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.
#5992: Ridiculous But Legal Ways to Get RAM for AI
Memory prices are up 485% on some kits. Here are ten ridiculous — but completely legal — ways to get RAM for AI without the markup.
#5991: Batch Inference on Your Own GPU: vLLM, SGLang, Ollama, llama.cpp
Hosted batch APIs sell you half-price tokens. Here's how to get the same file-in, file-out workflow on your own Linux box.
#5989: Twenty Tiny Beats That Make a Podcast Stick
Twenty novel recurring segment pitches — and the test each one has to pass: does it add context, or just noise?
#5987: The LEGO Cam: When LEGO Gave Kids a Movie Studio
It won Toy of the Year and flopped anyway. The LEGO Studios set that handed kids a camera, an editing suite, and a dinosaur.
#5982: Teaching a Voice Engine to Say "Yalla" Right
A small token classifier that spots Hebrew words hiding in English sentences — and why finding the word is the easy half.
#5981: Batch Inference: Four Doors, Half Price
Same tokens, half the price — and almost nobody using it properly. A tour of batch inference from OpenAI to OpenRouter.
#5975: Merging vs Distillation: Can Two Models Become One?
Merging and distillation get lumped together, but they're opposites. One composes existing capability; the other has to teach it.
#5974: One Model or Two? ASR Cleanup Explained
If speech models can punctuate and capitalize on their own, why does a separate 484MB cleanup model exist at all?
#5973: MCP Security: Tool Poisoning and Agent Identity
MCP servers trust their own tool descriptions. That design choice creates a whole new class of attack — and a new observability problem.
#5972: AI Meeting Agents Are Becoming Stand-Ins
Bots now book follow-ups, update CRMs, and attend on your behalf. Here's what's real, what's speculative, and where the etiquette is heading.
#5971: Personal CRM in 2026: Dex, Mesh, folk, Monica, Twenty
What actually makes a good personal CRM — and which ones can an AI assistant talk to?
#5964: Containers vs VMs for GPU Inference: What You Actually Pay
Containers cost 0.03%. Passthrough VMs cost 1%... or 36%. Same hardware, different systems — here's how to tell which you'll get.
#5963: Running One Model Across Mismatched GPUs
Tensor, pipeline, or offload? What actually happens when you run one model across several GPUs — including mismatched ones.
#5962: How Word Error Rate Lies to Us
WER is the number everyone reports for speech recognition — and the one that agrees with human judgment least. Here's what it actually measures.
#5961: What Your GPU Is Actually Waiting On
Your GPU says 100% utilized. It's multiplying zeros. Here's what the counters actually measure during inference.
#5960: There's No Such Thing as Tokens Per Second
Why one tokens-per-second number can't describe an LLM server — and which metrics actually tell you if it's working.
#5959: What RTF Actually Tells You About Speech Models
Accuracy gets the headlines, but speed decides what ships. How RTF, latency percentiles, and memory shape real ASR deployments.
#5957: The Scientific Plugins Hiding in Plain Sight
ChatGPT's plugin directory has 5,723 entries — but the real scientific AI work is happening in arXiv papers, not plugins.
#5956: Will ChatGPT Eat Your Grocery App?
MCP servers, ChatGPT apps, and a prediction that AI vendors will absorb your grocery list one micro-app at a time.
#5950: Self-Hosting Your Search Stack: SearXNG, Crawl4AI, and the Real Bill
Can SearXNG, Crawl4AI, and an open-source aggregator really replace a commercial search API? Yes — with a very large asterisk.