Artificial intelligence, machine learning--whatever we're calling it, it sure is in the news a lot all of a sudden. Everything about the use of AI feels uncanny enough lately that we sat down and had a free-wheeling conversation about the subject, from some basic (fuzzy) terms and definitions to Will's use of machine learning at Foo, the endless ethical dilemmas about the use of the technology, and some loose speculation about where AI will be used going forward and how long it'll take someone to unironically name their startup Skynet.Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

170: The Robots (Hopefully) Aren't Coming

You sent some serious Qs for this month's Q&A, which got us talking about the intermingling of control schemes in online shooters, the best sci-fi robots, the absurdity of discount medical care, pronounceable file extensions, AI-driven customer service, putting Airtags in other devices, and the northern plight of the humble brown rat.Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

169: Don't Trust Alberta's Lies

It was a pretty heavy week for a variety of reasons, so we decided to discuss a variety of shorter topics this week to try to take it in, starting by touch on the mass layoffs sweeping the tech industry and elsewhere. Then we make a... Musk sandwich, first by covering the New York Times Magazine's extensive article on Tesla's Full Self-Driving issues, then by examining the Orwellian goings-on with Twitter third-party clients. Finally, we go to our happy place with a quick check-in on Will's new Beelink NUC-like and the server stuff he's done with it so far.The New York Times Magazine piece we discussed: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/17/magazine/tesla-autopilot-self-driving-elon-musk.htmlSupport the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

168: It's Cool to Be Cool

Will does the unthinkable this week and PODCASTS WITH HIS BOSS, as Stray Bombay head Chet Faliszek joins us on the one-year anniversary of the release of The Anacrusis to talk all things running a small video game studio. From Steam and Xbox backend tools to current engine tech, the difficulty of getting noticed in today's ultra-crowded market, management and decision-making on a small team, whether launching on Game Pass was worth it, and more, there's a lot to cover in this ep.Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

167: We Can't Give Them the Heads

It's (belatedly) time to answer more of your questions, and this time you posed Qs that resulted in As about an iPhone without charging ports, cured meats, hyphy dark roast, favorite classic screensavers, favorite console boot-up animations, the rise of the Raspberry Pi Compute Module, and social acceptance of CRT filters. Last month's questions, today!Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

166: Someone Else's Cables

On our first show in 2023, we rejoin our epic task of ranking all of humanity's software. Will we actually start putting things in order this week? Or will we get sidetracked by our love of dot matrix-printed banners? Or by reminiscing about the excitement of IRC channel takeover wars? Will Brad be flabbergasted that Will has never played Gorilla.bas? Will we ever finish this project? Listen on and find out!This week's show art courtesy of Blake Patterson.Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

165: I Don’t Believe in Adverbs

Here at the tail end of 2022, are we nuts enough to attempt to rank every piece of software ever written? OK, not quite, but we're going to do our best to assemble a list and put it in an order... eventually. If you've ever wanted to hear someone debate the relative merits of the LAMP stack versus the Video Toaster versus Super Mario 64, you've come to the right podcast.Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

164: Truly Lawless

Our friend Kishore Hari becomes our first three-time guest by joining us this week to run down some of our favorite science and tech stories of 2022, including the latest developments in nuclear fusion, some ML-driven mid-podcast protein prediction, the latest addition to the dark energy debate, extremely American asteroid deflection strategies, one of the more exciting Antarctic discoveries in recent memory, and more.Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

163: JWST (Just Wonderful Science and Technology)

Will's recent clean-slate PC build and newfound abundance of extremely fast storage got us thinking about all things storage. So this week we had a top-to-bottom chat about our current storage strategies, including the ways we are and aren't still using local drives, our fondness for portable apps, how many cloud storage services is too many, the promise of something like rclone to manage all of your offsite storage, dumping long-term data into S3 Glacier, and more.Here's Will's recent PC build with Gordon and Adam from PC World: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIJBxR_BkRISupport the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

162: Storage Wars

Brrr, is it cold in here? It's time to deliver our semi-annual Cube of Cold Opens: Holiday Edition, with short and pithy conversations about cramming your Fortnite homework, that loud phone life, running your laptop off of your PC, reckless Thanksgiving leftovers, game console quality modes, the etiquette of (not) asking for your controller back, the unrivaled glory of a working dishwasher, and more. Enjoy, and stay warm!Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

161: Get Stretchy

We're thankful for the copious bounty of questions sent in by you this month, which got us talking about all kinds of stuff. Stuff like our love of treehouses (and mushroom soup), mouse pad technology, advanced s'more techniques, people who hold their phone in the toast position, more on setting up your own blog, the iPad apps Apple doesn't want you to have, Will's love of model railroads, and more.Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

160: Gelatinous Soup Tube

Techsgiving is here again, as we wax thankful about some of the stuff we love in our own specific nerdy spheres. Join us for some chill discussion of everything from defying gravity (under the desk) to the simple joy of playing guitar into your computer, wearable tech, wireless charging, intergalactic space inside your drinking bottle, good old simple human communication, and more.Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

159: It's Good Brain

Elon Musk's Twitter disaster has been impossible to look away from, and since we probably owe some amount of our careers to everyone's favorite social media platform, we had to spend this ep running down and trying to make sense of a series of events that's almost impossible to believe. We also dig into some of the feasible alternatives to Twitter, like Mastodon, Cohost, and the Bluesky project with its AT protocol. #twitastropheSHOW NOTESStories and reporters referenced in this episode include:A timeline of the whole mess: https://www.ign.com/articles/elon-musks-twitter-takeover-and-the-chaos-that-followed-the-complete-timelineImplications for Musk's business empire: https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-twitter-takeover-money-sucking-quagmire-tesla-spacex-debt-2022-4Text messages between Musk and others: https://gizmodo.com/elon-musk-texts-joe-rogan-larry-elllison-dorsey-twitter-1849600155Casey Newton: https://www.platformer.news/Mike Masnick: https://www.techdirt.com/2022/11/02/hey-elon-let-me-help-you-speed-run-the-content-moderation-learning-curve/Mike Isaac: https://www.nytimes.com/by/mike-isaacAlso, Will's definitely-not-shitty blog: https://shitty.blog/Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

158: Twitastrophe

This week we decided to do something radically different and "record" a "podcast" to answer some of your "questions." In the course of doing so we revealed shocking details about breakfast cereal, ran down our three-day weekend preferences, discussed the latest in sleep and robe technology, talked about spooky names, considered future Steam Decks, checked our interest in Linux laptops, and more. It's a Q&A!Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

157: Cereal's Dark Legacy

Brad is feeling under the weather this week, so we weren't able to turn Qs into As, but we did manage to find a classic Halloween episode of the Patron cast deep in the Tech Pod Vault. Brad and Will turn Qs into As and talk about the true horrors of the technological world, self-closing doors. Enjoy! 

Special Ep: Don't Pull the Frenulum

It's been too long since PC World's hardware expert Gordon Mah Ung dropped by, and what better occasion than the big launch of new CPUs from both AMD and Intel? Gordon runs down all his recent experience with the Ryzen 7000 and 13th gen Core parts, sits through a lightning round of hardware vendor Qs, considers whether undervolting is just overclocking for old people, and a bunch more in this loose, wide ranging chat about our first and most enduring love, PC hardware.Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

156: The People's Benchmark

The sizable slab of silicon known as the Geforce 4090 has landed in Will's computer, so this week we did a deep dive on his experiences with it so far, ranging from basic performance to impressions of how DLSS 3 impacts micro-stutter and game feel, installing the massive three-slot card and dealing with its new power connector, some speculation about what drove the unusual branding decisions around the 40-series, a hodgepodge of info we picked up at Nvidia's recent editor's day, and more.Nvidia's extremely brief update about "unlaunching" the 12GB 4080: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/12gb-4080-unlaunch/Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

155: Cyberplunk

Will and family just did the Southern California theme-park circuit, so this week we had a casual chat about some of the more technical aspects of visiting Disneyland and Universal Studios in 2022. How well do the old animatronics hold up? What's up with all that new Star Wars stuff? Just how much do you need your phone, really? What goes on in the Disneyland nerve center? (We can only speculate about that one... for now.)Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

154: Gas Station Tri-Tip

This week, we're checking back in with the FOSS Pod--now that we're several months (and more than a dozen episodes) into its run--by presenting our recent chat with Gina Häußge, founder and maintainer of OctoPrint, along with a new intro and outro by us. Gina covers topics like the work that goes into supporting endless printer models, transitioning from being the sole contributor on a project to managing contributors, doing open source work in Europe, why you shouldn't run your Raspberry Pi on an iPhone charger, and lots more.Listen and subscribe to the FOSS Pod here: https://fosspod.content.town/Learn more about OctoPrint: https://octoprint.org/Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

Special FOSS Ep: OctoPrint With Gina Häußge

Summer may be over, but we're still here and ready to answer the hot questions from you, the listener. This month we field everything from automating household chores to HDMI-CEC woes, that time one of the Mythbusters (guess who!) built a buzzsaw-equipped drone of death, our dream interviews from throughout history, 140-year-old fire safe technology, a preemptive year-end performance review, plus other stuff!Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod.

Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod.

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