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Planet Money is an NPR podcast that explains economic concepts through narrative-driven stories rather than dry analysis. It treats economics like a conversation with a friend—accessible, surprising, and actually engaging.
- The show makes economics approachable by grounding abstract concepts in real stories and human situations
- It's built on the premise that learning about the economy doesn't have to feel like a lecture
This article features a live podcast from the Night of Ideas festival at Villa Albertine in New York, where Max Read and Maya Vinokour discuss the concept of the "Dark Enlightenment." It highlights their conversation and thanks the organizers for the event. Only paid subscribers can access the full episode.
- Max Read and Maya Vinokour discussed "Dark Enlightenment" at a live podcast taping during the Night of Ideas festival at Villa Albertine in New York, hosted by the French Embassy's Cultural Services.
- The full recording is paywalled, available only to paid Unpopular Front subscribers.
This article covers highlights from a podcast conversation about recent advancements in AI models, particularly Google's new vision-capable LLMs. It discusses technical features like parameter efficiency and multi-modal capabilities, as well as ongoing challenges in running local models effectively.
- Google released Gemma 4 reasoning models (2B–31B params), with the E2B/E4B variants using Per-Layer Embeddings to boost on-device efficiency without growing total parameter count, and all versions handle text, images, and audio.
- Willison's hands-on testing found the smaller Gemma models worked well but the largest 31B model repeatedly errored out.
- A supply chain attack hit the Axios HTTP client via a malicious npm dependency, underscoring open-source package security risks.
- Willison argues efficient code will dominate AI deployment due to economic incentives, based on his experience running these models locally versus via Google's AI Studio API.
Dan Soder interviews comedian Tommy Pope about his Chef Microwave web series and how it blends cooking parody with stand-up humor. They dive into the show’s origin, behind-the-scenes stories, and Pope’s creative process.
- Tommy Pope turned his "Chef Microwave" bit, based on his mom's "just zap it" cooking philosophy, into a web series with hundreds of thousands of YouTube views
- Pope writes tweets by hand on paper before typing them, then monitors analytics all night
- Pope and comedian Lauren Ash survived a motel fire alarm at 3 a.m. during a 2018 cross-country tour and used late-night stops to test material
- Pope recommends a $20 six-pack of LED footlights for stage lighting, calling it "cheaper than therapy"