Writings

I’ve always run two AIs side by side. I’ll ask the same question to both, compare the answers, and pick the one I like better. The other gets dropped. Then I keep going with follow-up questions against the winner until I land on a final answer. It works, but it’s manual. I’m the judge every time. Stuck on an 8 hour transit with nothing better to do, it hit me: this is exactly what you do when you evaluate a prompt. You get a model to generate a result, then use another model to judge it. So why not let the AIs judge each other instead of me doing it by hand every time? ...

Who hasn’t seen this? The jumping dino shows up the moment your Wi-Fi drops. I’ve played it plenty of times myself, out of boredom more than anything. I kept wondering if I could automate it. It’s a simple game - no complicated logic needed. The idea showed up in my head a couple of years back. I even worked out the approach in my head at the time. I just never sat down and built it. ...

Software engineering is hard. Even with AI, it is hard. But software development? That is becoming easy. With today’s agentic tools, applications we once shelved for lack of time can now be built in an afternoon. “Vibe-coding” a frontend and wiring it up to a backend takes hours. Your friends and team will try it, and they won’t care if it crashes, leaks data, or looks unpolished. Kudos to everyone making their ideas a reality. It’s a great start. ...

I have had a very specific problem at work. Whenever I need to walk someone through a process on a web app - onboarding a new team member, handing off a workflow, writing up a process doc - I end up doing one of two things: scheduling a screen share, or spending 20 minutes stitching together screenshots in a Google Doc while writing “click here, then click there” in a way that somehow still manages to be confusing. ...

My daughter just roasted me, and honestly, I’m impressed. She told me, “Dad, at the rate you’re watching Demon Slayer, GTA 6 will be out before you finish it.” I’m proud of her on a few levels. It was a top-tier burn-novel, well-timed, and perfectly tailored to her target audience. We both had a good laugh, but now I’m on a mission to prove her wrong. Knowing her, that was likely the goal all along.

For a long time, my Mac Mini was the unintended backbone of my workflow. What started as a few local workflows, soon blossomed into a workflows for emails, scheduled jobs, Home Assistant alerts etc. It’s a great machine, and it handled my daily tasks alongside a growing list of background services-MongoDB, Postgres, Redis, and n8n-without breaking a sweat. It even ran my local AI models via Ollama. But then came the “lab creep.” I started adding more: a MagicMirror instance for the family calendar, Excalidraw for diagrams, and various utility containers. ...

One of the frustrating thing about being online these days is the obnoxious number of ads that litter each and every website. Some of these sites are so full of ads that it’s just impossible to get to the content. Take a look at Yahoo Finance for example Yahoo Finance Half the page is an ad. There are worse offenders out there. Sites that greet you with a mess of loud, inconvenient ads before you can get to the content. It’s not just annoying; it pulls your focus away from what you came looking for in that website. ...

2025 GitHub Heatmap Looking at a GitHub contribution graph is like looking at a mirror of your year. My 2025 graph tells a very specific story: a quiet first half followed by a second half that was busy, very busy. I did create a bunch of poc-xxxx repositories and frequently updated my personal projects, but the real drivers behind that green heat-map were my website updates and, most significantly, Obsidian. ...

Most of us have played around with prompt engineering by now, experimenting with different ways to get an AI to do exactly what we want. It really comes down to the ‘magic words’-the specific phrases and framing that can either trigger a perfect response or leave the model confused. It’s like the difference between “Wingardium Levi-O-sa”(explode) and “Wingardium Levio-sa”(levitation) Levi-O-sa v/s Levio-sa Jailbreaking Much like finding the perfect prompt to get a high-quality result, crafting specific words or phrases can be used to navigate around an AI’s built-in guardrails - often called “jailbreaking.” It’s essentially the art of finding a loophole in the AI’s logic. These methods take advantage of the fact that human language is flexible and messy, and AI models sometimes struggle to tell the difference between a helpful instruction and a “hacker” trick. ...

I have never been a runner. In fact, before this, I hadn’t run a single mile in my life. If you asked me a few months ago, I would have told you I don’t run unless something is chasing me. Despite my history as a non-runner, I stepped up to the starting line of the BMW Dallas Marathon 10k. I crossed the finish line with a time of 1:14:34 - and even managed to clock a new 5k personal record of 32:00 along the way. ...