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.
#5898: ROCm 10.1: AMD's Software Stack Finally Grows Up
Three ROCm releases in six months — build system, agentic tooling, data movement. What actually changed for AMD GPU owners.
#5885: The World's Oldest Software Still Running
From a 1958 Pentagon contract system to Voyager's 68KB computer, some software refuses to die. What's the oldest code still in production?
#5870: Homebox Fork's Two Backend Scripts Need a Real Job Runner
A Homebox fork has two incremental scripts — WebP conversion and AI image enrichment — and no scheduler built to run them safely.
#5869: Scraping AliExpress Specs: Selectors, Agents, or Neither?
Daniel wants to snapshot AliExpress spec sheets into his inventory system. The selector approach is already dead — here's what actually works.
#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.
#5858: Routing AI Models: When 3 Rules Beat a Trained Router
A deep dive into AI model routing — and why a learned router may not beat three rules you wrote by hand.
#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.
#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.
#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.
#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.
#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.
#5826: The Thread That Outlived Its Authors
A Debian bug filed in 1997 got its second reply 24 years later. What happens when a conversation outlives everyone who started it?
#5818: 46,434 Mailing Lists That Still Work
Daniel wants a public town hall. Turns out the oldest tool on the internet — the mailing list — might be the right one.
#5816: Why Linux Still Runs on a 1986 Mailing List
Linux 7.3 release candidates ship through a 1986 email tool. Here's why the kernel never left the listserv.
#5814: Who Remembers Where You Left Off?
mpv remembers. MPRIS, GstPlay, and Media3 don't. There's no standard for playback history.