Breaking Change

Latest Episodes:

v48 - Coil Whine Dec 06, 2025

Show notes

I'm experiencing what breathing out of my nose properly feels like for the first time. Everything is new and wondrous and I've never felt so optimistic. This sensation lasted for two days and now I'm used to it and existence is once again pain.

Share your existential musings at podcast@searls.co and I'll nod and sigh along. I might even nod and sigh performatively for you on the show!

Important ground covered in this episode:

My new gaming PC's final parts list
This nifty Wake-on-LAN app for iOS
The POSSE Party has STARTED!
Aaron's puns, ranked
Polymarket Builds In-House Trading Team as It Re-Enters the US (Archive)
Amazon explores cutting ties with USPS, building its own delivery network (News+)
The RAM Shortage Comes for Us All (Another good take)
Kirby Air Riders tops the Japanese physical charts as Switch and Switch 2 games sweep the top 15
Meta confirms cuts for Metaverse Efforts (Archive)
Alan Dye is leaving apple (Archive)
Ben Thompson on Nvidia and OpenAI
Everyone in Seattle Hates AI
Gemini 3 Pro: the frontier of vision AI
Pluribus
Star Trek: Enterprise
Section 31
Lower Decks
Soulframe
Outer Worlds 2

v47 - Turbinately Ill Nov 22, 2025

Show notes

Had a little pep in my step this time. Maybe it's because I decided to start recording after 7 AM for once. Maybe it's because I can finally fucking breathe out of my nose holes.

Tell me about what you do while you continue to draw breath at podcast@searls.co.

Things you can read if you're bored:

Beckygram.com
Aaron's puns, ranked
Steam Frame and Steam Machine
Xbox reportedly warning of yet another potential price increase
InKonbini retro convenience store simulator
Pipboy 3000 replica for $300
Apple introduces Digital ID, a new way to create and present an ID in Apple Wallet
Google Antigravity kinda sucks
I think I might regret watching The Bear
Nano Banana Pro made this episode's social image
GPT-5.1-Codex-Max is the best coding model I've used yet
Adversarial Poetry is a great way to jailbreak LLMs (Comment thread)
Cryptographers Cancel Election Results After Losing Decryption Key
Outer Worlds 2
⚡️ Death by Lightning really slaps (claps?)
Wicked: For Good is Very, Very Bad (News+)
The guy from Pomplamoose is the CEO of Patreon??!
"Pixar: The Early Days" interview with Steve Jobs
NotebookLM

v46 - Adjusted Gross Intelligence Nov 08, 2025

Show notes

I'm back and I'm angry. My power went out, which caused my Internet to go down, which broke my favorite mug. And that's just the shit that happened before 7 AM. By 9 AM my doorbell was continuously chiming for no fucking reason.

Join me in the struggle. We shall persevere. Tell me how your morning went by writing in to: podcast@searls.co.

Here 4 U:

Kudos to Adam Mcrea and Judoscale for solving my Heroku issue
Kudos to me for separately solving my Heroku issue with Straight-to-Video
ALVR for streaming SteamVR games
Streaming flat games with Sunshine and Moonlight
Aaron's puns, ranked
AI's Dial-Up Era (and my take)
Sandwich made the world's first immersive ad spot
Coinbase CEO Stunt Exposes Prediction Market Vulnerability
OpenAI and Microsoft resolve their issue without resolving their issue
Amazon v. Perplexity
BioWare reassures fans Mass Effect 5 is still coming
The Outer Worlds 2
Eddy Burback - ChatGPT Made me Delusional

v45 - Developer Strap-on Oct 26, 2025

Show notes

This may be the version 45 release of Breaking Change, but when you factor in its Hotfixes and Feature Release entries, this is somehow the 50th episode of the show!

Why? Why are we still doing this to ourselves? Write in your answer and how you feel about yourself as a result to podcast@searls.co. Seriously, I need some new material.

The web runs on links, so have some:

v44.0.2 - Mike McQuaid: If you don't like it, Quit Oct 17, 2025

Show notes

Post-recording update: As I've been lobbying for (both publicly and behind the scenes), it has been announced that the RubyGems and Bundler client libraries are being transferred to Matz and the Ruby core team.

Mike McQuaid (of Homebrew fame) and I scheduled this episode of Hot Fix a week before the Ruby community exploded. Hot Fix is all about getting spicy, but even we were a little wary of the heat in that particular kitchen. The problem Mike brought to the table is the same one he's always on about: open source is not a career. Incidentally, Mike's favorite topic also happens to be relevant to the latest RubyGems controversy—because it all boils down to paying people to work on open source.

Not content to miss out on the fun, Jerod from The Changelog asked if he could join and discuss the ongoing Ruby drama as a group. So we decided to team up and do a collab episode—call it Breaking Changelog, I guess? It's nothing if not efficient: record once, edit twice, and syndicate everywhere.

If you don't mind swear words, listen to this version. If you don't like swearing, what the fuck are you doing here? (But seriously, you can listen to their edit if you want!)

Please send your compliments to podcast@searls.co and your complaints to editors@changelog.com.

v44.0.1 - José Valim: It's a time for builders Sep 29, 2025

Show notes

If you know who José Valim is, then you know he probably made a mistake by joining me for our third installment of 🔥Hotfix🔥. The inventor of the Elixir programming language is at it again with his colleagues at Dashbit and they've got a new product called Tidewave. It's a coding agent with a twist: it has such a deep level of integration with your web framework that it can get the executable feedback it needs to tackle the entire feature development lifecycle.

I do eventually let him plug the tool (and our conversation genuinely makes me want to try it—I logged a todo and everything!), but to be on Hotfix you gotta bring a thorny problem to the table, and he picked a great one: marketing hype aside, nobody has a clue what the future of AI agents looks like.

Like always, we totally 100% and A+ solved the problem by correctly predicting the future. You gotta listen to find out.

Every time I talk to José, I get ideas for what I should be doing instead of what I'm actually doing. If you feel so inspired, write into podcast@searls.co and I'll read it on the next mainline version release of Breaking Change.

You can follow José on Bsky, X, and Mastodon. Pick your poison. ☠️

v44 - Can't get it up Sep 22, 2025

Show notes

Hey, look! Breaking Change now has chapter support for each segment! More on how I did that while still upholding my commitment to laziness later.

I didn't get a good job connecting this version's release to what I was referencing, so to be clear I was referring to my heart rate as opposed to any other bodily functions. The other ones are getting up just fine, thank you. Get your head out of the gutter.

Thanks for all the great e-mails the last couple weeks! Throw yours on the pile at podcast@searls.co. Hopefully Fastmail won't lose it.

For the folks who pronounce URLs like Earls:

Fallout comes to HHN
Apple's bullshit Watch Series 11 battery claims
Echofeed is like POSSE Party, kind of
Only POSSE Party is POSSE Party. Working on it.
Aaron's puns, ranked
Scuba-wearing restaurant robber swims away with cash at Disney Springs
India is fucked
H1-B's cost $100k now making India super fucked
Why tradwives aren't trad
Why Marriage Is Increasingly for the Affluent (News+)
Virtual Boy is coming to the Switch
Samsung brings ads to US fridges
Meta's bad demos and explanations
Steve Jobs smoking the good shit
Expedition 33
Super Mario Odyssey
Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 + 4
Paradise Season 1
The Last of Us Season 2
The Invincible

v43.1 - iPhone 17 Event Review Sep 09, 2025

Show notes

It's an emergency bonus edition of Breaking Change as I take the covers off yet another show-within-a-show. I call it Feature Release, and its job is to fill in that middle number in our semantically versioned series of conversations together. No pun, no news, just some timely content wrapped up in a name, logo, and jingle package that still has that new podcast smell.

It's a 1-hour review of the Airpods, Apple Watch, and iPhone updates Apple announced today. You can see the full event video on YouTube. The Verge has a 17 minute abridged version if you just want the synopsis.

Please enjoy this episode of Feature Release! It may be the only one. Write into podcast@searls.co with your feedback!

v43 - The Slop Economy Sep 02, 2025

Show notes

Remember it is your civic duty to e-mail me at podcast@searls.co. As of this episode, that address is monitored by Fastmail, so there's a higher probability I'll actually get your e-mail!

Some links you won't click:

v42.0.1 - Scott Werner: Ignore all previous instructions Aug 27, 2025

Show notes

🔥Hotfix🔥 is back with a new guest! Scott Werner is the CEO of Sublayer, helps organize the Artificial Ruby meetup in NYC, and is the author of the extremely well-named (and well-written) Substack, Works on my Machine.

In this conversation, we jointly grapple with WTF is happening to programming as a career. Did the unprecedented peacetime the software industry experienced from 2005-2022 make us all soft? Is the era of code-writing agents fundamentally changing the nature of the job? Should we be less like DHH/Matz and more like why the lucky stiff?

We'd love to get your feedback to podcast@searls.co — I'll read it all and flag relevant questions and comments for the next Breaking Change.

You can follow Scott Werner online at:

A handful of things we mentioned:

There's no AI in Team
The Goal book
Lean Thinking vs Fat Thinking (a newsletter that draws a different lesson from The Goal)
why the lucky stiff (aka "_why")
That fireside chat between Matz and DHH
Sublayer's product, APM (Actions Per Minute)

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