Technology
Hardware, software, networking, and development
#5606: Custom GPTs Retire: Skills, Plugins, and MCP Explained
Custom GPTs retire December 11. Here's how Skills, Plugins, and MCP servers actually replace them — and what doesn't migrate.
#5604: Fixing Typos Without Rewriting the Prompt
Three different jobs hide in one "clean up my prompt" pipeline — and only one of them should ever go to a generative model.
#5601: How Image Forensics Catches Fake Ghosts and Deepfakes
From darkroom magnifying glasses to AI provenance fingerprints — how we've verified photographs for a century.
#5596: What Victorian Diggers Could Teach Jerusalem's Cranes
London, Paris, and New York dug their first subways at a human cost we'd never accept today. Did we trade that chaos for something better — or just...
#5589: Hand-Arm Vibration Syndrome: What Cheap Power Tools Cost
Cheap power tools changed construction — and quietly introduced a disease that damages nerves and blood vessels in the hands. Here's what HAVS actu...
#5582: Who Invented the Internet? Actually, Seven People
The first message ever sent was "LO" — then the system crashed. The real story of the internet is a stack of seven layers, not one genius.
#5581: The Jerusalem Post's 1996 Bet and the Global Jewish News Race
A polarizing paper that launched online in 1996 — and the digital news network that followed it.
#5580: Before the Word Spy Existed: Venice's Intelligence Machine
Venice ran a centralised spy service with an archive, a spy network, and a counterintelligence body — in the 1400s.
#5579: Cutting Things With a Dremel: What Actually Works
Cut-off wheels vs cutting bits, RPM by material, and why lateral cutting is fine with the right attachment and fatal with the wrong one.
#5574: Ephemeral Containers and the ADE Label Nobody Owns
Claude Code's cloud sessions spin up a fresh VM every time. Here's what that breaks, and the new term for what Daniel actually wants.
#5573: Audio Post-Processing for AI Podcast Pipelines
Silence trimming, loudness normalization, EQ, and tempo fixes — the CLI tools that turn raw TTS output into a finished episode.
#5572: Renting Out Your Spare Room, Car, and Boat
Airbnb, Turo, and the platforms turning idle private assets into income — and the regulatory reckoning catching up with them.
#5570: Why Phone Trees Break and AI Voice Agents Can Fix Them
AI is good at routing calls and bad at resolving them. That single distinction explains why menu-replacing voice agents work and human-replacing on...
#5565: Inside the Factory: Why Plant Tours Are Addictive
Boeing, Ford, and Shenzhen's Future Factory: why watching a bottling line is mesmerizing, and where to find real golden tickets.
#5563: Your Fiber Is Dark: What You Can Actually Test
Your ONT is dark and there's no sync light to watch. Here's what a PON power meter can actually tell you before you call the ISP.
#5561: Fog, Light, and the Limits of Sight
Fog is a cloud sitting on the road. Here's the physics of why it forms fast, what it does to light, and why there's no safe driving visibility.
#5560: What's Really in That Paint Can?
Water-based paint still off-gasses for weeks. Here's what's in the can, and the one free lever that actually matters.
#5558: Landing on the Edge: Cork Fog to Carrier Decks
What does it actually take to land a heavy jet when the margin between calculated and flown is razor thin?
#5555: Five Machines That Peaked at the Wrong Moment
Concorde, Buran, Iridium: the finest machines ever built for a paradigm that vanished while they were still on the drawing board.
#5553: When 52 Volts Meets a 12-Volt Modem
A fried fiber modem raises the real question: where do you draw the line between preparedness and "done enough"?