Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchGrading the Grader: When Tests Fail to See
Season 1 Episode 323
How good is your test suite really? Host A plants bugs while Host B watches tests pass anyway—some changes harmless, others cutting critical safety s…
2 weeks, 2 days ago
Faithfully Wrong: When Specs Miss Reality
Season 1 Episode 322
A spec says to stop the transfer at 1%, the code follows it exactly, and every single run fails. We explore a bright tank transfer system where physi…
2 weeks, 2 days ago
The Price of Not Seeing: Institutional Willful Blindness
Season 1 Episode 321
Why do organizations and individuals deliberately ignore inconvenient truths? We explore the legal doctrine of 'willful blindness'—rooted in a 19th-c…
2 weeks, 2 days ago
Your Ancestry, Their Evidence: The DNA Loophole
Season 1 Episode 320
When law enforcement needs to find a suspect, they can't search consumer DNA databases legally—so they just... sign up. This episode dives into the s…
2 weeks, 3 days ago
The Players and the Gap: Who's Building AI for PLCs
Season 1 Episode 319
After eight episodes learning PLC fundamentals, the hosts investigate who's already building AI tools for industrial automation—and whether there's a…
2 weeks, 4 days ago
The Compilation Illusion: Why AI Ladder Code Fools the Compiler
Season 1 Episode 318
When an AI system generates control logic that compiles perfectly but executes catastrophically wrong, what went wrong? This episode examines a real …
2 weeks, 4 days ago
The Incident File: Fact-Checking Our Own Homework
Season 1 Episode 317
Clown Cast fact-checks its own red flag checklist and discovers three citations didn't survive scrutiny against actual investigation reports. One inc…
2 weeks, 4 days ago
The 275-Alarm Problem: Why Safety Systems Drown in Warnings
Season 1 Episode 316
At Texaco's Milford Haven refinery in 1994, operators faced 275 alarms in just 11 minutes before an explosion that injured 26 people. This episode ex…
2 weeks, 4 days ago
The Spec Is the Product: How Documents Become Reality
Season 1 Episode 315
In industrial automation and process safety, specifications aren't just documentation—they're the contract, test plan, and audit trail. This episode …
2 weeks, 4 days ago
Batch Plants and Beer: Why Breweries Break Manufacturing Rules
Season 1 Episode 314
Episode 4 of our brewery automation series digs into ISA-88, the industrial standard that uses breweries as its textbook example. We explore why a br…
2 weeks, 4 days ago