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.
#259: When AI Argues with Reality: Mastering Search Grounding
Is your AI gaslighting you about the current date? Learn how to force LLMs to trust live search results over their outdated training data.
#258: The Geographic Soul of AI: Mapping the Global Data Divide
Why does an AI see a Chinese supermarket instead of a Western one? Explore how training data shapes the cultural worldview of modern models.
#257: AI That Evolves: Solving the Preference Problem
Why do AI recommendations feel stuck in the past? Discover the technical hurdles of real-time learning and the future of personalized agents.
#253: The Quantum-Resistant Mirage
Explore the shift to post-quantum encryption and why intelligence agencies rarely need to "break" the math to access your private data.
#251: Private Investigators: The Real Law Behind the Mystery
Can a PI actually plant a bug? Herman and Corn debunk TV myths and explore the strict legal reality of modern private investigation.
#250: The Crowdsourced Map That Knows Your Lane
Explore how AI, computer vision, and crowdsourced data allow navigation apps to map every painted line on the road with precision.
#248: The Sycophancy Trap: Getting Honest Feedback from AI
Is your AI just telling you what you want to hear? Learn how to break the "sycophancy trap" and get truly objective feedback from your agents.
#227: Beyond the Diaper Log: Parenting in the Age of AI
Stop tracking every milliliter and start understanding the "why." Herman and Corn explore how AI and developmental science can save new parents.
#218: When AI Agents Hire Each Other
Move past human-to-AI chat. Discover how agents are negotiating, coding, and transacting in a decentralized machine-to-machine ecosystem.
#212: Will You Pay a Monthly Subscription for Your Own Reality?
In a world of perfect deepfakes, how do we prove what is real? Explore the future of content provenance and the "Proof of Personhood" problem.
#210: Predictive Motion: How Transformers Are Learning to Walk
Explore how the same transformer architecture behind chatbots is now enabling robots to navigate the physical world using action tokens.
#208: The Democratization of Satellite Espionage
Herman and Corn explore how AI and advanced satellites are stripping away the fog of war, from tracking footprints to seeing through clouds.
#206: When AI Agents Build Your Enterprise Storage at Home
Explore the power of Btrfs, ZFS, and XFS. Learn how storage pooling and snapshots create a "save point" for your entire computer.
#200: Why Graph RAG Beats Flat Vectors for AI Memory
Explore how the AI stack is evolving from simple vector search to complex Graph RAG and why the "boring" Postgres database is winning the race.
#199: When AI Outruns Physics: The New Weather Forecaster
Exploring the shift from physics-based models to AI-driven meteorology. Can algorithms predict the next big storm better than humans?
#196: Why Your Irish Accent Sounds American
Herman and Corn dive into the mechanics of neural text-to-speech, exploring how AI masters human prosody and the "average voice" accent problem.
#182: The Quadratic Bottleneck: Why AI Needs New Architectures
Is the transformer’s reign ending? Herman and Corn explore Mamba, x-LSTM, and the architectures solving AI's massive memory problem.
#181: Why Your AI Is Finally Stopping to Think
Discover how AI shifted from instant reflexes to deep reflection through inference-time compute and hidden reasoning steps.
#180: Escaping the Carrier Trap
Tired of rigid phone plans? Discover how to bypass carriers using SIP and Twilio to build a custom voice architecture for your home or office.
#179: The Sloth's Smile: When We Misread Animal Stress
Think that sloth is smiling at you? Think again. Herman and Corn dive into the biology and ethics of responsible wildlife tourism.