678: Mentoring a Box of Numbers
Accidental Tech Podcast
Marco Arment
4.3 • 2.5K Ratings
🗓️ 12 February 2026
⏱️ 154 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
- Pre-show: Marco HVAC update
- 🗣️ New ATP Member’s Special: ATP Insider: After Apple
- Follow-up:
- Units corner
- WarGames display reincarnated (via everyone)
- AI
- Whoops, we whiffed on disclosing past/future sponsors 🤦🏻♂️
- Steve Troughton-Smith’s experimentations
- Dread & fatalism
- Productivity promise vs. reality
- Breaking the Spell of Vibe Coding by Rachel Thomas
- AI-Generated Code Quality by Mark Levison
- Comprehension Debt by Aman Shekhar
- Your Brain on ChatGPT by Nataliya Kosmyna et al
- Some related links from our AI conversation:
- Steam Machine & Steam Frame delayed due to component shortages/price increases
- Ferrari Luce
- Post-show: Casey is car shopping
- Members-only ATP Overtime: China’s ban on electric door handles
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Marco, I have to ask you, what is the temperature in the building that you're in right now? |
| 0:05.7 | Because all I know is I see in the pre-show, in our internal show notes, |
| 0:10.3 | Marco's HVAC update, and I'm scared for you. |
| 0:13.6 | Mm-hmm. |
| 0:14.5 | Oh, no. |
| 0:15.9 | So I mentioned my HVAC or HVAC. |
| 0:20.1 | I never know which one or did. |
| 0:21.2 | I've heard both. |
| 0:21.6 | You can say both. |
| 0:22.6 | Problems in past shows because basically all of last summer I didn't have reliable air conditioning at the beach. |
| 0:30.1 | That is also our heat all winter long in that house. |
| 0:33.5 | We don't drain the water because we go there all the time in the winter. |
| 0:36.6 | So it has to be kept from freezing. |
| 0:40.3 | 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. |
| 0:51.9 | I have like the nice, you know, the nice safe oil radiator kind. |
| 0:56.0 | So it's not like a safety risk. It's certainly not an efficient use of electricity or money. |
| 1:00.8 | Well, you got the solar panels. Doesn't that help? It helps, but I mean, it's a lot of power. |
| 1:04.5 | Like that's like it offsets it, but it doesn't cover the whole thing. By any means. |
| 1:08.8 | Especially if you have snow covering the panels. Yeah, exactly. |
| 1:12.3 | So over the course of the last few months, we occasionally get listeners asking, hey, |
| 1:16.9 | whatever happened to that project? |
| 1:18.7 | Because I believe the last update I gave you was probably in the fall. |
... |
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