1183. This week, we talk to Anna Jo Bratton about leading the committee that decides the rules for the "journalism bible." We look at how the team "pressure-tests" new rules and why the process isn't a democracy. Then we look at major updates for 2026, including the new AI chapter and the decision to make "healthcare" one word. 

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In this fully connected episode, Dan and Chris break down one of the biggest questions in AI today: do open vs. closed models still matter? From the rise of physical AI and edge devices to the shifting landscape of open-source models like LLaMA, they explore whether the “model wars” are becoming irrelevant. The conversation then dives into a bigger transformation, the rise of agentic systems, workflows, and AI-driven infrastructure.

Featuring:

• Chris Benson – Website, LinkedIn, Bluesky, GitHub, X
• Daniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, X

Upcoming Events: 

• Register for upcoming webinars here!
• Midwest AI Summit 2026

Welcome back, Jason Kridner!

• Jason has previously been on the show
  • Episode 59 (!)
  • Episode 378 alongside Robert Nelson
• The BeagleY AI was the first board that mimic’ed the RPi form factor
• PocketBeagle 2 is still a small altoid tin form factor with a new processor
• The Zepto is a new product targeting a $1 price point for microcontrollers
• Many boards in the Beagle catalog now run Zephyr, and BeagleBoard.org recently joined The Zephyr Project as members and contributors
• Click Brand is the official bards from MikroElectronika that implement the open source Mikrobus
• Chris started using Mikrobus while designing early prototypes of the BeagleConnect Freedom
• The Freedom board talks over wireless to boards like the BeaglePlay
• Application spaces for different boards
• FPGA based board
• Cheeseburger robot? Well yes, but also Cheeseburger robot
• Mitchells vs the machine
• Krazam
• Click boarfds now have eeprom / ClickID as a 1-wire identifier with a uuid
• Beagleplay has 802.15.4
• Project ARA popularized the idea of Greybus
• MotoMods from Motorola was another implementation that worked on the Moto Z
• Using Freedom for prototyping
• WebAssembly
• …on microcontrollers?
• Jason says he doesn’t really like MCUboot
• Entering the linux ecosystem
• bb-imager
• Techlab is a way to easily extend peripherals for the PocketBeagle
• Known working targets
• Michael Welling designed the baconbits mini cape as a learning platform
• The BeagleBadge is a new formfactor shown in the title image for this episode. It runs on a new low cost TI part running Linux and yes… it runs Doom
• The Badge can also talk on Meshtastic
• Working with the memory shortage
• Bao – Bunie and Xobs
• Bella / Gem
• Beagle5fire
• RISC V boards
• RV32 Claire
• Find Beagle and Jason online
  • Schedule a meeting with Jason
  • There is also a Discord
  • And a Zulip instance
  • You can get Beagle merch

Imagine a development team starting to build their own auth system from scratch. Talented developers, clean architecture, all the right OAuth 2.0 flows. When they succeed, they are proud of it, and they should be, because it works.

Months later, three sprints deep into adding SAML for a single enterprise customer. Their best Auth engineer had just given two weeks' notice. The compliance team is asking questions about session management that no one else on the team can answer. And the original six-week project? It had quietly become the single largest line item in their technical debt backlog.

"We'll just build it ourselves" is one of the most common and most expensive sentences in software engineering. The logic seems sound on the surface. Your team knows your requirements. You don't want vendor lock-in. You've got talented people. A few sprints, maybe a quarter, and you'll have exactly what you need.

Here's the thing nobody tells you during that planning meeting: the initial build is the cheap part. It's the years that follow — maintenance, security patching, protocol updates, compliance audits, incident response, and the features you didn't know you'd need — that quietly bleed budgets. And when things go truly wrong, the costs aren't measured in sprints. They're measured in breach notifications and lost customer trust.

This post breaks down the real total cost of ownership for identity systems, using data from the IBM/Ponemon Cost of a Data Breach Report and the Verizon DBIR. We'll be fair about when building makes sense. But we'll also make the case for a third option that most teams don't consider early enough, and it's where the smartest ones tend to end up.