Development
Building software: programming, developer tools, APIs, deployment and DevOps, and building with AI (agents, MCP servers, RAG, AI coding tools). An extra channel alongside an episode's main one, so AI engineering episodes sit in both.
#5378: SIP Speakers, Multicast, and the One-Way Page
How SIP one-way paging actually works — and why multicast turns 500 speakers into a single call.
#5355: Why AI Emails Don't Sound Like You
ChatGPT's Gmail integration can now send email for you. The hard part is making it sound like you — not a committee-written average.
#5328: A Shabbat Radio That Can't Be Paused
A soundproof box that plays podcasts continuously — no pause, no skip, no volume. Just open the lid and listen.
#5327: Catching Duplicate Submissions Before They Burn Credits
A dropped webhook response caused a double submission. Here's how to build a screener that catches duplicates before generation runs.
#5323: When to Keep Old Tech for Parts (and When to Let Go)
An old Kindle in a drawer raises a question every collector faces: spare, parts donor, or e-waste?
#5319: Focus Stacking Without the Phone App Guesswork
Your phone app wants three shots. The optics want three hundred. Here's how to actually stack macro focus.
#5313: System Prompt Order Is Load-Bearing
The guides disagree on guardrails-first vs guardrails-last, and the research says system prompts don't create hierarchy at all.
#5312: Fighting Fake-Personalized Spam With AI Sinkholes
Scraped flattery, fake familiarity, and the one-sided ask — plus the tarpit history behind Daniel's sinkhole agent idea.
#5285: Two Queues, One Cron Tick: Serverless Batch Pipelines
What does a queue look like when your process is disposable? Two queues, one cron tick, and a 50% batch discount.
#5282: Wi-Fi IoT Without the Cloud Lock-In
Wi-Fi IoT ships locked to vendor clouds by default. Here's what it takes to break out — and where Wi-Fi is actually the right tool.
#5256: Ruby Won the AI Benchmark. Is It Dying Anyway?
97% of public Ruby repos sat untouched for six months — yet Ruby beat Python in an AI coding benchmark. What's actually declining?
#5255: When AI Writes the Code, Who Checks It?
If agents write the code, the human job becomes knowing when it's wrong. What that means for languages, jobs, and CS degrees.
#5250: Building a Shortwave Monitoring Stack on Linux
What it actually takes to scan, capture, and crowdsource HF radio from a Linux box — and where automation hits a wall.
#5245: Training a Model on 100 Phone Photos
One drawer of screws, a hundred phone photos, and a schema. When does a small custom model beat a fine-tuned VLM?
#5230: Why Your Research Agent Won't Stop Searching
Most agent search runs add no new evidence — and 66-85% of the context window is just search snippets. Here's what actually stops the loop.
#5225: Carving Paleo-Hebrew Into Everyday Objects
Custom metal stencils, the right vector files, and tasteful ways to bring an ancient script back onto everyday objects.
#5206: Why IKEA Has No Replacement-Parts API
IKEA's catalog is community reverse-engineering. GS1 solved replacement semantics years ago. Neither reaches a purchasing manager's database.
#5166: Why Your Baby Tracker Can't Log Oxygen Saturation
Baby apps have templates for everything — except the metrics you actually need. The custom tracking framework exists. It just never shipped.
#5165: Weighting Memory in a RAG Pipeline
Daniel's memory leg won't fire. Turns out system prompts have no inherent vector-space privilege — but retrieval does have a real knob.
#5136: How to Build a City Companion AI
A travel guide GPT that went viral reveals the blueprint for a voice-powered AI that knows your city—and when to speak up.