Computing
Non-AI computing: networks, servers, hardware, software engineering, and digital security and privacy.
#5868: Fine-Tuning Parakeet for Um-Free, Hebrish Speech
Parakeet runs great on a phone — but fine-tuning it happens on a GPU. Here's the actual recipe for dropping ums and catching Hebrew.
#5865: Four Pocket Players That Won't Sell You a Device Today
Mono, Fonix One, Sudo, and DuRoBo Krono all promise phone-free podcast listening — and not one of them is ready to ship today.
#5861: Inside Cloudflare's Bot Check: TLS, JA4, and the Sand-Timer
What actually happens during those two seconds of "Checking your browser"? The verdict is made before a single byte of JavaScript runs.
#5859: Slow Labs, Fast Ships: What Release Cadence Actually Tells Us
Anthropic ships premium models every 22.5 days — the fastest lab in the industry. So much for the slow-and-careful story.
#5857: Building a Scorecard for Our Own AI Writers
Daniel wants a real scorecard for the agent that writes this show — repetition, dialogue quality, and whether the retrieval harness actually works.
#5851: The Earbud Assistant Problem Nobody Solves
The AI model is solved. So why does the assistant in your ear still fail? The answer is the unglamorous plumbing nobody demos.
#5850: Ambient Computing: Why Glasses Beat the Phone
Weiser's 1991 vision said tech should disappear. Thirty-five years later, the device that finally worked wasn't new — it was glasses.
#5849: Who Invented Computer Science—and Was It Ever a Trade?
The founders wanted a science of computation. We built a job credential instead—and the argument hasn't changed since 1968.
#5848: The Libraries Nobody Thinks About
zlib, SQLite, OpenSSL, and the xz backdoor — the tiny pieces of code running everywhere, and the volunteers keeping them alive.
#5847: Why One EQ Curve Can't Fix Two Voices
One static EQ curve can't serve two different voices — here's why, and what actually works instead.
#5844: Five of the Buggiest Software Ever Shipped
Windows ME, Sonic '06, Big Rigs, and more — the software where the bugs weren't a problem, they were the product.
#5843: Why pip and uv Share Almost No Code
pip won by being preinstalled, not by being best. uv is a from-scratch Rust rewrite, not a wrapper — and the speed story isn't really about Rust.
#5842: When Your TTS Model Updates Itself
Resemble pushed new Chatterbox weights to Hugging Face. Our pipeline started using them without a single config change.
#5841: What's Actually Inside a Secure Line?
What makes a secure line secure — and why the call was never the vulnerable part.
#5840: Why Voice Clones Lisp: Sibilants, Codecs, and the Sounds We Lose
Sibilants and plosives are the most fragile sounds in speech — and every stage of the audio chain is quietly built to destroy them.
#5831: Managed vs Layer 3: Two Switch Axes, One Empty Box
Managed and Layer 3 aren't the same thing — they're orthogonal. One quadrant of the matrix is a product that basically doesn't exist.
#5830: Serving Your Own Fine-Tuned Model in the Cloud
You fine-tuned an open-weight model. Now how does anyone actually talk to it? Dedicated GPUs vs serverless inference, and the math that decides it.
#5829: Printing Files on Paper That Outlasts the Software
Optar and PaperBack turn any file into machine-readable dots on paper. The paper lasts centuries — the codec might not.
#5828: Punched Cards: The 200-Year Reign of Cardboard Computing
From Jacquard's silk looms to NSA key tapes, how holes in cardboard ran the world for two centuries — and why we can still read them.
#5827: LTFS Explained: Tape That Acts Like a Disk
LTFS makes tape pretend to be a filesystem — but 37-second seeks decide whether it can anchor a searchable archive.