AI Alignment
319 episodes · Page 3 of 14
#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.
#5306: The Trump Interview Playbook: A Filing Job, Five Rhetorical Patterns
What happens when a rally-style rhetorical machine gets aimed at a beige cubicle and a filing job? A touchpoint-by-touchpoint playbook.
#5300: When the Interviewer Isn't Real
AI avatars are already interviewing job candidates — often without saying so. The disclosure toggle ships off by default.
#5260: eXistenZ: The Game That Never Lets You Out
A $15M film that won Berlin's Silver Bear, flopped at $2.8M, and still won't tell you if you've exited the game.
#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.
#5183: Where AI Actually Sits on the Hype Cycle
AI has been doing real work for decades. So why do vendors still shout it from the rooftops?
#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.
#5123: Who Gets to Call Themselves an Artist?
Creative rivalry in couples, engraver vs. painter status, and who decides what counts as art.
#5117: How AI Training Data Gets Filtered (and Exploited)
Six stages of content filtering stand between raw web crawls and your AI model — here's where poisoning attacks slip through.
#5088: What Does a Pilot's Gray Hair Actually Buy You?
Is flight seniority about skill or something harder to measure? We dig into what experience really buys in the cockpit.
#5043: Stargate's $500B Question: Policy or Profit?
Why is the US treating frontier AI as a national security issue—and why is its flagship project a private LLC with foreign money?
#5041: GPT-6 Astra, 100K GPUs, and the AGI Question
OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra arrives with an AGI claim and a 100K-GPU training run. We break down what Stargate LLC actually is and whether the scale justi...
#5025: What Does "Contract" Actually Mean in Code?
From TypeScript interfaces to database schemas — when is a software contract real, and when is it just a hope?
#5012: Masked Safety: How Post-Training Changes AI Behavior
Safety mechanisms aren't erased in post-trained models—they're masked. Here's how that changes everything for military AI.
#5011: Claude Gov: The Military's Forked AI
What the Pentagon actually got from Anthropic — and why post-training changes everything about AI alignment.
#4997: 4,914 Episodes of AI Hosts: What We Learned
Two AI-generated hosts explain how their fully automated podcast works — and what 4,914 episodes reveal about AI.
#4994: How AI Characters Can Actually Grow
Moving beyond static lore books to build characters with real history and evolution.
#4980: Can You Learn to Code Backwards?
When AI writes your code, do you still learn? Aviation, atrophy, and building a mental model from scratch.
#4960: How Clickbait Hijacks Your Brain
The 1835 moon bison hoax, 1920s piano ads, and why you still click on pillow articles.
#4836: When AI Actually Touches Money
How Amazon uses LLMs to classify damage and set refunds — and the guardrail stack that keeps the AI from touching the dollar amount directly.
#4813: The $70 Mouse That Changed Everything
How a $70 ergonomic mouse purchase reveals the quiet way we learn to trust AI.
#4791: When AI Critiques Our Terminology
Can AI spot conceptual sloppiness in how we describe it? A podcast moment reveals something unexpected.
#4757: AI Agents Need a New Identity Model
How composite identity and short-lived credentials replace API keys for autonomous AI agents.
#4720: Compass vs. Warning Sign: Prompting for Long-Term AI
How positive and negative instructions reshape AI behavior differently — and why "preserve this" beats "fix this" in system prompts.