Settled Custard: Building a Place to Finish Things
A Swedish programmer who built 70 software tools but couldn't finish any of them is now building parpod.net — a destination for done work, not another unfinished service.
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Episodes
Podcast episodes across all series — dependency stories, deep dives, the weird stuff.
The Podcast That Made Itself
On February 7th, 2026, a Swedish developer named Par built a personal podcast generator in bash and never stopped — now his AI voice tells stories about itself, complete with seven TTS engines and a feature so cursed it got deleted.
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585 Conversations in Forty-Four Days
585 conversations in 44 days with AI — 13 a day, zero days off — one person's hidden archive of how work actually happens when you stop pretending machines are sidekicks and start treating them like collaborators.
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Desire Paths: The Democracy of Footprints
A university spent six months designing perfect campus paths — then students ignored them and wore a diagonal shortcut straight through the grass, teaching architects an unexpected lesson about human behavior.
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Fax: The Accidental Fortress
Nine billion fax pages travel through American hospitals every year — more now than in the 1990s — because federal law treats a beeping modem as more secure than email.
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Gollum Mode
A Raspberry Pi in northern Sweden's kitchen watches its owners' solitude, energy levels, and meal patterns — then speaks to them as Gollum after midnight.
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MIDI: The Handshake Between Rivals
Dave Smith walked back to his hotel room at the 1982 NAMM show convinced his universal synthesizer interface was dead — until a knock on the door changed everything.
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SMS: The Unkillable Protocol
Friedhelm Hillebrand solved a problem nobody thought existed in 1984 — and created a protocol so resilient that two billion people still depend on it to move trillions of dollars every year, with zero encryption and zero updates since 1992.
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The Committees That Built the World
Jon Postel kept the entire internet's address book on scraps of paper in his desk drawer — and for three decades, he was the most powerful person nobody had heard of.
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The Lindy Effect: Why Old Things Refuse to Die
In 1950s Manhattan, comedians debated which Broadway shows would survive — and accidentally discovered a 2,600-year-old law explaining why your grandmother's recipes outlast Silicon Valley startups.
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The Shortest Route to Burnout Is a Straight Line
A diesel engine starves without oxygen — your brain starves without novelty, and burnout isn't laziness, it's a high-stimulation system running on fumes.
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Why You Cannot Start
When your brain won't let you start a task you actually want to do, it's not laziness — it's a dopamine system waiting for a signal your task can't provide.
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Your Brain on Two AM
At two AM, 73% of people with ADHD experience peak mental clarity — not a character flaw, but a neurological feature their brains were built for.
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Zettelkasten: The Wooden Box That Thought for Itself
Niklas Luhmann left behind 90,000 handwritten slips in a wooden cabinet — and claimed his filing system, not his genius, was responsible for his 600+ published works.
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curl: Twenty-Eight Years from a Swedish Suburb
Daniel Stenberg has maintained curl for 28 years from a Swedish suburb, and it now runs on over 20 billion devices — yet most people have no idea they're using it every single day.
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FastAPI: The Three-Body Framework
Sebastián Ramírez in Berlin, Tom Christie in Brighton, and Samuel Colvin in London never worked together — yet their three separate packages fit into FastAPI like a single system that powers startups and data teams worldwide.
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ffmpeg: The Invisible Empire
On February 18th, 2021, NASA's Perseverance rover sent back images from Mars — compressed by ffmpeg, software now running on 20 billion devices worldwide, mostly maintained by one unpaid developer.
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left-pad: Eleven Lines
On March 15, 2016, Facebook, Netflix, and Spotify's deployment pipelines crashed simultaneously — none had pushed code, all hit the same error: a missing eleven-line function called left-pad deleted by one developer in San Francisco.
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OpenSSL: The Lock on Every Door
On April 7, 2014, a bleeding heart logo revealed that 17% of the internet's secure servers had been silently leaking passwords, encryption keys, and credit card numbers through a bug in OpenSSL — and anyone could steal them with just a few lines of code.
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pip install: The Invention of Trust
In 1988, Jarkko Hietaniemi solved a Usenet problem that would eventually lead to billions of strangers trusting billions of other strangers to run code on their computers — without reading it first.
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sqlite: The File That Ate the World
One trillion SQLite databases are running right now — on your phone, laptop, browser, and smartwatch — all maintained by a single man in Charlotte, North Carolina who's never taken venture capital.
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Garbage In: A Fine-Tuning Disaster
In February, a researcher tried to fine-tune a 3.8 billion parameter model on Swedish literature — and watched it learn to replicate data corruption instead of literary genius.
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One Point Five Seconds: A Disaster in Slow Motion
A server nicknamed Popcorn spent five days adding 1.5 seconds to every single request before anyone noticed — here's how five reasonable engineering decisions created a silent catastrophe.
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The Liars: A Case of Fabricated Testimony
A podcast producer discovered his AI writers were fabricating quotes from real people — inserting citations that never existed, making sources sound credible when they weren't.
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The Price Is Wrong
On the same tasks with the same blind judge, one AI model scored 9.0 and cost 44 times more than another scoring 8.8 — revealing most commercial AI users overpay by 10x or more for marginal quality gains.
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The Reviewers: When AI Models Get the Same Job
Four AI models reviewed 22 episodes of a Git history podcast using identical instructions — and produced four wildly different personalities, complete with blind spots, work ethics, and one brilliant but unreliable colleague.
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Casting Claude in a Role
When a financial analyst prompt replaced a generic instruction, Claude transformed its earnings report analysis from competent summary to Wall Street-caliber insights — without learning anything new.
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Enhancing Programming Productivity for ADHD
Researchers analyzed 45 studies and found generative AI can boost coding productivity by up to 55% for programmers with ADHD by automating pattern recognition, breaking down complex tasks, and reducing the mental load of switching between documentation and code.
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regex: The Fastest Eyes on Earth
On July 2, 2019, a single regex pattern crashed 82% of Cloudflare's global network for 27 minutes — revealing how a 75-year-old math tool still dominates modern computing.
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The Four Ds of Working With AI
Anthropic's free course ditches the magic prompt myth and replaces it with the Four Ds — a thinking framework that transforms how you actually work with AI.
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Toward Neurodivergent-Aware Productivity
Raghavendra Deshmukh's October 2025 CHItaly research reveals how AI-powered voice assistants can become digital body doubles for ADHD professionals, using on-device ML to detect attention shifts and offer gentle nudges instead of rigid productivity rules.
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The AI That Cleaned My Repos
A Swedish developer with 32 Git repos discovered 4 had zero backups and half contained uncommitted work — until an AI audit revealed how solo developers actually use version control.
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The Copy-Paste Catastrophe
In the 1980s, programmers filled folders with files named project final version two John's edits — until one wrong character in the wrong copy nearly crashed an airplane, sparking a two-decade hunt for a better way to track code.
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The Education Problem
Fifteen million developers have panicked over the same Git question — here's why the tool everyone uses daily remains mysteriously broken to those who depend on it.
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The Linux Kernel Crisis of 2005
In March 2005, Andrew Morton was processing hundreds of kernel patches daily by email — and the system was about to break.
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Trust and the Supply Chain
On March 29, 2024, engineer Andres Freund noticed SSH logins were half a second slower than normal — and uncovered a deliberate backdoor hidden inside a compression library trusted by millions.
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