Dave’s Garage: Shop Talk

Why put a microcontroller in the trunk instead of simply tapping into the brake lights or turn signals? In this episode of Shop Talk, Dave and Glen dig into the hidden trade-offs behind Dave’s Mark III RGB lighting project: reading outputs instead of inputs, handling hazard lights and reverse lights, burned-out bulbs, unexpected states, wiring, waterproofing, optocouplers, LEDs, ESP32s, schematics...

What happened to software optimization—and does understanding what's happening underneath still make you a better programmer? In Shop Talk #85, Dave Plummer answers viewer questions about software optimization, engineering discipline, abstraction, and whether modern developers are losing touch with the fundamentals that once made software remarkably fast and efficient. The discussion begins with a...

What does it really mean when programmers say "everything is a file"? In Shop Talk #84, Dave Plummer and Glen Hodges answer viewer questions inspired by the recent fopen() discussion and explore one of the most influential ideas in computing: abstraction. The conversation begins with a question about why computer science classes often feel disconnected from real-world software developmen...

Are we teaching programming wrong? In Shop Talk #83, Dave Plummer and Glen Hodges explore how programmers learned to think about computers in the early days of personal computing—and whether something important has been lost along the way. The discussion begins with a viewer question about systems thinking and how younger generations can develop the same understanding of computers that earlier pro...

Dave and Glen explore what’s really happening under the hood of modern computers. From memory allocation and malloc to page faults, caches, printf, BitLocker, networking APIs, and software complexity, this episode digs into the systems most people use every day but rarely understand. Along the way, they answer viewer questions about low-level programming, operating systems, security, engineering t...

Shop Talk #81 explores the strange engineering decisions that still shape modern Windows systems today. Dave and Glen dig into GUIDs, COM, APIs, the Windows Registry, backwards compatibility, CPU scheduling, interrupts, abstraction layers, and why software architecture often becomes far more complicated than users expect. The conversation expands into how old engineers approached system design, wh...

Shop Talk #80 explores why old technology often feels more understandable — and sometimes more trustworthy — than the systems we use today. Dave and Glen dig into retro payphones, massive 1980s hard drives, cloud dependency, hardware ownership, restoration projects, and the strange comfort of machines that users could actually understand and repair themselves. The discussion eventually expands int...

What happens when AI can find every vulnerability in software? This week on Shop Talk, Dave and Glen dig into the real-world implications of powerful new AI systems that can identify—and potentially exploit—security flaws across major platforms. Are we about to see a flood of CVEs? Should these tools be limited to reporting bugs instead of exploiting them? And what does this mean for open source,...

We’ve been told AI is going to fix everything—but is that actually true? In this episode of Shop Talk, Dave and Glen dig into viewer questions about where AI falls short, what it can’t fix, and why many of the problems in modern software aren’t going away anytime soon. From performance and system design to security risks and patching complexity, we explore the gap between what AI promises—and what...

Will AI fix modern software — or just make the same problems faster? In this episode of Shop Talk, Dave and Glen dig into a question that keeps coming up: if AI can write code, why does software still feel slow, bloated, and unreliable? From abstraction layers and performance tradeoffs to the reality of debugging versus generating code, this conversation breaks down what’s actually happening under...

Most modern hacks aren’t happening because of genius attackers… They’re happening because of simple decisions developers keep making. In this episode of Shop Talk, Dave and Glen break down: Why third-party scripts are still one of the biggest risks on the web How modern dev stacks are increasing complexity (and attack surface) Whether AI is helping developers… or making things worse What actually...

A trusted tool gets compromised… and it raises a bigger question: why do we trust anything at all? The Axios npm hack wasn’t just another security incident — it was a reminder of how much trust we place in systems we don’t fully understand. In this episode of Shop Talk, we start with the Axios supply chain attack and then dig into something deeper: why we trust things that “seem right,” even when...

This week’s Shop Talk is built entirely from your questions — pulled from the latest episodes on Dave’s Garage and Shop Talk on Dave’s Attic. From debugging “almost working” systems to figuring out when you can actually trust a result, we dig into the messy middle where things seem fine… but aren’t. If you’ve ever said “well, it works…” — this one’s for you. 👇 Got a question for a future episode?...

When you're debugging a complex system, how do you know when the problem is actually solved? In this episode of Shop Talk, Dave and Glen discuss engineering instincts, repeatable testing, instrumentation, and how experienced engineers decide when something is truly fixed versus just temporarily behaving. Topics include: • debugging complex systems • repeatable testing and validation • instrume...

After the latest Dave’s Garage episode, the conversation shifted. Instead of asking how to build the system, viewers started asking what actually comes after the hardware problem is solved — and what becomes hard next. In this episode of Shop Talk, Dave and I lean into those questions. We talk about what changes once hardware stops being the bottleneck, the limits of abstraction and virtualization...

Password crackers use hash files to check password guesses. The video explores this process and answers viewer questions about virtualization, hardware, and even a surprising use for an air compressor. A discussion of AI and its uses for problem solving adds to the mix. 00:00 - Start 00:39 - Hey I’m Dave… 00:54 - Do you find a crippling performance drop if your system runs all that on 1 box? 01:58...

00:00 - Start 00:42 - I had heard those displays were created by rear projection with Sony VPH 1020s or 2020s. 01:42 - How was the HP device used to PROJECT to such large displays? 02:11 - I’ve always been curious how they made the explosion circles. Just tons of vectors mashed together? 03:21 - Did the old three tube CRT projectors have tubes that could be converted to vector displays with some e...

Dave turns a Dell 7875 workstation with dual RTX6000 GPUs loose on an old Unix password file to see how quickly he can break an old UNIX password file from a PDP-11/70. Just to be clear for YT, no actual password-cracking technology is demonstrated or revealed within the episode, only the results, and DES is an old 1970s UNIX technology of historical interest only, no longer used. 00:00 - Intro 00...

Protect yourself from the latest Windows Update fiasco! Dave explains the steps required. 00:00 - Start 00:12 - Hey I’m Dave… 01:46 - Can I rent some time on Daves new Dell to test my new Hello World program? 02:14 - Maybe some stable diffusion as a test of the GPUs? 03:38 - Make virtual machines for every other computer you own and run them all on that one $70k computer? 05:21 - Winter experience...

00:00 - Start 00:12 - Hey… I’m Dave…. 07:37 - If you had a 400GB database - should you aim to have 450GB of main memory? 09:16 - Is there a difference in what an ARM based processor can due compared to an Intel based processor? 10:14 - Doesn’t the Apple M3 Ultra have memory bandwidth of 819 GB/s? This 250 -275GB/s doesn’t seem that impressive. 11:20 - Will the AI encompass all those pursuits and w...

00:00 - Intro 00:20 - Do those lights scrolling across the front, actually signify anything or are they just for looks? 03:27 - Please explain what is the purpose of all the flashing/scrolling lights below the 2 floppy disk drives of your PDP-11? 04:03 - All those LED’s in the front… aren’t they and their PCB blocking the airflow into the chassis? 06:09 - At some point does Kelly LeBrock magically...

00:00 - Intro 00:12 - Hey I’m Dave… 00:22 - How to automate a local backup of that (cloud) data? 03:30 - I have One Driveand its very delayed in syncing…what’s going on or why? 05:53 - Why does Windows 7 backup need an NTFS formatted removeable storage device for a system image? 06:55 - What’s the biggest loss of data have you experienced? 08:02 - Can the owners of the ‘Cloud’ ‘decrypt’ my data? 0...

00:00 - Hey Jerome… 00:45 - Could you use AI to write a test suite to verify the Basic interpreter? 02:13 - Isn’t there a coding LLM that can automatically test and debug its own code? 02:52 - What happens if you tell it to implement usr() and the jump table? 03:21 - How about a version in 6502 assembly code, like the real thing? 03:55 - The code is horrific… Maybe you make another video about the...

00:00 - Intro - A letter for Jerome 00:27 - If AI is generating the code then why would it need to generate a human-readable language? 02:16 - Do you think that AI will be eating its own dogfood in the near future? 05:22 - Please explain how the AI system can evaluate an AI user’s sample code and produce functional code of good quality? 07:48 - I miss OS/2. Can AI generate an updated version of th...

Do the advancements in AI mean that programmers are obsolete? 00:00 - Opening 00:19 - What’s your opinion on AI replacing developers? 02:28 - With AI doing the code do you think we may see a return to using Assembly language? 04:17 - What do you think about AI’s ability to somewhat code? 05:29 - Whatcha been doin’ lately Dave? 16:08 - Can’t you just copy Notepad over from a Windows 10 (or older) i...