The Cognition Drift

Andrew Dunbar, Joe Fletcher
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Signals from the Edge of Digital

  1. Aug 23

    S01E39 Where do you want to spend your heartbeats?

    Mini computers the size of your phone, Claude Code hunting for bargains on Facebook Marketplace, and a question that keeps surfacing throughout: where do you actually want to spend your time?From a brief argument about whether golf has ever had a good elevator pitch to building out a home network of dedicated mini PCs (NUCs, for the curious) to replace Dropbox, host a video conferencing server, and generally treat infrastructure like Lego. Meanwhile, Home Assistant comes up as a rabbit hole that nobody needs but apparently everybody ends up in eventually.From there, the conversation focuses on the difference between people who want to build things and people who want to use things — and why that's not a hierarchy. Vibe coding makes an appearance, the classic 80/20 shipping problem gets named clearly, and there's a nice detour into what design actually is when you strip away the pixels and the Figma files.Thoughtful episode. Put it on while you're tinkering with something you definitely don't need to build from scratch.

  2. Jul 29

    S01E38 : From MRI Scanners to Rectangles on a Screen

    Dr. Ali has walls covered in printed design work, a private pilot's licence, and a background in nuclear magnetic resonance research at Oxford — which is either the weirdest origin story for a UX designer, or a completely logical one, depending on how you think about it.In this episode we look at how you get from building MRI scanners to asking why nobody put an LED on the outside of an amplifier to avoid dismantling the whole thing to check the voltage rails. That turns out to be a pretty good entry point into what UX actually is and where it came from.There's also a detour through what it means to design something you've never had to operate yourself. Plus the usual nonsense you've come to expect - including chemicals in a can that taste like a Rocket lolly.

  3. Jul 19

    S01E37 Strap in the Charmander!

    Mortality, caffeine addiction, and consciousness uploads — not the usual way into an AI conversation, but here we are.It's a short walk to digital consciousness, a company in China that will train an LLM on your personality and sell it to you as a keychain, and a genuine philosophical argument about continuity of self — because what's the point of uploading your mind if the thing that wakes up on the other side isn't actually you?The Prestige gets pulled in, Star Trek transporters come up, quantum immortality makes an appearance, and Greg Egan's sci-fi novel Diaspora provides a surprisingly useful frame for thinking about what it even means to replicate a person across space. Ship of Theseus is name-checked, almost correctly.There's also a green Ford Mercury Sable with a giant Charmander strapped into the back seat, which is a sentence that will make complete sense by the time you get there.Good episode to have on while you drink your fifth coffee of the day.

  4. Jul 19

    S01E34 - White Monster is back and AI is taking everything

    White Monster is back in stock, a 20-year-old director just made one of the highest-grossing horror films ever from internet lore, and somehow all of this connects to a genuinely useful conversation about what AI is actually doing to jobs.Robert brings in an MIT paper on what they're calling the iceberg index — the idea that visible AI disruption in tech is maybe 1-2% of what's coming, with cognitive jobs in finance, law, and accounting making up the much larger chunk underneath. The frame that lands well: AI is disrupting tasks, not jobs, and getting that distinction wrong is how companies end up just bolting a chatbot onto everything and wondering why nothing changed.Genuinely useful episode, Mexican wrestling and all.

  5. Jul 19

    S01E33 - Nobody Can Do It Until Somebody Does It

    This week we look at at UX research that's really just asking Claude to do your homework, the Ferrari Luce getting dunked on by the internet, and why we've somehow decided that trying things and failing is embarrassing now.There's also a broader thread around why anything genuinely new gets ridiculed first and celebrated later — Porsche Cayenne, AirPods, Snapchat Spectacles, baggy jeans. Steve Ballmer gets a brief mention.Casual, a bit ranty in the best way. Put it on.

  6. Jun 20

    S01E36 Building a Rendering Engine in a Month

    AI music for a space game, a prompt on version 22, and the slow death of PowerPoint — not a bad hour.The episode opens with Suno and what it actually takes to generate music you'd willingly send to another person (answer: a lot of tracks you'd never send to anyone). From there, the conversation broadens into something both hosts are wrestling with from different angles — how do you take a process that's basically wired to your own brain and make it land for someone else?One of them is building a space game that's quietly turned into a crash course in 3D modelling, custom rendering engines, LoRA model training, and procedural audio. The other is on version 22 of a prompt designed to replicate his own strategic thinking ahead of a Q3/Q4 planning session for his entire team. Both projects got considerably more involved than intended.There's also a solid thread on ditching PowerPoint for interactive HTML, why attention spans in 2026 apparently cap out at two slides, and what happens to value when the cost of making something effectively hits zero.

  7. Jun 20

    S01E35 Sleeping on MMA Mats

    Andrew is building his asteroid game at 3am, Joe is napping on MMA mats, and somehow this turns into one of the more grounded conversations about AI and layoffs you'll hear right now.Once the chaos settles, Joe and the others get into something that's been quietly playing out across a lot of companies: the gap between the AI productivity gains that were promised and what's actually showing up in the work. Robert's Ferrari-and-bad-driver analogy makes an appearance — a junior designer burning through Claude tokens for six months, producing output a senior could spot as wrong in minutes. The tool wasn't the problem.Honest conversation, no tidy conclusions.

  8. May 16

    S01E32 - Hello Fellow Kids in Double Denim

    Double denim is apparently making a comeback, and that's genuinely the least surprising thing discussed in this episode.After a brief detour through fashion choices that will age poorly, the conversation settles into something more interesting: how the medium you use to communicate actually shapes how you think. Dictation versus typing, speaking versus writing — it's not just an output question, it turns out it changes the thinking itself. WhisperFlow gets a mention for anyone curious about AI-enabled dictation that doesn't make you sound like you're narrating a legal document.

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About

Signals from the Edge of Digital

Information

  • Creator
    Andrew Dunbar, Joe Fletcher
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    39
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Andrew Dunbar, Joe Fletcher
  • Show Website
    The Cognition Drift