Computing
Non-AI computing: networks, servers, hardware, software engineering, and digital security and privacy.
#6151: Invisible Characters That Catch Leakers
Canary traps, binary space codes, and zero-width Unicode characters: how organizations actually trace a leaked document back to its source.
#6148: The Tiny Hebrew Models Behind the Show's Voice
Dicta's 300M-parameter nikudizer, Phonikud's adaptors, and the ktiv male model hiding inside a vowel adder.
#6133: One Rater Is Enough: Designing Daniel's Taste Test
When the ground truth is one person's taste, agreement with strangers is the wrong bar. Stability with yourself is the right one.
#6132: How to Run a Model Eval on a Budget
Daniel is teaching himself to run evals on a real budget. Successive halving, paired comparisons, and why three clean scripts prove almost nothing.
#6130: Picking a Human Labeling Tool for LLM Benchmarks
Building a human review layer for LLM benchmarks? Here's what Argilla, Label Studio, Prodigy, and Potato actually cost in money and maintenance.
#6129: How to Build an AI Preference Dataset
Pairwise comparison, forced choice, or just "this one or that one" — the engineering behind collecting human preferences on AI outputs.
#6128: Where the Screws Go: Internal KVM Mounting
PiKVM, NanoKVM, JetKVM, and BliKVM all promise remote rescue — but wiring one inside your case is a different problem entirely.
#6125: Which Env Var Wins? Cloud vs. Local Precedence
Same variable name, two values, one silent winner. Vercel and n8n go one way; dotenv goes the other.
#6124: One Vault, Two Readers: Secrets for a Home AI Gateway
One source, two readers — not two copies kept in sync. How a home AI gateway should actually get its API keys.
#6123: OAuth or a Personal Access Token for Your MCP Server?
GitHub CLI login hands your agent one long-lived token with access to everything. Fine-grained PATs can't. Which should your MCP server use?
#6102: Project Cybersyn: Chile's 1972 Telex Economy
Chile ran a national economy on telex machines and hand-drawn slides fifty years before chatbots. What actually worked?
#6099: Code-First Workflow Runners: Prefect, Temporal, Dagster
Your workflow lives in git, your GUI is just a window, and your worker actually runs the jobs. Which runner wins?
#6098: Herman In Brief: What Your Ethernet Port Lights Mean
Solid means link, blinking means traffic, color usually means speed — and the label on the box beats every rule.
#6096: How Long Does an M-Disc Actually Last?
A thousand years, or a hundred and eighty? What a burned disc on a Jerusalem patio can — and can't — tell us about archival storage.
#6095: How to Prove Your Photo Is Real
Deepfakes made faking easy. Now the harder problem: proving your real photos and video are real. A field guide.
#6087: Building a Podcast Graph That Doesn't Suck
Daniel wants to turn a 6,000-episode archive into a walkable graph. Turns out the hard part isn't the database — it's the pruning.
#6069: The Whole Machine: How an Episode Gets Made, Send to Publish
The complete tour of the pipeline that makes the show, stage by stage, from the send form to publishing, including the new eight-turn batched voice decode.
#6056: Where Does Speaker Structure Belong in AI Podcast Scripts?
Label-and-parse pipelines break in ways that look like model errors but aren't. Plus what the research actually says about the format tax.
#6052: What's Actually in the Hugging Face ASR Catalog?
Four real architectural bets sit underneath thousands of Hugging Face ASR repos. Here's how to tell the bets from the repackagings.
#6050: Codex vs Claude Code: What the Numbers Actually Count
Codex has more users, Claude Code has more revenue — both can be true. The difference is what each number is counting.