Nerd Adjacent

Someone, somewhere, is always in charge of the official record, and the rest of us just have to trust them. Blockchain wants to change that. This episode explores how a shared digital ledger can be nearly impossible to fake, where the hype has gotten ahead of reality, and where its future potential lies.

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Music for this episode by Eric Lund

The average person has 170 passwords. Most of them are terrible. In this episode of Nerd Adjacent, Chris breaks down how passwords work, how they get cracked, and what's coming next—because it turns out, the thing standing between hackers and your bank account deserves better than your dog's name and a birth year.

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Music for this episode by Eric Lund.

Vibe coding changes how software gets made by letting people describe what they want in plain language instead of writing every line by hand. This episode explores how AI lowers the barrier to programming, opening the door for non-developers to turn ideas into working software.

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Music for this episode by Eric Lund.

USB is the tiny port that quietly standardized our digital lives—letting nearly anything plug into almost anything. This episode tells the story of how a handful of tech giants killed off a jungle of incompatible connectors and gave us one simple plug (well… eventually).

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Music for this episode by Eric Lund.

Wi-Fi made the internet truly portable—turning coffee shops into offices, living rooms into classrooms, and airports into, well, slightly less boring places. This episode looks at how Wi-Fi untethered our digital lives and became the quiet force keeping everything connected.

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Music for this episode by Eric Lund

You drop your phone on a pad, and it just starts charging—no fumbling with cables, no broken cords. Wireless charging has quietly reshaped how we power our devices. This episode explores how it works, why it feels so effortless, and what it took to make electricity go cordless.

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Music for this episode by Eric Lund

They turn airplane roar into a hush and office chatter into silence—but noise-cancelling headphones aren’t magic. This episode breaks down how microphones, sound waves, and a bit of clever engineering create quiet on demand, and why some sounds still slip through.

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Episode Music by Eric Lund.

From guiding missiles in the Cold War to guiding you to the nearest coffee shop, GPS has become one of the world’s most essential technologies. This episode explores how satellites, signals, and a bit of math keep us from getting lost—and why the system is far more fragile (and fascinating) than most people realize.

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Episode music by Eric Lund

Ever wonder how your phone unlocks with your face or how self-driving cars see the road? That’s computer vision—AI trained to understand images and video. This post dives into how it works, what it can do, and why teaching machines to ‘see’ is both powerful and weirdly philosophical.

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Why did my classifier just mistake a turtle for a rifle?

MIT News explains how researchers used a 3D-printed turtle to fool an image classifier into thinking it was a rifle—highlighting the strange vulnerabilities of computer vision.

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Episode Music by Eric Lund.

From voice assistants that misunderstand you to chatbots that almost get it right, Natural Language Processing is the AI trying to understand what we mean when we speak or type. This episode explores how machines learn language, why it’s so tricky, and what’s going on behind the scenes when your devices talk back.

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Episode Music by Eric Lund.