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.
#208: The Democratization of Satellite Espionage
Herman and Corn explore how AI and advanced satellites are stripping away the fog of war, from tracking footprints to seeing through clouds.
#206: When AI Agents Build Your Enterprise Storage at Home
Explore the power of Btrfs, ZFS, and XFS. Learn how storage pooling and snapshots create a "save point" for your entire computer.
#200: Why Graph RAG Beats Flat Vectors for AI Memory
Explore how the AI stack is evolving from simple vector search to complex Graph RAG and why the "boring" Postgres database is winning the race.
#199: When AI Outruns Physics: The New Weather Forecaster
Exploring the shift from physics-based models to AI-driven meteorology. Can algorithms predict the next big storm better than humans?
#196: Why Your Irish Accent Sounds American
Herman and Corn dive into the mechanics of neural text-to-speech, exploring how AI masters human prosody and the "average voice" accent problem.
#182: The Quadratic Bottleneck: Why AI Needs New Architectures
Is the transformer’s reign ending? Herman and Corn explore Mamba, x-LSTM, and the architectures solving AI's massive memory problem.
#181: Why Your AI Is Finally Stopping to Think
Discover how AI shifted from instant reflexes to deep reflection through inference-time compute and hidden reasoning steps.
#180: Escaping the Carrier Trap
Tired of rigid phone plans? Discover how to bypass carriers using SIP and Twilio to build a custom voice architecture for your home or office.
#179: The Sloth's Smile: When We Misread Animal Stress
Think that sloth is smiling at you? Think again. Herman and Corn dive into the biology and ethics of responsible wildlife tourism.
#178: The Skywave Secret: Why Aviation Can’t Quit HF Radio
Why do pilots still use scratchy 1940s radio in the age of Starlink? Explore the resilient world of oceanic communication and skywave physics.
#176: What Are AI Weights, Really?
What actually happens inside an AI model? Corn and Herman break down the numerical "valves" and "knobs" that power modern intelligence.
#172: Taming the Sprawl: Building Your Cognitive AI Toolbox
Drowning in a sea of custom AI scripts? Learn how to turn disconnected "vibe-coded" tools into a unified, local-first cognitive operating system.
#171: From Digital Fortresses to Machine-Digestible Sites
Stop fighting the crawlers and start feeding them. Learn how llms.txt and structured metadata are defining the new era of AI Optimization.
#170: How PyTorch Beat TensorFlow and Became AI's Backbone
Discover why PyTorch is the "oxygen" of AI. Herman and Corn explore its history, the magic of Autograd, and the move to the PyTorch Foundation.
#165: The Dual-Signature System That Runs Every Flight
Who’s really running the show? Go inside the high-stakes world of flight operations centers and the "ground-based co-pilots" managing the chaos.
#161: From Search to Design: AI's New Molecules
Discover how AI is slashing drug development times and "hallucinating" new molecules to treat once-incurable diseases.
#158: The Power of the Jagged Profile: Beyond Specialization
Are you a jack of all trades or a master of synthesis? Explore how neurodivergence and multipotentialism are redefining success in the age of AI.
#157: Beyond the Chatbox: The Power of Model Context Protocol
Discover why the Model Context Protocol is the "USB of AI" and how it’s fueling a new wave of autonomous agents and developer communities.
#155: Building an Ideation Factory: Beyond Generic AI Ideas
Learn how to overcome AI repetition and build a multi-agent "ideation factory" to solve complex local economic challenges.
#154: From Apps to Agents: Building Your Digital Workforce
Move beyond simple prompts. Explore the architecture, autonomy, and fiscal guardrails of the next generation of AI agentic workflows.