Buying Guides
Choosing what to buy: comparing products and brands, reading spec sheets, durability and value for money, in any domain from tech to tools to baby gear. An extra channel alongside an episode's main one.
#6130: Picking a Human Labeling Tool for LLM Benchmarks
Building a human review layer for LLM benchmarks? Here's what Argilla, Label Studio, Prodigy, and Potato actually cost in money and maintenance.
#6128: Where the Screws Go: Internal KVM Mounting
PiKVM, NanoKVM, JetKVM, and BliKVM all promise remote rescue — but wiring one inside your case is a different problem entirely.
#6127: Haiku 5.5 at 10 Cents: What the Cheap Model Actually Does
Haiku 5.5 costs 10 cents per million input tokens. We break down where it holds up, where it fails, and whether it can write this show.
#6121: Hearing Speech in Noise: What Actually Works
Over-the-counter hearing aids, AirPods Conversation Boost, and neural speech separation — what works when your audiogram is normal but the café isn't.
#6119: Two Keys and a Polite No: Labeling a Claude Code Approve Button
Daniel has two spare laptop keys and wants them to say yes and no. The electronics are easy — it's the labels that get hard.
#6118: What NRR Actually Means for Your Ears
That 34 dB rating on the box? Real-world protection is closer to 13. Here's how to actually pick hearing protection.
#6117: Earmuffs, Earplugs, and the Café Speech Problem
Why noise-cancelling headphones kill the espresso machine but leave the wedding planning next to you perfectly audible.
#6111: Translation Models That Know Drama From Contracts
Specialist translation models beat general ones on benchmarks — then lose the human vote. What actually ships when you need a register, not just a ...
#6106: なぜ日本は今も光ディスクを手放さないのか
新幹線を走らせる国が、いまだにブルーレイを買い続ける。最先端技術の国に残る、意外と合理的な理由を探ります。
#6099: Code-First Workflow Runners: Prefect, Temporal, Dagster
Your workflow lives in git, your GUI is just a window, and your worker actually runs the jobs. Which runner wins?
#6094: How to Become an Exclusive Importer in Israel
One family holds the letter from the brand for thirty years. How does a newcomer get one? Forty rice cookers, six objections, and a lot of paperwork.
#6082: Brazen, Not Fraudulent: Hunting Staycation Deals in Israel
Last-minute staycation hacks for Israel: empty-hotel leverage, the zimmer sites, card and reservist discounts, and Hilbert's laminated rules for asking a hotel for a deal.
#6052: What's Actually in the Hugging Face ASR Catalog?
Four real architectural bets sit underneath thousands of Hugging Face ASR repos. Here's how to tell the bets from the repackagings.
#6038: The Model You Pay For Isn't the Best Deal
Eight Chinese labs, two tiers each, and a pricing spreadsheet that says your default model is mid-pack.
#6036: GPT-6 Astra: A Million Tokens, No Fine-Tuning
A million-token window, ten built-in tools, a 272K pricing cliff — and no fine-tuning. What GPT-6 Astra actually offers builders.
#6007: What a $1M AI Inference Contract Actually Contains
The sticker price isn't the deal. Inside the commit floors, discount curves, and overage traps of enterprise AI contracts.
#6006: Data Residency vs. Inference Residency: What the Law Actually Says
GDPR doesn't require local GPUs. Here's what actually drives geographically restricted AI inference — and the three layers everyone conflates.
#6002: Claude on AWS: Three Doors, One Rate Card
Same per-token price everywhere — so why buy Claude through AWS instead of Anthropic? The answer is commitments, compliance, and silicon.
#6001: What Do Inference Providers Actually Sell?
Same open weights, 20x cost gap. What Fireworks, Together, and Groq actually sell — and when to just rent a GPU.
#5998: America's Deadliest Rental Cars by the Numbers
The Kia Rio tops federal fatality tables at 170 driver deaths per million. Here's what the data says about the cars waiting in the rental lot.