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A single field mismatch bricked fleets of Windows machines. A simple gesture turned dating into a swipe. A major grocer is hacked and down for 45 days. A driverless car pulled up with no one inside.

As we gear up for the launch of Season Two on March 3, Hannah shares her favourite stories from Season One. We went under the hood and explained tech in an accessible way for every curious listener. In this episode, we share what you've missed and our favourite parts for our loyal listeners.

We start by pulling apart the CrowdStrike outage to show why software that runs deep in the operating system is powerful and dangerous. Then we shift to the Marks and Spencer ransomware story to examine how attackers slip in at the edges, escalate privileges over months, and force hard choices about rebuilds and business continuity. From there, we pivot to product craft with a candid story from Google Maps, where watching Apple sparked a smarter roadmap and a useful parking feature. The theme: humility, fast learning, and disciplined shipping beat ego every time.

Our AI segments tackle the bigger shift: language models trained on trillions of tokens that summarise and reason without a tidy explanation of how. We cut through the hype with grounded numbers on GPUs, training timelines, and cost, and we explain why inference feels cheap while training burns the budget.

Then the interviews bring it home. Tinder co‑founder Jonathan Badeen traces swipe right back to flashcards, illustrating how a physical metaphor became a mobile-native flow that reduced friction and changed behaviour. Waymo’s engineering leader Nick Pelly breaks down the robotaxi experience, the safety data across one hundred million autonomous miles, and the sprawling software and hardware stack that makes autonomy work today. He also paints a vivid picture of tomorrow’s cities, where fewer car parks free space and travel time becomes time to work, play, or sleep.

We wrap with practical basics—LANs, WANs, data centres by rivers—and a reminder that legacy systems like COBOL still run banks and still pays.

If you enjoy smart stories backed by clear numbers, credibility, and lessons you can act on, this highlights edition was made for you.

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Three months ago we set out to make complex tech feel simple for smart people. Today, we close Season 1 with a bonus episode that’s a candid debrief on what worked, what didn’t, and the practical concepts you told us made a difference at work and in everyday life. We answer listener questions and Hugh fails to answer Hannah’s trivia questions (in a throwback to Episode 1).

We start with reflections on learning the craft of podcasting while defining our mission and chemistry. Favourite episodes resurface—especially the outages deep dive—because they blend clear systems thinking with human stories and real fixes. Hannah share she learnt the most from our episode on LLMs (which was definitely the hardest episode for Hugh to prep for).

From there we jump into listener Q&A and tackle the acronyms that clutter meetings: VPN as an encrypted tunnel that blocks man-in-the-middle attacks, URL as these days a synonym for “web address”, and HTTP versus HTTPS as the protocol that is the backbone of the modern web. We keep the momentum with SQL and CSV as the backbone of analytics, plus LAN and WAN to map your home, office, and global networks. Along the way we bust a persistent myth: Wi‑Fi isn’t “wireless fidelity”; it’s simply a name that stuck (and one that was invented in Australia!).

Cloud computing takes centre stage as we lay out how AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud grew from internal platforms into the engines of modern startups. We talk trade-offs: price, performance, managed services, and the undeniable friction of switching providers. Then we answer a deceptively simple question: how do different programming languages “talk”? The practical path is APIs and shared contracts, with compilers and files as the quiet glue that lets JavaScript front ends call Java services and microservices cooperate at scale. For fun, we tip our hats to tech lore—from YouTube’s dating-app origin to Bluetooth’s Viking name—and why trivia can be both marmite and memorable (and why a Vegemite analogy isn’t the same!).

We’re lining up more expert interviews and deeper dives into data centres, energy use, Bitcoin mining economics, quantum timelines, and chip fabrication. If season one made you a little bit smarter, help us reach tens of thousands more learners: follow, share with a friend, and leave a review so we can shape season two around your biggest questions.

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A taxi pulls up with no one in the front seat. Would you get in? We invited Waymo director Nick Pelly to take us from that first uncanny moment to the engineering that makes a driverless ride feel calm, confident and, by the data, far safer than most humans behind the wheel.

We walk through the full autonomy stack in plain English: how cameras, radar and LiDAR fuse into a single view of the world; how perception, prediction and planning work together to thread through double‑parked vans, nudge through gridlock and still behave like a good road citizen. Nick explains why Level 4 autonomy is about design domain as much as capability, why hardware still matters, and how redundancy handles blocked sensors, grime or failures without drama. We dig into machine learning at scale, from training on diverse city data to tens of billions of simulated miles, and how teams tune precision and recall so the car avoids both missed hazards and needless hard braking.

Beyond the ride, we zoom out to the business and the city. Phoenix offered a launchpad to build the marketplace, charging and fleet operations; San Francisco demanded handling a busy city and human‑like judgement; London beckons with dense streets and weather. We explore what happens as adoption grows: fewer parking lots, smoother traffic, motorway platoons, even intersections that need fewer lights when vehicles coordinate. Nick also shares his focus area—reliability and freeway fail‑safes—designing for worst‑case scenarios so the system exits danger gracefully at speed; this episode was recorded a week before Nick and the team announced highway driving!

If you’re curious about autonomous vehicles, safety, AI, urban mobility or just want to know what “robotaxi” really means, this conversation turns buzzwords into something you can picture—and maybe soon, ride. Enjoy the episode, then follow and share the show, and leave a quick review to help us bring you an even bigger season two.

Like, Subscribe, and Follow the Tech Overflow Podcast by visiting this link: https://linktr.ee/Techoverflowpodcast