AI
Artificial intelligence, machine learning, and everything LLM
#2664: Can You Trust an LLM's Raw Knowledge?
Why pre-trained knowledge isn't reliable for facts — and what actually makes models useful.
#2657: How Background Removal Actually Works (and Why It Matters for AI Art)
Background removal isn't magic — it's multiple AI systems working in sequence. Here's what's actually happening under the hood.
#2653: Puppetry in America: From Vaudeville to Muppets
Tracing the surprising institutional depth of American puppetry, from UConn's puppet arts program to the Henson revolution.
#2651: AI Training Itself: Student, Teacher, and Grader
Can models generate their own training data and judge their own outputs? The promise and pitfalls of fully AI-led pipelines.
#2650: How to Catch an LLM's Bad Writing Habits
A practical guide to analyzing podcast transcripts for repetitive language and dialogue patterns — from Python word counts to embedding clustering.
#2649: Freelancing Without Getting Burned: Clients, Contracts & Cash Flow
How many clients do you need to survive? And what contract clauses actually protect you?
#2647: Async Communication: Tools, Norms, and AI Mediation
How to choose the right async tool, set boundaries with clients, and where AI fits in.
#2645: How to Document Failures for Your AI Second Brain
Stop writing diary entries. Start writing retrospectives your AI agent can actually use.
#2644: Crafting Agendas That Actually Work (With AI)
Stop writing table-of-contents agendas. Learn the diplomat’s method for crafting meetings that actually achieve their goals.
#2643: How Stenographers Type 300 Words Per Minute
Court reporters don’t type letters—they chord syllables at 300 words per minute. Here’s how it works and why AI can’t replace them yet.
#2641: Whiteboard to Clean Diagram with Nano Banana
How Nano Banana finally solves the text rendering problem, turning messy whiteboard photos into polished tech diagrams.
#2640: Batch Inference Use Cases and Instructional AI in 2026
Beyond cheaper tokens—how batch inference changes AI workflows and why instructional models beat conversational ones for automated jobs.
#2639: How Re-Ranking Actually Works in Search and RAG Pipelines
Why your search results miss the mark — and how cross-encoders fix it.
#2638: How to Build Disposable AI Agents at Runtime
Create ephemeral AI agents that answer questions about specific items, then vanish. No persistent configuration needed.
#2636: Take Notes Like a Diplomat
What WikiLeaks cables teach us about capturing meetings: judgment over transcription, context over completeness.
#2634: Mining Latent Value from AI Prompts
How to extract durable personal context from raw prompts and build a self-healing memory layer for AI systems.
#2632: How to Start a Meetup Without Burning Out
Practical steps for launching a local community around any interest — without it taking over your life.
#2622: How Transformers Actually Work: Attention, Tokens, and Context
How one architectural change unlocked chatbots, image generation, and protein folding — explained without the jargon.
#2604: Self-Hosted Screen Recording: Tools Beyond Loom
Practical tools and trade-offs for async video documentation with real data control across platforms including Linux.
#2603: Building Agent Skills for Creative Workflows
How composable AI agent skills turn tedious media tasks into one-instruction operations for creatives.