Eric Mann's Blog

Think about the audio your organization is sitting on.

“RAG” — retrieval-augmented generation — has accumulated a lot of vendor mystique.

Native extensions are powerful and heavy.

A huge amount of organizational knowledge isn’t written down — it’s spoken.

ext-turbovec is a PHP 8.3+ extension for in-process vector indexing and approximate-nearest-neighbor search.

ext-infer is a PHP 8.3+ extension that loads a GGUF model and runs LLM inference inside the PHP process.

The other day while catching up on social media, I came across a bizarre ad on Facebook.

I’ve spent most of my career at the intersection of web development and security — and the standard architecture for adding AI to an application makes the security half of my brain itch.

Every embedding in my production system is a point in 1,024-dimensional space.

This is the post version of the talk I gave at PHP Tek this year: how to retrofit semantic search into an existing Laravel application without a rewrite, a vector database, or a machine-learning team.

This is part 1 of a series on building AI-powered systems in PHP — from first principles to a fully local, PHP-native stack.

In 2009 I had a brand new iPod Touch and one very specific itch: I wanted an evolution game.

While in Hawaii with my family this summer I had the opportunity to do a 2-night solo backpacking adventure on Kilauea.

I came to blockchain skeptically — and I think that skepticism is why I ended up in the right place.

I’ve been building developer tools long enough to recognize when an ecosystem is missing one.

If you’ve spent time building on Ethereum, Solana, or any of the major L2s, Canton will feel unfamiliar in ways that go deeper than syntax.

I’ve been working in blockchain infrastructure for the better over two years now.

My portfolio has a secret most visitors will never discover.

I once watched a team lead argue against buying a $20/month Git tool for engineers.