Long story short (tl;dr)

Welcome to the new Wonk. There’s a lot that changed and you should check it out:

— Article reading lists by topic
— New podcast landing page and player
— Podcast transcripts
— Guests of the pod pages
— Video pods
— Improved site-wide search 
— Day / Night theme

Actual long story

These posts become time capsules, so please allow me to luxuriate in prose for future nostalgia. This update shares a goal with the last one 10 years ago: finding ways to make a massive archive of articles and podcasts more accessible. How do you do that?

New “related” posts now sit at the end of every article. We embed the site’s content with a machine learning model and recommend the closest vectors, which means posts are matched on meaning, not keywords. Then we clustered those vectors to find common topic groups, which in turn became collections and reading lists. Pretty cool.

To apply the same system to podcasts, we first needed transcripts. I ran a local, open-source speech recognition model on all 325 episodes, then used a language model to identify and label speakers. Once we had good transcripts for each episode, the same embedding pipeline we used for articles could produce meaningful topic groupings here too. And what’s related to an article might now be a podcast episode, and vice versa. Crossover.

Full transcripts we can display on the site fell out of this process. So did the ability to connect podcast guests to every episode they appeared on. And since many podcast guests also write for the blog, their author and guest pages now link to both. Along the way, we recovered 105 episodes that had never been posted on the site, and we unearthed the inaugural episode, previously thought lost to time.

That feeds into the project’s second goal: giving the ACW podcast a first-class home of its own, which it very much deserves after a ten-year history and so much content. There’s now an on-site player that persists in the footer as you navigate the rest of the site. And the transcripts aren’t just readable. They’re also searchable across the whole site and each result jumps the player to that exact moment.

For the visual redesign, I leaned hard into the editorial minimalism we’ve been chasing since the beginning. I’m pretty proud that V4 held up visually for 10 years. I’d like to think the choices here are solid enough to go another 10.

Then there are the unglamorous parts, which were most of the work. The site moved from shared hosting to its own server and two decades of legacy were cleaned out of the database. Page loads are optimized. Bandwidth use is minimized: the heaviest image post went from 70 MB to 2 MB (looking at you, Pyongsan uranium mill).

***

In 2015, Version 4 of ACW took 120 hours of my time (and I had help). When Jeffrey asked me in 2025 if I’d consider another wonk refresh, I hesitated. I didn’t think I could do it. And I was right.

How quickly things changed in 12 months.

Enter Claude Code. No one I know writes code by hand anymore. It’s a weird time, and we’re all still working out what it means as a society. What does it mean for this website? It means I was free to focus on what I believe makes a website great no matter the code behind it: insane attention to detail at every level. I still have 50 hours of time in this, but what was built is something I couldn’t have done in 120 hours, or even 240 by myself.

Aaron and Jeffrey crossed paths in Philadelphia for a TTX about space nukes and escalation dynamics. The two caught up on the game, the recent news from USAF Secretary about US weapons in orbit, and what it all means for the new space race. 

Support us over at Patreon.com/acwpodcast!

Is space based missile defense all gold and no dome? Aaron and Jeffrey sit down with FPRI Fellow Sam Lair to discuss their forthcoming paper about the costs of space based missile defense.

Support us over at Patreon.com/acwpodcast!

Aaron and Jeffrey have a lot to announce. On this special episode of the show, the two let the listeners in on their future plans, and take a look back at the history of the podcast.

Support us over at Patreon.com/acwpodcast!