The Aboard Podcast

How is AI reshaping internet culture? On this week’s episode, Paul is joined by a journalist who has truly looked into the digital abyss: Business Insider’s Katie Notopoulos. Using a few recent AI-related stories Katie reported as a lens, they discuss the increasingly blurry boundaries between the real and the artificial on our social feeds. Katie is known for, among other things, her lists of the worst things on the internet; with AI, Paul asks, has “worst” somehow gotten “even worser”? Plus: In a classic reporter move, Katie flips the script and quizzes Paul about his 2014 essay on YouTube, “The American Room.”

LLMs are often far too powerful for the small tasks they’re asked to complete. Is the more-contained Jev the alternative? On this week’s episode, Paul and Rich read a question from tech writer John Pavlus about Jev, a new model from Typesafe AI that’s been a major topic of discussion in programming circles recently. LLMs, Rich suggests, are often like using a power riding mower to cut the grass of your tiny lawn. As Paul breaks down Jev and others like it into layman’s terms, they debate whether this kind of technology is the future—or if it’ll just be one more thing absorbed by the AI giants?

How is observability being redefined in the AI era? On this week’s episode, Paul and Rich sit down with Charity Majors, the co-founder and CTO of Honeycomb. After a crash course on observability, the conversation pivots to AI and its cascading effects—both on this subfield, and on the tech community overall. Some engineers try to plan for every eventuality, but Charity stresses that the best thinking comes when you accept that anything could go wrong at any time: “There’s liberty in chaos.”

Tech execs are sounding alarms about the dangerously fast pace of LLM development. Will any regulators stop them? On this week’s episode, Paul and Rich discuss a heady few days in the world of Big AI, as Dario Amodei called for a slowdown on AI development that was soon echoed by other leaders like Sam Altman and Elon Musk. Do their stated concerns actually match up to reality? In our current political climate, how realistic is the idea of government intervention? Plus: Paul does a pretty convincing imitation of a data center.

Problems with your boss? Why not fire up Claude and hit HR with a lengthy legalistic complaint? On this week’s episode, Paul and Rich look at the erosion of human-to-human communication in the AI era, springboarding off a friend’s anecdote about employees sending official-sounding LLM-generated documents to HR rather than starting with simple conversations. AI tools allow us to flood each others’ inboxes. Is that making it impossible to truly communicate?