Quick Thoughts

I fine-tuned whisper-small on 7.7 hours of real spontaneous speech and made it 2.6 times worse.

Make the most of cheap compute to do cool things.

Progress waits for no one.

AMD makes compelling hardware and backs open source, but CUDA is still the default.

A walkthrough of how to fine-tune Whisper end to end with Listenr, fully locally.

Firefox's AI chatbot sidebar can talk to a local Lemonade server.

Whisper is impressive and its vocabulary stopped in 2023.

After hitting walls with FreeCAD, TinkerCAD, and Fusion 360, I discovered that scripting 3D models in OpenSCAD with an LLM produces precise, reusable parts faster than any GUI-based workflow I tried.

Using LLMs to generate deterministic scripts rather than running real-time AI agents is a more reliable, testable, and repeatable approach to automation.

After noticing CBC blocking 11 tracker domains in uBlock Origin, I built an automated tool to scan Canadian and international news sites and measure exactly how many trackers each one loads.

Large language models are changing the calculus on when to reach for a third-party library versus generating a lightweight, purpose-built implementation.

hCaptcha is a privacy-respecting, drop-in alternative to Google ReCaptcha that actually pays you for serving its challenges on your site.

Google ReCaptcha V3 offers invisible bot detection that scores users without requiring puzzle challenges, and wiring it into an Express backend is straightforward once you understand the token verification flow.

Maintaining a legacy web application is a challenge most developers eventually face, where migrations are too costly, rebuilds are impractical, and doing nothing means a growing list of security risks.

Building a URL shortener is a great project for exploring real-world concerns like unique ID generation, database modeling, and abuse prevention.

Flask is a lightweight Python web framework that gets out of your way, but choosing the right supporting tools for your database, frontend, and dev environment is where the real decisions are made.

When an application's core technology grows stale, mixing a modern frontend framework like Vue into an aging backend can be a practical step forward without a full rebuild.

After 12 months with a System76 Lemur Pro 9, a Linux-focused laptop with a metal chassis and user-replaceable internals, the experience has been a mix of genuine strengths and persistent hardware and software quirks.

Running a SaaS startup serving thousands of users for just $10 a month is achievable by choosing a VPS over managed services, leaning on free tiers, and writing code instead of buying tools.