I open this episode with a story from my childhood: a dam that broke above my uncle's farm, and two California kids who survived the flash flood only because they knew how to surf a wave instead of fighting it. That's exactly how I think about AI right now. It's a massive wave bearing down on all of us, and whether it becomes a wonderful tool or something that crushes us depends entirely on whether we learn to ride it. I walk through what happened when I went from writing off AI-generated code as "laughable" last fall to building real, deployable tools with it today, including the Andrew Winkler Reading Room, a free app that lets you read over a hundred of the world's greatest books in their original languages, from Homer's Greek to modern Japanese.
In the second half, I get honest about what it's actually like working with AI day to day. I talk about building "Gentle Reader," a feature that lets language learners dive into real literature with only 70 to 75% vocabulary instead of waiting until they hit 95%, and the surprising detective work it took to get ancient and modern Japanese texts working properly. I also share where AI still struggles: its short-term memory lapses, its tendency to patch symptoms instead of solving root problems, and what my ongoing project to restore Don Quixote from a centuries-old scan taught me about "wisdom of crowds" and a 250-year-old quote from Sir Joshua Reynolds that turned out to apply just as much to machines as it does to us.
In this episode you will learn:
(00:00) Why I compare AI to a wave that can either be surfed or can crush you, using a story about a dam breaking above my uncle's farm
(03:14) How the Andrew Winkler Reading Room lets you read the Odyssey and other classics in their original Greek, with every word's form, meaning, and pronunciation just a click away
(06:06) What "Gentle Reader" is and why lowering the vocabulary threshold from 95% to 70-75% makes it possible to start reading real literature much sooner
(09:04) Why I chose books like Wizard of Oz, Aesop's Fables in Chinese, and Nicholas Nickleby in Italian to fill gaps where no natural "great work" existed at the right reading level
(12:01) What made Japanese the hardest language to build, including the challenge of AI handling ancient versus modern Japanese grammar and meaning shifts
(14:54) Why AI models have what I call a "short-term memory slash auditory processing disorder," and how the "Attention Is All You Need" paper changed the game but didn't fully solve it
(17:48) What my Don Quixote restoration project, removing decades of ink bleed and yellowing, then building a font from "wisdom of crowds," taught me about AI's tendency to avoid the real labor of thinking
Let’s connect!
linktr.ee/drprandy
Read, with computer assistance, the best literature the world has ever produced
andrew-winkler-reading-room.overskill.app
Love Quotient: Stop Dying of Thirst in an Ocean of Love Kickstarter
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/amwphd/love-quotient
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