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Accidental Tech Podcast

678: Mentoring a Box of Numbers

12 Feb 2026

Transcription

Chapter 1: What is the current HVAC situation Marco is facing?

0.031 - 15.93 Marco Arment

Marco, I have to ask you, what is the temperature in the building that you're in right now? Because all I know is I see in the pre-show, in our internal show notes, Marco's HVAC update, and I'm scared for you. Oh, no.

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16.18 - 39.371 Casey Liss

So I mentioned my HVAC or HVAC. I never know which one it is. I've heard both. You can say both. Problems in past shows because basically all of last summer I didn't have reliable air conditioning at the beach. That is also our heat all winter long in that house. We don't drain the water because we go there all the time in the winter, so it has to be kept from freezing.

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40.333 - 62.295 Casey Liss

So my solution last winter, when it first broke last February, like a year ago February, my solution was I'm just going to bring a bunch of space heaters in and just run them on low all the time. Oh, God. You know, the nice safe oil radiator kind. So it's not like a safety risk. It's certainly not an efficient use of electricity or money. Well, you got the solar panels. Doesn't that help?

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62.516 - 68.59 Casey Liss

It helps, but I mean, it's a lot of power. Like that's like it offsets it, but it doesn't cover the whole thing by any means.

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68.951 - 70.555 John Siracusa

Especially if you have snow covering the panels.

70.535 - 90.348 Casey Liss

Yeah, exactly. So over the course of the last few months, we occasionally get listeners asking, hey, whatever happened to that project? Because I believe the last update I gave you was probably in the fall. Basically, all spring, summer, and fall, I had a parade of different service people come out and try to figure out what the heck was wrong with my systems.

90.929 - 95.557 Casey Liss

What ended up happening was, in short, nothing good.

96.138 - 96.238

Yeah.

96.218 - 109.751 Casey Liss

And the service person who spent the most time with it, and these are people, they were like calling tech support from the manufacturer and trying to decode all these codes and they couldn't, they're hooking up all sorts of diagnostic equipment. Nobody could figure out what the problem was.

Chapter 2: What challenges did Marco encounter with his HVAC system repair?

253.134 - 255.417 Marco Arment

It's all like train and a couple other things around here.

0

255.797 - 262.005 Casey Liss

They're very popular for split unit systems. They're not that common for central systems yet. This is a central system.

0

262.025 - 263.587 John Siracusa

How do you spell the name of the company?

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263.728 - 284.595 Casey Liss

D-A-I-K-I-N. As far as I can tell, they seem to have a really good sales network because every HVAC tech out here wears Daikin shirts. They have a Daikin sticker on their car. They have the best parties. They're obviously doing a lot of sales outreach, but their stuff is everywhere. Everyone knows how to service it. It's simple.

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284.615 - 293.086 Casey Liss

It doesn't seem like it's super high quality, but it's also not that expensive. And at the beach, that's kind of what you want because it's such a harsh environment. Nothing out there lasts very long.

293.267 - 295.87 John Siracusa

It's a consumable. It's going to rot out anyway in a few years.

295.85 - 319.571 Casey Liss

Right. So if you're only going to get five to ten years out of something like this, it's best to have it be reasonably serviceable and replaceable. So anyway, so I've been using space heaters downstairs, new system upstairs. And then we have this massive cold freeze this winter. And so I've been... Relying on my Yolink sensors. Yes, yes. My house is filled with Yolink sensors.

319.711 - 331.594 Casey Liss

I can see the temperatures everywhere. I have one outside so I can correlate what's going on inside to what's going on outside so I can tell when the system is working right. I have water sensors everywhere for water leaks at every turn.

331.574 - 354.038 Casey Liss

under every sink trap under every toilet valve um on a couple of you know next to the fridge like in case that leaks like next to the ice maker and you know a couple of like floor locations water link sensors or water leak sensors everywhere so i'm going through this freeze and i'm watching my and we you know we have like the house is lifted um because it's the beak so it's like it's on stilts

Chapter 3: How does Marco monitor his home temperature and water leaks?

1109.249 - 1113.615 Marco Arment

Here it is. I'm trying to be inclusive and no good deed goes unpunished.

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1113.595 - 1142.438 Marco Arment

yeah uh speaking of member specials a little while ago i think it was a couple months ago we did atp movie club war games and this is kind of apropos because the whole of the internet and that is not a complaint i'm glad that you all did the whole of the internet sent us a youtube video from dave's garage where he bought basically one of the display units i don't know how to describe this that generated those screens in the bunker those like um those i don't know how can i verbalize this

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1142.418 - 1157.632 John Siracusa

So, I mean, what we're talking about is in the movie War Games in the big room with all the screens that show, like, the lines with the missiles exploding and stuff. Those are the screens we're talking about. It's like, how did they do that back in 1980-whatever when this was made? Well, they did it with the thing you're going to see on Dave's Garage channel. It's a vector display.

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1158.072 - 1169.843 John Siracusa

And, of course, it's very tiny, and it's monochrome. So how did they do those big things? This is not really about how they made the movie, but just my understanding is that they got these little vector displays. They filmed them with a film camera, and they filmed –

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1169.823 - 1194.885 John Siracusa

different images and with different color filters in front of the monochrome screen so they got a red pass and a blue pass and a green whatever whatever colors they use like you see colors in the movie that's just because they put different images and they filmed it with a film camera and then they put that film together and then they projected onto projection screens and then they filmed the projection screens with the movie camera so it's a it's quite a ways to go but you know without computers they can do graphics that big but anyway the vector display itself is like i don't know it's like

1194.865 - 1224.298 John Siracusa

seven inches diagonal or something it's a tiny it looks like an oscilloscope screen practically but vector displays are really cool and getting it up and running is really cool that's really what the video is about is so i bought one of these these war games displays on youtube again they're not war games displays but they're used for the movie how do i get it to do literally anything and it was a fun video it was very well done and you know the dave fellow was like i'm not a developer but let me tell you about the low level programming i had to do in the communication protocol i had to work through in order to get this to work it was very impressive

1226.067 - 1244.534 Casey Liss

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1244.914 - 1285.692 Casey Liss

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1285.993 - 1300.59 Casey Liss

They have everything you will need to make your business succeed. Things like SEO tools, analytics, email campaigns, and of course, the scales to so many different kinds of businesses. Again, physical goods, digital goods, things like services. And if you're a

Chapter 4: How can AI assist in coding and algorithm selection?

4821.36 - 4835.713 Casey Liss

I know this because I have done that with other types of algorithms. I have asked ChatGPT or Gemini or Claude to generate me code to do some kind of relatively, I even asked it like, here's the kind of problem I'm trying to solve. What algorithm should I be looking at?

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4836.114 - 4848.265 Casey Liss

And it'll give me a nice overview of six different algorithms to solve this problem, what the trade-offs of each ones are, what the performance is. And then I'll say, do you want me to generate this for you in Swift? I'll say, yeah, sure. And then it generates it for me in Swift. And I think there's no way this is going to work.

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Chapter 5: What are the implications of AI on proprietary coding techniques?

4848.285 - 4867.956 Casey Liss

And then I try and it works. Already, the value of like proprietary custom techniques and tricks that you do is plummeting. I should be really upset about that. And on some level, that is kind of a shame. But also on another level, this other problem I was trying to solve, I just got the answer and I had to move on.

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4868.356 - 4877.651 Casey Liss

That's incredibly powerful that there's all these different algorithms that like, you I could have figured out the algorithm to do it the sophisticated way.

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4877.691 - 4897.699 Casey Liss

It would have taken me a day or more, and I might have gotten the algorithm wrong, and I might have had weird bugs as a result, or I might do something in a relatively straightforward, naive approach that might have a really efficient algorithm that I'm not going to ever think of or know about, but the AI knows about it. So the AI code is not only...

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4897.679 - 4919.124 Casey Liss

giving me the potential to make faster performing code by giving like more sophisticated algorithms that cover more things with fewer bugs, but also it's allowing me to make things faster because I'm not having to implement all of these tricky lines of code myself. I can actually have it generate the really complex, hairy parts of these kinds of things.

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4919.545 - 4944.406 Casey Liss

And then I can move on and I can work on higher value tasks. And so it's taking over some of those really tricky things. It's taking over some of the low end stuff and some of the like shuffling around data code. It's a huge win for programmers. We will be, like, the people who stand to win the most from using these tools are, as John was saying, experienced, good programmers.

4945.126 - 4953.876 Casey Liss

We stand to win the most here. It's a huge value creator for us. So, ideally, you know, once you are...

4953.856 - 4982.04 John Siracusa

done morning and I think that's a process that we're all going through once you're done morning jump in I'm not morning I'm morning but I'm also going to jump in I just simply don't believe the argument in that article like I don't think there's that there's really that much to mourn but you know anyway I mean it's time for my momentum or anything you're mentioning like considering whether you should allow this thing to look your overcast code and deciding eventually you should just do so it's nice that you got to make that decision it didn't just take the code without your knowledge or consent

4983.218 - 4988.645 John Siracusa

Which is the situation for every other piece of code that's in that model, probably. You are correct, and also it's irrelevant.

Chapter 6: How does the AI-generated code compare to traditional coding?

4989.406 - 4996.076 John Siracusa

I think it's entirely relevant. But when people only hear Marco's opinion on the show, apparently, and everything I say doesn't count. But anyway.

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4996.516 - 5000.582 Marco Arment

Oh, yeah. John, let me assure you that could not be further from the truth.

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5000.602 - 5012.778 John Siracusa

Have you ever read the email? I swear to you, if you listen to the feedback from last episode, everyone was yelling at me about things Marco said. we are three different people. I have a different position on this stuff, but it is a complicated issue. Like I'm saying, there's no one simple answer.

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5012.818 - 5025.914 John Siracusa

Like if I'm not saying that I don't discount that person's morning articles, that's how a lot of people are really feeling. Like, but I, the main point I want to get across with all of this, with all this back and forth, all these things is that it actually is complicated and not simply black and white.

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5025.934 - 5034.985 John Siracusa

And every time I see someone extreme in either position, it just makes me think that they're not interested in, they don't, they don't know enough about the topic because it actually is fairly complicated.

5035.586 - 5035.686

Yeah.

5035.666 - 5054.603 John Siracusa

And, you know, it's it's something that we're all going to have to grapple with. And this is just in the realm of programming, which is a tiny corner of the world of things that people are using chat for. So, yeah, we've got a challenge ahead of us. Hopefully it's not like nuclear weapons, but, you know, maybe it's like the version of that that does not destroy the entire planet.

5055.055 - 5073.314 Marco Arment

Now, one final note on the AI stuff, and I know this has been going long, and I'm sorry, but you also wanted to call out that AI hardware use and the fact that it's slurping up, like these LLM vendors are slurping up all the hardware in the world, has had some real-world implications so far in a lot of different ways.

5073.474 - 5082.143 Marco Arment

But perhaps most recently, the Steam Machine and Steam Frame are delayed because of AI-driven RAM and storage shortages and price increases.

Chapter 7: What are the challenges of integrating AI in programming?

5082.123 - 5091.837 Marco Arment

From Valve, when we announced these products in November, we planned on being able to share specific pricing and launch dates by now. But the memory and storage shortages you've likely heard about across the industry have rapidly increased since then.

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5091.937 - 5099.828 Marco Arment

Limited availability and growing prices of these critical components mean that we must revisit our exact shipping schedule and pricing, especially around Steam Machine and Steam Frame.

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5100.213 - 5113.709 John Siracusa

This is part of the reason people hate AI because they're like, the thing I wanted isn't going to get here because AI is stealing all the chips to tell people to have a little Eliza bot tell people about their feelings, which is apparently what the vast majority of the millions and millions of people who use AI every day are doing with it.

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5114.15 - 5133.354 John Siracusa

And lots of people think that is both not a good idea and bad for people and a waste of electricity and time and resources. And now I can't get my steam machine. So again, anti-AI sentiment, like I get where it comes from. Like it's not, it's not, you know, it's not frivolous. They're not against AI because they're just mean and someone is paying them to be against AI.

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5133.895 - 5149.035 John Siracusa

People, there's a lot of things, you know, not in AI's favor, especially since it's like, you know, huge amounts of VC and all the benefits going to the small number of companies and they're doing things in an unsustainable way. And when this bubble pops, it's going to destroy all our retirement accounts and all that terrible stuff.

5149.015 - 5161.624 John Siracusa

And yet none of that negates the fact that it actually can do some useful things in a tiny subset of stuff. And I think we as a people should find a way to extract the good while avoiding as much of the bad as we can.

5163.646 - 5182.031 Marco Arment

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5182.132 - 5200.161 Marco Arment

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5200.562 - 5220.338 Marco Arment

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