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.
#2848: Can 100 Volunteers Let AI Govern Them for a Month?
An AI council of multiple models, a hundred volunteers, and a month of real municipal decisions. Here’s how you’d run the experiment.
#2847: How AI Could Transform Comparative Policy Analysis
Can AI agents do the work of a distributed think tank for cross-country policy learning?
#2836: Can ANC Handle Real City Noise Now?
ANC has gotten smarter, not just stronger. Can it handle construction noise? And what about cancelling noise in a whole room?
#2834: The Deep Ocean Trench of Authentication
PIN + smart card + biometric + behavioral checks. The real security stack behind federal authentication.
#2822: Serverless E-Commerce: Medusa, Saleor, and Vendure
Three open-source headless commerce engines that make serverless e-commerce actually viable.
#2821: The Trench Coat Is on Fire: Making Smart Home Parts Interrupt Each Other
Three engineering problems in a trench coat. Make Zigbee sirens, Snapcast speakers, and push-to-talk audio actually work together.
#2808: Falling for Your Chatbot: Love, Loss, and Language Models
Real cases of people falling in love with AI companions, why memory makes it feel real, and what happens when the illusion breaks.
#2800: The Two Meanings of Industrial Design
Industrial design is a profession. The "industrial look" is something else entirely. Here's where they split.
#2798: Why AI Tooling Finally Makes Static Frameworks Practical
From thumbnails to SVGs — how Astro changes the media game compared to WordPress.
#2790: Git Hygiene for AI Coding Agents
How to keep your git repo clean when Claude is blazing through tasks — plus a recovery playbook for when things go sideways.
#2788: Living in Multiple Realities at Once
What film genre captures the feeling of not knowing what's real? A deep dive into ontological uncertainty.
#2783: Can a DAP Cure Your Distraction Addiction?
A listener asks if anyone still makes a decent non-phone audio player. The answer is yes—with a few important caveats.
#2781: When Voice AI Features Enable Fraud
Voice AI platforms now let you simulate background noise, hesitation, and natural conversation — and that's a problem.
#2780: Building Self-Healing Agent Pipelines
How to build an agent that monitors and fixes other agents in production — without the hype.
#2779: The Hidden Stateful Side of Serverless GPU
How Modal, RunPod, and other platforms handle container builds, caching, and versioning under the hood.
#2778: When AI Podcasts Stop Being Weird
AI-generated podcasts exist, but are they welcome? One builder’s open-source project tests platform tolerance and cultural acceptance.
#2774: Open Data That Actually Works
The gap between open data promises and reality, and the rare cases where it actually changes policy.
#2773: Beyond Static Fallbacks: Agentic Error Handling in AI Pipelines
From try-except blocks to planning agents that route around failures intelligently.
#2767: The Anonymous Virtuosos of Elevator Music
The surprising history of Muzak, the military general who invented it, and the session musicians who made music designed to be ignored.
#2762: Thread vs Zigbee: Multi-Floor Smart Home Networking
Can you mix Thread border routers from different brands across floors? Yes—here's how it actually works.