Stay ConnectedEach Sunday, Brad Shoemaker and Will Smith discuss a new technology topic. Come for the long-form conversations about virtual reality, space travel, electric cars, refresh rates, and a whole lot more.
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Copyright: © 2019 Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod.
It's been a couple of weeks since the Chinese firm DeepSeek released its new R1 large-language model and sheared an enormous amount of value off of American AI companies. Now that the dust has settled, we don our AI-skeptic hats again and try to unpack what makes this model different, including how it was made so much more efficiently, what opening it up for free means for paid competitors, and whether we might not have to burn down quite so many forests going forward. (Hint: Don't get your hopes up.)
https://hackaday.com/2025/02/03/more-details-on-why-deepseek-is-a-big-deal/
https://www.404media.co/openai-furious-deepseek-might-have-stolen-all-the-data-openai-stole-from-us/
https://www.vellum.ai/blog/the-training-of-deepseek-r1-and-ways-to-use-it
Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, a monthly bonus episode, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod
Questions! The time to answer them is here again, and this month we do our best with such topics as the relative scarcity of nuclear energy, nested comment systems, USB thumb drives versus portable SSDs, browser RAM usage, why CPUs get faster from one model to the next, the difficulty of naming operating systems, phones without camera bumps, learning to read an analog clock (and a lot of other things), and when we'll finally get around to reviewing that high-tech toilet.
Submit ideas about secret information encoding in the world around us for an upcoming episode: https://forms.gle/VYgL9gLeSBKkNtfy9
Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, a monthly bonus episode, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod
Will's gotten his hands on Nvidia's fancy new RTX 5090 in advance of its release at the end of the month, and he's spent the last several days feverishly benchmarking it and testing its new features, so this week we dive into the raw performance numbers he's seeing, consider the card's mammoth power requirements, talk about some of the most prominent new out-of-the-box features like multi-frame generation, better DLSS upscaling, and Reflex 2, and then attempt to demystify some of the more forward-looking tech coming to Nvidia cards like neural net shader programs and textures, mega geometry, and more.
Submit ideas about secret information encoding in the world around us for an upcoming episode: https://forms.gle/VYgL9gLeSBKkNtfy9
Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, a monthly bonus episode, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod
The work of ages continues as we return (for the last time this month) to our tier list of every-ish cable and connector ever made. Such heavy hitters as DisplayPort, SATA, and USBs both mini- and micro- enter the fray this week, with digressions about obscure entries like the DFP (digital flat panel?) cable, powering bare hard drives straight out of the wall, the all-too-often overly stiff jacket on RJ45 ethernet cables, and more.
The Cable Bible: https://amiaopensource.github.io/cable-bible/
Recompute's port roundup: https://recompute.co.zw/buying-guides/a-complete-guide-of-every-type-of-computer-port/
The current cable tier list: https://tinyurl.com/techpod-cable-rankings
Submit ideas about secret information encoding in the world around us for an upcoming episode:
Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, a monthly bonus episode, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod
It's the Consumer Electronics Show once again, and there's a lot to talk about this year, so we chat this week about all the most interesting topics out of the show, including the Nvidia 50 series and its reliance on DLSS 4, new mobile chips from Intel and AMD, SteamOS-powered third-party handhelds, some eyebrow-raising Switch 2 leaks, new HDMI and DisplayPort standards, plus the usual assortment of off-the-wall and not-ready-for-market tech like IP birdfeeders, perfume-scented laptops, and plenty more.
Submit ideas about secret information encoding in the world around us for an upcoming episode:
Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, a monthly bonus episode, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod
We note the tragic passing this week of our good friend and tech reporting legend Gordon Mah Ung, with a short tribute and a bit of reminiscing about Gordon's illustrious career and the impact he made on everyone he came into contact with. Then we return to the very serious work of ranking every cable and connector in existence, with a pivot this week from numbered rankings to one of those newfangled tier lists, plus considerations of quarter-inch stereo, TOSLINK, DisplayPort, the legendary SCART, and more.
GoFundMe to support Gordon Mah Ung's family: https://www.gofundme.com/f/join-us-in-supporting-dara-glenn-and-marianne
The Cable Bible: https://amiaopensource.github.io/cable-bible/
Recompute's port roundup: https://recompute.co.zw/buying-guides/a-complete-guide-of-every-type-of-computer-port/
The current cable tier list: https://tinyurl.com/techpod-cable-rankings
Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, a monthly bonus episode, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod
It's our last pod of 2024, and thus, another batch of year-ending questions meets our entirely professional and learned answers. This month we talk about improving your Bluetooth quality in Windows, our personal mouse grip, tech-related anime we've seen, when to throw in the towel on learning new skills, weird freebies with your tech purchases, questionable Black Friday purchases, how many browser tabs is too many, and the oppression of the Elf-on-the-Shelf surveillance state.
Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, a monthly bonus episode, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod
As the end of the year is here again, we're finally doing it: we're ranking every plug and connector in existence, or at least all the ones we can think of. Join us as we evaluate the relative merits in multiple categories -- like ease of use, reliability, versatility, and that satisfying tactile X factor -- of everything from BNC to XLR, Apple's Lightning and old 30-pin dock connector, DB-15 (you know, VGA), the enormous pile of USB types, and more. Will we get through the whole list in one week? Uh, sure!
Follow along with pictures and info about all these connectors with these links:
The Cable Bible: https://amiaopensource.github.io/cable-bible/
Recompute's port roundup: https://recompute.co.zw/buying-guides/a-complete-guide-of-every-type-of-computer-port/
Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, a monthly bonus episode, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod
Will and family just got back from the final show of Taylor Swift's Eras tour, so this week we dig into some of the technical aspects of a modern arena mega-concert, from turning the audience into a human light show to innovations in ticket-sharing QR code technology and metrics on the mobile data being used in the vicinity. Meanwhile, Brad's been harvesting some extra cheap hard drives in the wake of Black Friday, so we also lay out a primer on what exactly hard drive shucking is, including price-per-terabyte, the best models to look out for, foolproof methods for getting those enclosures open, and more.
Links for this episode:
Wired on the Swift concert tech: https://wired.me/technology/the-tech-behind-taylor-swift-concert-wristbands/
Audience bracelet fun: https://x.com/swifferupdates/status/1644415217445609508
ShuckStop: https://shucks.top/
Easy shucking with guitar picks: https://forums.truenas.com/t/easystore-drive-shucking-like-a-pro-by-a-pro/1498
Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, a monthly bonus episode, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod
Two momentous events have recently rocked the computing world: First, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger abruptly stepped down this week, less than four years after taking the company's helm, and before completing the ongoing transition to its next-generation chip fabrication, and second, Microsoft has removed the venerable WordPad from current and future versions of Windows. We convene to try to make sense of both of these unexpected happenings (and talk a lot about word processors along the way).
Cling to WordPad for dear life: https://www.pcworld.com/article/2376881/how-to-get-wordpad-back-windows-11-24h2.html
The Microsoft Fandom wiki: https://microsoft.fandom.com/wiki/Windows_95
Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, a monthly bonus episode, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod
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