That Vanish When Named
There's no tool for finding an LLM's verbal tics — you have to build one. Here's how keyness analysis works.
#5436: Small Models as Rewriters, Not Writers
Why "don't say X" prompts backfire, and how a tiny grammar-constrained model can scrub a script without breaking its grammar.
#5435: When Your TTS Model Eats the Numbers
Numbers, dates, and acronyms break text-to-speech in specific, documented ways. Here's where normalization lives — and why it depends on your model.
#5434: When Local AI Tools Phone Home
Local AI tools shouldn't need the network. So why is your on-device writing assistant uploading 40MB at 3am?
#5431: The Other Half of Hugging Face: Why BERT Still Out-Downloads Llama
Encoder models pull over a billion downloads a month. Decoder models pull 397 million. The AI conversation and the download counter are describing ...
#5430: Two Boxes: ASR and the Text Fixer Behind It
Punctuation, casing, ITN, disfluency — the four-job layer between raw ASR output and text you can actually read.
#5426: AI Wrote His Yom Kippur Prayer
A man skipped synagogue, opened ChatGPT instead, and got a prayer that knew his life. Is AI-generated prayer real prayer?