AI
Artificial intelligence, machine learning, and everything LLM
#5289: Why World's Fairs Built Absurd Transit
Moving sidewalks, monorails, and robot boxers: what we lost when technology's grand public spectacles became trade shows.
#5288: Slideware, Vaporware, and the Founders Who Never Built Anything
Builder.ai raised $450M with AI that was mostly humans. Here's how pitch decks became the product.
#5285: Two Queues, One Cron Tick: Serverless Batch Pipelines
What does a queue look like when your process is disposable? Two queues, one cron tick, and a 50% batch discount.
#5282: Wi-Fi IoT Without the Cloud Lock-In
Wi-Fi IoT ships locked to vendor clouds by default. Here's what it takes to break out — and where Wi-Fi is actually the right tool.
#5281: Why Your Cheap Phone Plan Feels Broken
Same phone, same spot, same 5G bars — so why does a cheap carrier crawl? It's not the signal.
#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?
#5274: A Broken Dremel and the Hidden World of Parts Distribution
A dead rotary tool leads down two rabbit holes: warranty economics and how components actually move around the world.
#5270: Teardowns as Documentation: Inside the Hardware Repair Playbook
A dead Dremel sparks a deep dive into teardowns as a documentation discipline — and why board-level knowledge matters more than ever.
#5265: Repairing a $50 Dremel When the Warranty Costs More
A $50 tool, a 90-minute drive, and a warranty that costs more than the item. How macro PCB photography and public documentation make repair possible.
#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.
#5258: Vyvanse, Alcohol Withdrawal, and the Titration Problem
A listener's water-titration experiment with Vyvanse leads to a bigger question: can medicine model neurotransmitter systems in real time?
#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.
#5249: What Makes a Network Truly Sovereign?
An HF antenna on a consulate roof raises a bigger question: what makes a network sovereign — and why is everyone from cloud vendors to AI data cent...
#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?
#5244: Model C: Keeping Doers Doing Across a Career
What if learning and doing never had to be separate phases? A look at the career arc that burns people out at both ends.
#5232: Zello, PTT Buttons, and the Kitchen Intercom Question
Why your Bluetooth speaker ignores Zello's push-to-talk — and what to buy instead for a hands-full, phone-off fallback.