Rolling your own serverless OCR in 40 lines of code
A few months ago, I wanted to make my copy of Gelman’s Bayesian Data Analysis searchable for use in a statistics-focused agent. There are some pretty sophisticated OCR tools out there but they tend to have usage limits or get expensive when you’re processing thousands of pages. DeepSeek recently released an open OCR model that […]
The ”Crown of Nobles” Noble Gas Tube Display
In my day job I work with ion thrusters for spacecraft, which are essentially electric-powered rockets that fling Xenon gas out at super high speeds to provide thrust and allow satellites to change their orbit. Xenon is a rare element way up on the periodic table, and it’s great for in-space propulsion because it’s fairly […]
AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it
{{ message }} Add this suggestion to a batch that can be applied as a single commit. This suggestion is invalid because no changes were made to the code. Suggestions cannot be applied while the pull request is closed. Suggestions cannot be applied while viewing a subset of changes. Only one suggestion per line can […]
From specification to stress test: a weekend with Claude
Over a weekend, between board games and time with my kids, Claude and I built a distributed system with Byzantine fault tolerance, strong consistency and crash recovery under arbitrary failures. I described the behaviour I wanted in Allium, worked through the bugs conversationally and didn’t write a line of implementation code. Here is the prompt […]
The missing digit of Stela C
One bad thing about archeologists is that some of the successful ones get a big head. People used to think the Olmecs, who made these colossal stone heads, were contemporary with the Mayans. But in 1939, an archaeologist couple, Marion and Matthew Stirling, found the bottom half of an Olmec stone that had part of […]
Lines of Markdown, a Claude Code Sensation
published on 2026-02-12 · tagged with #ai, #code and #cursor Yesterday my employer organized an AI workshop. My company works a lot with AI supported code editing; using Cursor and VS Code, GitHub Copilot. Plus we do custom stuff using AWS Bedrock, agents using Strands and so on, all the stuff everyone is working with […]
D Programming Language
D is a general-purpose programming language with static typing, systems-level access, and C-like syntax. With the D Programming Language, write fast, read fast, and run fast. Fast code, fast. your code here Got a brief example illustrating D? Submit your code to the digitalmars.D forum specifying ”[your code here]” in the subject. Upon approval it […]
Warcraft III Peon Voice Notifications for Claude Code
Your Peon pings you when Claude Code needs attention. Claude Code doesn’t notify you when it finishes or needs permission. You tab away, lose focus, and waste 15 minutes getting back into flow. peon-ping fixes this with Warcraft III Peon voice lines — so you never miss a beat, and your terminal sounds like Orgrimmar. […]
1,300-year-old world chronicle unearthed in Sinai
A newly identified Christian world chronicle dating to the early 8th century is shedding fresh light on the political and religious upheavals that marked the transition from late antiquity to the rise of Islam. The manuscript, originally written in Syriac and subsequently translated into Arabic, was discovered and examined by researchers from the Austrian Academy […]
How to Make a Living as an Artist
Preface I first wrote down these ideas in early 2017, just after I started to make a living as an artist. I came to them over time, but I wanted to document them at that specific moment in my career. The moment when I was finally sure that what I was doing was working. I […]