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.
#5313: System Prompt Order Is Load-Bearing
The guides disagree on guardrails-first vs guardrails-last, and the research says system prompts don't create hierarchy at all.
#5312: Fighting Fake-Personalized Spam With AI Sinkholes
Scraped flattery, fake familiarity, and the one-sided ask — plus the tarpit history behind Daniel's sinkhole agent idea.
#5311: Churchill's McKinsey Interview: When Oratory Meets the Case
Churchill's rhetoric was architectural, every sentence load-bearing. McKinsey wants the answer in sixty seconds. Let's roleplay the collision.
#5306: The Trump Interview Playbook: A Filing Job, Five Rhetorical Patterns
What happens when a rally-style rhetorical machine gets aimed at a beige cubicle and a filing job? A touchpoint-by-touchpoint playbook.
#5301: Why Talking Robots Are Really a Committee
That humanoid chatting while it moves? It's not one brain — it's a stack of separate models glued together.
#5300: When the Interviewer Isn't Real
AI avatars are already interviewing job candidates — often without saying so. The disclosure toggle ships off by default.
#5278: Photogrammetry vs Gaussian Splat: Scanning a Room Without LiDAR
No LiDAR? No problem. How capture modes, masking, and vertical parallax shape a phone-based room scan.
#5277: AI Handles the GTD Inbox So You Don't Have To
GTD says capture everything — then caps your inbox at 100 items. What if AI did the organizing layer instead?
#5276: Who Really Invented the Gantt Chart?
Karol Adamiecki built it in 1896 — in Polish. Henry Gantt got the name. And why critical path analysis still catches what humans miss.
#5262: How the Talmud Outlived Every Book Burning
From the 1242 Paris burning to Sefaria's AI agents, the chain of transmission was never in the books — it was in the network.
#5260: eXistenZ: The Game That Never Lets You Out
A $15M film that won Berlin's Silver Bear, flopped at $2.8M, and still won't tell you if you've exited the game.
#5259: When Actors Watch Themselves: Tarantino's Laugh Track
Tarantino laughs at his own films in Tel Aviv theaters. Most actors can't even watch theirs once. What's behind the gap?
#5256: Ruby Won the AI Benchmark. Is It Dying Anyway?
97% of public Ruby repos sat untouched for six months — yet Ruby beat Python in an AI coding benchmark. What's actually declining?
#5255: When AI Writes the Code, Who Checks It?
If agents write the code, the human job becomes knowing when it's wrong. What that means for languages, jobs, and CS degrees.
#5251: Recovering the Moon That's Already in the Pixels
Image restoration clarifies photos without inventing detail — until the fidelity dial shows up. Here's what's in the toolbox.
#5245: Training a Model on 100 Phone Photos
One drawer of screws, a hundred phone photos, and a schema. When does a small custom model beat a fine-tuned VLM?
#5239: What Happens When a Plane Dumps Fuel Over a City
Fifteen fuel dumps a year over US airspace — and nobody tracks where the fuel lands or what it does to the ocean.
#5233: One Tap Beats Eight Links: Designing a Digital Business Card
Most digital cards fail in ten seconds. Here's the design that actually starts a conversation.
#5230: Why Your Research Agent Won't Stop Searching
Most agent search runs add no new evidence — and 66-85% of the context window is just search snippets. Here's what actually stops the loop.
#5225: Carving Paleo-Hebrew Into Everyday Objects
Custom metal stencils, the right vector files, and tasteful ways to bring an ancient script back onto everyday objects.