Technology
Hardware, software, networking, and development
#5399: Who's Actually Behind the AI? Fauxtomation Explained
Amazon's Just Walk Out needed 1,000 workers in India. Google Duplex, Facebook M — the pattern of selling humans as software goes deep.
#5396: Teaching a Small Model to Stop Spelling Out Numbers
Your ASR pipeline is fine until someone dictates "three point two" and gets "three point two" spelled out. Here's how inverse text normalization ac...
#5394: Why Waze Sends You Into a Jerusalem Alley
A listener's complaint about Waze turns into a tour of how routing apps actually work — graphs, shortcuts, and a map that's always slightly wrong.
#5393: Fine-Tuning a Model on 100 Hand-Edited Answers
You don't need 10,000 examples to make a model sound like you. The real number is closer to 100 — if the edits are opinionated.
#5392: Building Agents You Can Actually Move
Agent portability isn't a copy job — it's a rebuild. Why memory, not code, is where lock-in lives.
#5391: The Software Behind Urgent Care Triage
Big buttons, emoji vitals, and a system that says "order IV" — what's actually running behind the triage screen?
#5389: Hugging Face vs Kaggle: Where Models Actually Live
Hugging Face and Kaggle aren't rivals — one is infrastructure, one is a practice field. Here's how the two platforms actually differ.
#5388: Android's Split Keyboard and Voice Input Problem
Android separates keyboards from speech engines by design. Most apps weld them back together.
#5387: Who Decides What Your Keyboard Knows?
Your keyboard's word list was probably frozen in 2014. Here's who maintains the open-source dictionaries — and why Gboard's stays fresh.
#5386: Morse Code Between Two Phones: Does It Actually Work?
Two phones, no data, one room. Morse over sound and flashlight — what the research says about echoes, timing, and whether anyone will hear you.
#5384: Android ASR Runtimes: LiteRT, ExecuTorch, and Why Your Phone Has No VRAM
Why does your phone have no VRAM number? A tour of Android's runtime layer and what it takes to run ASR locally.
#5383: Android's Open Core, Closed Governance
Android's code is open, but its roadmap isn't. What happens when Google changes the core and developers just have to cope?
#5382: 10 Commercial Gear Upgrades for Your Home
Commercial dishwashers, washers, and fridges can outlast consumer gear — if your electrical panel cooperates.
#5381: What Hotels Know About Laundry Machines
Washer-extractors, 400 G-force spins, and why a hotel laundry machine won't fit in your apartment.
#5380: Zero-Click: When Your OS Opens Files For You
Your file manager parses downloads before you touch them. Here's what that means for your security — and what you can actually do about it.
#5379: Hashing, Sandboxes, and YARA: The Free Forensics Nobody Uses
VirusTotal, MalwareBazaar, and YARA do far more than most people realize — and they're free. Here's how to actually use them.
#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.
#5376: Why a Zello Pager Wearable Doesn't Exist Yet
Pagers blink until acknowledged. Zello beeps until you tap. But nobody's shipped the wearable that bridges them.
#5375: Do Laptop Screen Protectors Actually Stop a Drop?
Tempered glass for laptops exists — but it's sold for scratches, not drops. Here's what actually survives a fall.
#5372: 10 Power Tools, Ranked by What to Buy First
A purchasing sequence, not a wish list: the 10 power tools a homeowner should own, in the order you should actually buy them.