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.
#1170: The Frozen Backend Paradox: Modern Static Architecture
Explore the "frozen backend" paradox and how modern static sites use build-time logic and sharded search to mimic complex dynamic applications.
#1168: Building a Mental Model for Hypersonic War
How do you process a war that looks like science fiction? Explore the films and series that decode the physics and strategy of today’s conflict.
#1167: Why Incremental Change Beats Heroic Sprints
Stop chasing radical overhauls. Learn how Kaizen can solve modern AI burnout through small, compounding improvements.
#1151: Is RLHF Lobotomizing AI? Why Guardrails Kill IQ
Are safety guardrails making AI less intelligent? Explore the "alignment tax" and why corporate filters might be lobotomizing our best tools.
#1127: Granted Permission to Speak: The Truth About Leaks
Is it a whistleblower or a conduit? Discover the hidden mechanics and high stakes of anonymous sourcing in modern journalism.
#1123: When One Database Isn't Enough
Can Postgres 18 finally replace the data warehouse? We dive into data gravity, columnar storage, and the physics of scaling in the AI age.
#1122: Why AI Agents Are Abandoning Human Language
Why force AI to talk like humans? Explore how agents are ditching English for high-speed "mind-melding" and latent space communication.
#1121: Why 80% of Developers Are Hiding Their Code From AI
With 81% of new code moving to private repos, the era of building in public is at a crossroads. Is AI killing the open source dream?
#1120: The AI Handoff: From Manual Hacks to Standard Protocols
Stop the "context rot." Learn how new protocols like MCP and typed state channels are revolutionizing how AI agents collaborate.
#1115: The Rise of the AI Procurement Officer
Discover how AI is evolving from simple chat to autonomous B2B procurement agents capable of negotiating and executing million-dollar deals.
#1113: The Ghost Company: The High Cost of AI Agent Bureaucracy
Can a company run entirely on AI? Explore the hidden costs and "agentic bureaucracy" of building autonomous agent hierarchies.
#1112: Inside the Neural Cathedral: Cracking the AI Black Box
Peek inside the "black box" of AI to discover how models use high-dimensional geometry and superposition to organize complex human concepts.
#1111: Surviving the arXiv Deluge: Finding Signal in AI's Paper Firehose
Discover the unsung research papers that built the AI era and learn how to navigate the relentless flood of new machine learning breakthroughs.
#1110: The arXiv Effect: Inside the Engine of AI Research
Explore how a 1990s-style website became the central nervous system for AI breakthroughs and the power of the preprint revolution.
#1109: The T-FLOP Trap: Measuring the Power of Modern AI
Are teraflops the "horsepower" of AI, or just a marketing gimmick? Explore why raw compute speed isn't the whole story in the race for AI power.
#1108: Beyond the Emoji: How Hugging Face Conquered AI
Discover how a quirky chatbot company became the central nervous system of AI, hosting millions of models and standardizing the entire industry.
#1106: The Entropy Budget: Embracing AI Zaniness
Corn and Herman explore how to inject "zaniness" and entropy into their show without losing their educational edge.
#1103: The Kitchen War: When Theory Meets Messy Reality
Explore the mechanics of LLM context windows and attention, and witness what happens when technical debates collide with household chores.
#1100: The Truth Conflict: Why AI Ignores the Facts You Give It
Discover why AI models ignore provided documents in favor of old training data and how to build a reliable "hierarchy of truth" for RAG systems.
#1099: Digital Recalls: Why Your AI Is Losing Its Edge
Is your AI getting lazier? Explore the "digital recall" and why the world’s most advanced models are secretly taking steps backward.