Dan and guest Paul Ford discuss Claude Opus 4.5's capabilities as a coding model. The episode explores how this tool can keep coding and coding autonomously without tripping over itself, marking new possibilities for software development. They examine design principles behind Claude Code, practical applications in building software, and broader implications of AI's evolution in development workflows.

Stewart Butterfield is the co-founder of Slack and Flickr, two of the most influential products in internet history. After selling Slack to Salesforce in one of tech's biggest acquisitions, he's been focused on family, philanthropy, and creative projects. In this rare podcast appearance, Stewart shares the product frameworks and leadership principles that most contributed to his success. From utility curves to the owner's delusion to hyper-realistic work-like activities, his thoughts on craft, strategy, and leadership apply to anyone building products or leading teams.

There's a ubiquitous prop in just about every police procedural and conspiracy thriller: a cork board pinned with documents, newspaper clippings, and Polaroid photos, all connected by a web of red string. They go by many names, including pin boards, string boards, evidence boards, investigation walls, conspiracy walls, and walls of crazy. These boards can be vehicles of insight or manifestations of madness – and in many cases, both. But where did they come from? And can they really solve a crime? In this episode, we try to unwind the red string board all the way to its center. To aide in our investigation, we enlist the help of Aki Peritz, a former CIA analyst and the author of Disruption: Inside the Largest Counterterrorism Investigation in History. You'll also hear from Shawn Gilmore, editor of The Vault of Culture and creator of the Narrative String Theory project; and Dr. Anne Ganzert, author of Serial Pinboarding in Contemporary Television. And we learn about the intricacies of building a string board from production designers Michael Scott Cobb (It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia) and John D. Kretschmer (Homeland).

The episode features an interview with Dwarkesh Patel, a prominent podcaster known for going deep with subjects rather than oversimplifying content. The conversation covers his rise as an interviewer, particularly in AI discussions, and announces his upcoming book The Scaling Era: An Oral History of AI, co-authored with Gavin Leech and published through Stripe Press. The interview was recorded in San Francisco and explores both his professional work and personal background.

This is one of the finalists in the 2025 review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I'll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you've read them all, I'll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked. Just as we don't accept students using AI to write their essays, we will not accept districts using AI to supplant the critical role of teachers. – Arthur Steinberg, American Federation of Teachers-PA, reacting to Alpha's cyber-charter bid, January 2025. In January 2025, the charter school application of Unbound Academy, a subsidiary of 2 Hour Learning, Inc, lit up the education press: two hours of AI-powered academics, 2.6x learning velocity, and zero teachers. Sympathetic reporters repeated the slogans; union leaders reached for pitchforks; Reddit muttered another rich-kid scam. More sophisticated critics dismissed the pitch as selective data from expensive private schools. But there is nowhere on the internet that provides a detailed, non-partisan, description of what the 2 hour learning program actually is, let alone an objective third party analysis to back up its claims.

In his landmark multi-volume biography of Stalin, Stephen Kotkin shows how totalitarian power worked not just through terror from above, but through millions of everyday decisions from below. Currently a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution after 33 years at Princeton, Kotkin brings both deep archival work and personal experience to his understanding of Soviet life, having lived in Magnitogorsk during the 1980s and seen firsthand how power operates in closed societies. Tyler sat down with Stephen to discuss the state of Russian Buddhism today, how shamanism persists in modern Siberia, whether Siberia might ever break away from Russia, what happened to the science city Akademgorodok, why Soviet obsession with cybernetics wasn't just a mistake, what life was really like in 1980s Magnitogorsk, how modernist urban planning failed there, why Prokofiev returned to the USSR in 1936, what Stalin actually understood about artistic genius, how Stalin's Georgian background influenced him (or not), what Michel Foucault taught him about power, why he risked his tenure case to study Japanese, how his wife's work as a curator opened his eyes to Korean folk art, how he's progressing on the next Stalin volume, and much more.

Beset by colonial controversy, difficult finances and the discovery of a thief on the inside, Britain’s No 1 museum is in deep trouble. Can it restore its reputation? By Charlotte Higgins

Artificial general intelligence — an A.I. system that can beat humans at almost any cognitive task — is arriving in just a couple of years. That’s what people tell me — people who work in A.I. labs, researchers who follow their work, former White House officials. A lot of these people have been calling me over the last couple of months trying to convey the urgency. This is coming during President Trump’s term, they tell me. We’re not ready.One of the people who reached out to me was Ben Buchanan, the top adviser on A.I. in the Biden White House. And I thought it would be interesting to have him on the show for a couple reasons: He’s not connected to an A.I. lab, and he was at the nerve center of policymaking on A.I. for years. So what does he see coming? What keeps him up at night? And what does he think the Trump administration needs to do to get ready for the AGI — or something like AGI — he believes is right on the horizon?

In the first episode of the Solid Podcast, we talked with Dennis Wingo, founder of Skycorp, in the former NASA McDonald’s where he’s been restoring the first images of the moon taken from space.

After an hour of recounting his techno-archaeology exploits — reverse-engineering the arcane analog image-transmission systems that NASA’s engineers developed in the 1960s — Dennis paused and said, “and that’s just one of our history projects.”

That teaser is where we begin today’s episode. Ready to apply modern computing to another analog challenge, Dennis turned his attention to the reboot of the International Sun/Earth Explorer-3, a research satellite launched in 1978 and commended to the heavens in 1997.

NASA decommissioned the equipment for communicating with the satellite in 1999, so Dennis set about reverse-engineering the ISEE-3’s control system and devising a way to communicate with it. In the 1970s, he would have needed custom analog hardware, but now, general-purpose hardware is powerful enough that he could do it all with software.

Wingo’s team built a system on top of an Ettus software-defined radio that could analyze the satellite’s 2.2-gigahertz S band signal; all that remained was to transmit a wake-up call and then listen through a receiver powerful enough to hear the 36-year-old satellite’s signal. The Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico did just that.

The “steely-eyed missile men” of the 1970s had done some magnificent engineering work. When Wingo re-established contact with the satellite, it was off course by 3,000 kilometers — after traveling 24 billion kilometers.

The story is an excellent illustration of how software can replace physical complexity — one of the key themes we follow at the Solid conference, and Dennis will deliver a keynote at Solid San Francisco in June, where he’ll talk about his extraordinary combination of techno-archaeology and modern computing.

We’re kicking off our newest series, the O’Reilly Solid Podcast, with an episode recorded in the manager’s office of a McDonald’s at NASA’s Ames Research Center. David Cranor and I (Jon Bruner) visited McMoon’s, as it’s known, to talk with Dennis Wingo, founder of two audacious “techno archaeology” efforts.

In the first episode, we discuss the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project, which has rescued NASA’s first high-resolution images from satellites orbiting the moon. Dennis’ team reverse-engineered the extraordinary analog image transmission system that the satellites used in 1966 and 1967, digitized 14 tons of magnetic tape, and interpreted them to compose imagery at vastly higher resolution than NASA was originally able to recover from the satellites.

Before the invention of the charge-coupled device (CCD), collecting and transmitting images was an electro-mechanical enterprise. The process required to get images from the moon to the earth highlights the ingenuity of NASA’s early engineers — and the relative ease of working with electronics today, when crossing between physical and virtual is straightforward.