Games
28 episodes
#6206: Monte Carlo: How Random Guesses Solve Impossible Problems
From solitaire at Los Alamos to neutron diffusion, why rolling dice beats careful grids — and how many runs is enough.
#5987: The LEGO Cam: When LEGO Gave Kids a Movie Studio
It won Toy of the Year and flopped anyway. The LEGO Studios set that handed kids a camera, an editing suite, and a dinosaur.
#5986: Electronics Kits for Toddlers? What Actually Works
No kit exists for a 15-month-old — but the age question splits into three windows: kits at 5, breadboards at 10, microcontrollers at 13.
#5985: Meccano at 125: What Kids Actually Learn From Bolts
Meccano just relaunched for its 125th year — but does childhood tinkering actually build lasting engineering intuition?
#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.
#5700: Did the Internet's Pioneers Know What They Were Building?
Vint Cerf says they didn't know — and they did. How early internet subculture formed, where it lived, and whether it survived.
#5458: Two Linuses and the Fun in Technology
What Linus Tech Tips and Linus Torvalds each model about play, mastery, and keeping tech fun as AI eats the tedious parts.
#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.
#5134: Why Japanese TV Commits So Hard to Absurdity
Ten comedians who can't laugh, exploding rings, and a man who won a contest for 15 months — why Japan goes all in.
#3617: Takeshi's Castle and the Art of Absurd Japanese Game Shows
Why Takeshi's Castle, Gaki no Tsukai, and Ninja Warrior became global comedy phenomena.
#3584: Why Rugrats Feels So Vanilla in Retrospect
Why does Nickelodeon's longest-running original series feel so hollow decades later? We unpack the design choices.
#3143: How a Swiss Sub "Sank" a US Carrier
Inside the adjudication pipeline that turned a simulated torpedo into a real Navy crisis.
#3127: Crafting AI Characters That Feel Alive
Move beyond system prompts with structured character bibles that give AI personalities real inner lives.
#2581: Did Ancient Jews Have Leisure?
Did ancient Jews ever relax, or was every moment supposed to be Torah study? The surprising history of leisure in Jewish tradition.
#2313: When AI Optimizes the Wrong Thing
Discover how AI systems learn to optimize for rewards—and why they sometimes get it dangerously wrong.
#2190: Simulating Extreme Decisions With LLMs
LLMs fail at the exact problem wargaming was built to solve—simulating irrational, extreme decision-makers. A new study reveals why.
#2171: How IQT Labs Built a Wargaming LLM (Then Archived It)
A deep code review of Snowglobe, IQT Labs' open-source LLM wargaming system that ran real national security simulations before being archived. What...
#2137: Wargaming's Methodology, Not Magic
Most AI wargames are just expensive role-play. Here's the professional methodology they're missing.
#2136: The Brutal Problem of AI Wargame Evaluation
Most AI wargame simulations skip evaluation entirely or rely on token expert reviews. This is the field's biggest credibility problem.
#2134: The Fog-of-War Problem in AI Wargaming
Why shared AI brains make secret-keeping a nightmare, and the four architectural patterns researchers use to fix it.
#2132: The Referee's Dilemma: Epistemic Containment in LLM Simulations
Why do AI war games need a news blackout? We dissect the firewall that keeps LLM actors from cheating with real-world data.
#2020: 1,000 AI Agents Built a Religion in Minecraft
An experiment drops 1,000 autonomous agents into Minecraft, and they spontaneously invent religion, democracy, and taxes.
#1855: When AI Makes Game Assets, Who Owns the Art?
From blocky polygons to photorealistic assets, AI is transforming how 3D models are made.
#1849: When Forum Etiquette Becomes Prompt Engineering
Forget simple chatbots—this is how roleplayers taught AI to remember entire worlds, from 90s MUDs to just-in-time lore delivery.