A Couple Recent Interesting Podcast Episodes

First off, I’ve mentioned before that I enjoy listening to the science fiction short story podcast Escape Pod. Today I listened to episode 949, A Foundational Model for Talking to Girls. Large Language Models (LLMs), what we have colloquially called AI for the past few years, have been a giant source of wonder and consternation in the world. AI in general has long been a topic for science fiction, but this short story tackles the current LLM version of AIs. I found it to be a very fun episode that is a master class in providing a huge amount of backstory without an exposition dump. I don’t want to spoil anything about this story, but they naturally drop all these background details about the world that make me want more stories in this universe. It also has a fun, light tone to it. I highly recommend you either listen or read (the full text is available at the episode link above)

The other podcast episode I wanted to mention is actually a series of episodes. There have been a few times where I have come to the realization that I prefer the wikipedia summary of the story compared to the real thing. One example is Bioshock. I haven’t played it, but I know for a fact that I would not enjoy the story nearly as well as I enjoyed reading the summary of the story and all the backstory that led to the events of the game. The same is true of Robert Caro’s The Power Broker. I know myself and I know I would not nearly enjoy reading this book as much as I enjoy listening to Roman Mars, Elliott Kalan, and each episode’s guest discuss the contents of each chapter and provide color commentary. You can get to the archive of all the episodes here. It’s a fascinating story of one man’s transformation from working in the NYC parks department to becoming one of the most powerful men in NYC (able to challenge US presidents and win!).

• 99pi
• Ai
• Llm
• Nyc
• Podcast
• Robert-Moses
• Science-Fiction
• Short-Stories
• The-Power-Broker