alt Hacker NewsAsk HN: What Are You Working On? (March 2026)
What are you working on? Any new ideas that you're thinking about?
Comments
https://github.com/AzimovParviz/openblaster/tree/qt6
I wrote a CLI utility last year to control my SoundBlasterx G6 DAC (can only control LED colour and EQ bands) without needing to use Creative's windows only program (I am mostly a Mac + occasional Linux) user.
Recently downloaded Qwen3-coder-next 80b model and been vibing with it to introduce Qt6 and write a dead simple (aka ugly) crossplatform GUI to it so that other people can use it on their Macs and Linux machines. Letting a LLM wreak havoc on your project feels bad, I constantly have to reign it in and rollback the repo once it starts looping due to writing something that doesn't compile, making it going back and forth between doing and undoing changes.
I changed gears and moved into the video games industry at the end of 2021.
I started developing a city builder called Metropolis 1998 [1], but wanted to take the genre in new directions, building on top of what modern games have to offer:
- Watch what's happening inside buildings and design your own (optional)
- Change demand to a per-business level
- Bring the pixel art 3D render aesthetic back from the dead (e.g RollerCoaster Tycoon) [2]
I just updated my Steam page with some recent snapshots from my game. Im really happy with how the game is turning out!
[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/2287430/Metropolis_1998/
[2] The art in my game is hand drawn though
I'm working on arranging talks and poster presentations at various conferences/seminars to spread knowledge of my latest academic paper, "Specieslike clusters based on identical ancestor points". In the paper, among other things, I argue that (we should define species in such a way that) for any organism in any species, either the species is made up almost entirely of descendants of that organism, or else the species is made up almost entirely of non-descendants of that organism. This is a funny property because most people who hear about it fall into one of two camps, those who say it is obviously true, and those who say it is obviously false!
The paper in question: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.05274 (published in the Journal of Mathematical Biology)
Strafter - generate aftermovies from strava activities
Demo fase, showing the branded version to potential clients. We iterate on it with their feedback.
For language geeks: https://kpt.datamediate.com
KPT is a language app specifically targeted at explainable verb conjugation for highly inflected/agglutinative languages. Currently works for Finnish, Ukrainian, Welsh, Turkish and Tamil.
These are really hard languages to learn for most speakers of European languages, particularly English - we're not used to complex verb conjugations, they're hard to memorise and the rules often feel quite arbitrary. Every other conjugation practice app just tells you right/wrong with no explanation, which doesn't really help you learn when there are literally hundreds of rules to get right.
The interesting part was using an LLM to create a complete machine-executable set of conjugation rules, which are optimized for human explainability, and an engine to diagnose which rule is at fault when you get it wrong. There's several hundred rules needed for each language in order to cover all exceptions.
NB as a bonus it also works fully offline because my best practice hours are when I'm travelling and have poor connectivity.
I inherited a stake in a pyridine derivatives manufacturing factory - while I do not know much about chemical feedstocks and the chemical supply chain, I am trying to help the current partner optimize their yields and reduce losses across multiple stages of reactions across the feedstock and reagents. It is quite similar to hardware design and electrical engineering than I thought.
I have also taken an interest in learning distributed paradigms like MPI and am using it on my own cluster of rPis
Vibe-coded a YouTrack CLI tool in < 1 hour:
Also working on a language for embedded bare-metal devices with built-in cooperative multitasking.
A lot of embedded projects introduce an RTOS and then end up inheriting the complexity that comes with it. The idea here is to keep the mental model simple: every `[]` block runs independently and automatically yields after each logical line of code.
There is also an event/messaging system:
- Blocks can be triggered by events: `[>event params ...]`
- Blocks can wait for events internally
- Events can also be injected from interrupts
This makes it easy to model embedded systems as independent state machines while still monitoring device state.
Right now it’s mostly an interpreter written in Rust, but it can also emit C code. I’m still experimenting with syntax.
Example:
module WaterTank {
type Direction = UP|DOWN
let direction = UP
let current = 0
[>open_valve direction |> direction]
[>update level |> current]
[
for 0..30 |> iteration {
when direction {
UP -> !update level=current + 1 |> min(100)
DOWN -> !update level=current - 1 |> max(0)
} ~
%'{iteration} {current}'
}
]
[>update level |> when {
0..10 -> %'shallow'
11..15 -> %'good'
16.. -> %'too much!' then !open_valve direction=DOWN
}
]
}Screenleash.com: A personal project that deducts money from my bank if I spend more than the allocated time on specific websites. I have already spent around $60, but it has definitely reduced the time I spend playing Smashkarts and on Instagram.
Yes, I got addicted to playing Smashkarts (over 2 hours/day). Now it is capped at 30 minutes.
https://finbodhi.com — It's an app for your financial journey. It helps you track, understand, benchmark and plan your finances - with double-entry accounting. You own your financial data. It’s local-first, syncs across devices, and everything’s encrypted in transit (we do have your email for subscription tracking and analytics).
Supports multiple-accounts (track as a family or even as an advisor), multi-currency, a custom sheet/calculator to operate on your accounts (calculate taxes etc) and much more. Most recently, we added support for benchmarking (create custom dashboards tracking nav and value chart of subsets of your portfolio) and US stocks, etfs etc.
We also write about like:
How fund performance explain part of returns, rest is explained by timing. And ways to tease those out: https://finbodhi.com/docs/blog/benchmark-scenarios
Or, understanding double entry account: https://finbodhi.com/docs/understanding-double-entry
Im building https://trypixie.com to legally employ my 7 year old child, save on taxes and contribute to her Roth IRA.
Im also building https://www.keepfiled.com, a microsaas to save emails (or email attachments) to google drive
I almost forgot, I also built https://statphone.com - One emergency number that rings your whole family and breaks through DND.
I love building. I built all these for myself. unfortunately I suck at marketing so I barely have customers.
Since subreddits related to identifying AI images/videos got very popular, my wife started to send me cute AI generated videos, older family members can't distinguish AI videos at all, I've decided to code a weekend side project to train their Spidey sense for AI content.
The content is hand picked from tiktok, Instagram, Facebook, Reddit and other AI generating platforms.
Honestly I don't know where I'm going with this, but I felt the urge to create it, so here it is.
I learned how to optimize serving assets on CloudFlare.
Feedback welcome.
When GPT-4.5 came out, I used it to write a couple of novels for my son. I had some free API credits, and used a naive workflow:
while word_count < x: write_next_chapter(outline, summary_so_far, previous_chapter_text)
It worked well enough that the novels were better than the median novel aimed at my son's age group, but I'm pretty sure we can do better.
There are web-based tools to help fiction authors to keep their stories straight: they use some data structures to store details about the world, the characters, the plot, the subplots etc., and how they change during each chapter.
I am trying to make an agent skill that has two parts:
- the SKILL.md that defines the goal (what criteria the novel must satisfy to be complete and good) and the general method
- some other md files that describe different roles (planner, author, editor, lore keeper, plot consistency checker etc.)
- a python file which the agent uses as the interface into the data structure (I want it to have a strong structure, and I don't like the idea of the agent just editing a bunch of json files directly)
For the first few iterations, I'm using cheap models (Gemini Flash ones) to generate the stories, and Opus 4.6 to provide feedback. Once I think the skill is described sufficiently well, I'll use a more powerful model for generation and read the resulting novel myself.
I made a game where you try to guess a daily mystery bird.
It pulls a list of birds reported on eBird in your county in the last 2 weeks and you ask preselected questions like the the color or size to whittle down the possibilities. I also made a matching game that uses the same list and you have to match the name to a picture of the bird. I set it up for California for now. I wanted to get more comfortable with SQL and APIs.
Feedback welcome.
GetSize (https://www.getsize.shoes). We’re collecting the official sizing data of the world's shoes in one place.
Today, if you search for "what size should I get in Nike Air Max 90" you'll find size charts. We have it, and for 200+ brands across 70+ retailers. When users tell us which shoes they own and what size fits them we’re slowly building crowdsourced fit recommendations which are personal and more accurate compared to size charts.
We're two coders who've built an almost fully autonomous platform. AI agents build, debug and deploy crawlers on their own. We went from 4 crawlers to 280+ in about a month, and the whole thing runs on a home server. When new shoes are discovered, the platform publishes new pages with relevant info automatically. Agents get access to platform metrics and SEO data via custom MCPs to identify the right opportunities on their own. Currently at about 3000 MAU and about 100 size recommendations/day.
Example: https://www.getsize.shoes/en/shoes/nike-air-jordan-1-low-se-...
A browser extension to add a table of content widget into the chatbot pages (claude/Grok/Chatgpt). Making long conversation easier to navigate. Mainly used on firefox. Not tested on chrome
I am building ReifyDB(reifydb.com), a database for live application state.
A lot of existing databases are storage first, with everything else built around them. I have been exploring what it looks like if the database is closer to the application runtime itself, where state is live, queryable, and easier to reason about directly.
One thing I am prototyping right now is database-native tests.
Basically: what if integration tests were a database primitive?
CREATE TEST test::insert { INSERT test::users [{ id: 99, name: "Ghost" }]; FROM test::users | FILTER id == 99 | ASSERT { name == "Ghost" }; };
So not a wrapper, not a framework, not an external test runner.
A real test object inside the database.
The idea is that you could run these before schema changes, and make stored procedures or other database logic much easier to test without leaving the database model.
Still early, but it feels like one of those things that should just exist, especially for databases built around live application state.
https://gitlab.com/usecaliper/caliper-python-sdk
An LLM observability SDK that let's you store pre and post request metadata with every call in as lightweight an SDK as possible.
Stores to S3 in batched JSON files, so can easily plug into existing tooling like DuckDB for analysis.
It's designed to answer questions like; "how do different user tiers of my services rate this two different models and three different systems prompts?". You can capture all the information required to answer this in the SDK and do some queries over the data to get the answers.
I'm using TimescaleDB to manage 450GB of stocks and options data from Massive (what used to be polygon.io), and I've been getting LLM agents to iterate over academic research to see if anything works to improve trading with backtesting.
It's an addictive slot machine where I pull the lever and the dials spin as I hope for the sound of a jackpot. 999 out of 1000 winning models do so because of look-ahead bias, which makes them look great but are actually bad models. For example, one didn't convert the time zone from UTC to EST, so five hours of future knowledge got baked into the model. Another used `SELECT DISTINCT`, which chose a value at random during a 0–5 hour window — meaning 0–5 hours of future knowledge got baked in. That one was somehow related to Timescale hypertables.
Now I'm applying the VIX formula to TSLA options trades to see if I can take research papers about trading with VIX and apply them to TSLA.
Whatever the case, I've learned a lot about working with LLM agents and time-series data, and very little about actually trading equities and derivatives.
(I did 100% beat SPY with a train/out-of-sample test, though not by much. I'll likely share it here in a couple weeks. It automates trading on Robinhood, which is pretty cool.)
I’m building an application for documenting modular patches, mostly for my own use case. It uses ML to recognise the patch points, knobs and toggles from a photo of the front panel. You can then build racks from the scanned modules and then store presets of the knobs and connections which are displayed as simple schematics. Idea is ultimately to have it on an iPad as reference to accompany a live performance. Had some fun fine tuning the cable physics engine.
https://monohub.dev — a new EU-based (hosted and developed) GitHub alternative. Currently, it has a file browser and a PR review tool. Started off as a personal tool, but grew enough to consider offering as a service.
I posted about it recently on HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47199062):
It is at a fairly early stage of development, so it's quite rough around the edges. It is developed and hosted in EU.
I have started developing it as a slim wrapper around Git to serve my own code, but it grew to such extent that I decided to give it a try and offer it as a service. It doesn't have much at the moment, but it already has basic pull requests. Accessibility is high priority.
It will be a paid service, (free for contributors) but since it's an early start, an "early adopter discount" is applied – 6 months for free. No card details required.
I would be happy if you give it a try and let me know what do you think, and perhaps share what you lack in existing solutions that you would like to see implemented here.
I live in an old house.
The front bump out leaks when we get driving rain. I installed some flashing but that wasn't enough, it's still leaking. So I'm working on that so I can close up the big hole in the ceiling some day.
The prior owners filled in the old coal chute with literal bags of cement sort of artistically placed in the hole in the brick foundation. So I'm trying to figure out what masonry tools and skills I'll need to close it up proper.
I'd like to build my kids a playhouse of some sort, sketching out some designs for that.
I'm still having a lot of fun releasing daily puzzles for my game Tiled Words: https://tiledwords.com
It just won an award! It was awarded Players' Choice out of 700 daily web games at the Playlin awards: https://playlin.io/news/announcing-the-2025-playlin-awards-w...
Right now around 3,500 people play every day which kind of blows my mind!
It's free, web-based, and responsive. It was inspired by board games and crosswords.
I've been troubleshooting some iOS performance issues, working on user accounts, and getting ready to launch player-submitted puzzles. It's slow going though because I have limited free time and making the puzzles is time consuming!
Here's an article with more info about the award: https://cogconnected.com/2026/03/tiled-words-crowned-the-pla...
I've been plugging away on MadHatter (https://madhatter.app), a web tool for knitting/crochet projects. It works best on desktop!
Why? Many yarncrafters painstakingly build spreadsheets, or try to bend existing general purpose pixel editors to their will. It's time consuming & frustrating.
Along the way, I've solved a bunch of problems:
- Automatic decreases (shapes the hat) / overstitching markers (shows when multiple colors are used in the same row)
- Parameterized designs, like waves, trees, geometric shapes. No more manually moving an object by a couple of pixels, it's a simple click & drag.
- Color palette merging (can't delete a color if you already use it in a pattern!)
- Export to PDF (so you can print it or stick it on a tablet)
- Repeat previews (visualize the pattern as it repeats horizontally)
If you drag a shape near the right edge of the canvas, you'll see it "wrapping around" onto the right edge.
This reflects the 3D reality of a hat!
I have been working on quite a bit of things… but lately I went back to my hobby project of the last year:
It’s like netflix for language, where users can select/create their personal bilangual stories.
I had quite a lot of feedback from HN, friends, random people on the internet and trying to solve the common pain points and find my way around to make it geniunely useful.
- Most people said it’s hard to come up with a story, so I added url grounding. Also added buttons (including HN :)) so people can just click click and get their stories at their level with their interests.
- Made sure people can generate stories without ever signing up
- Each word is highlighted while being read, and the meanings can be checked with a tap. I also added an option for users to read the sentence for being checked how good their pronounciation is.
- Benchmarked 7 different models to get the fastest & highest quality story generation (it’s gemini now) and it’s insanely fast. I might share more about it on the webpage because I am an engineer and I enjoy this stuff lol.
- Added CSV import in Use my words so Anki users can just import their words to study.
- Also people can download their stories as pdf so they can send it to their kindles.
- I am working on a ChatGPT app, so people can just say “@DuoBook give me a Dutch/English story on latest Iranian events” within ChatGPT, but I am a bit afraid that it might be costly lol.
Continuing to make fantastic progress on Breaka Club, where we teach kids to code, be creative and make games:
https://breaka.club/blog/why-were-building-clubs-for-kids
The recent Netflix Games edition of Overcooked with K-Pop Demon Hunters is cool, but not nearly as cool as kids coding and playing their way through Overcooked levels in our custom educational mod for Overcooked:
I'm also maintaining GodotJS, strongly typed TypeScript bindings for Godot, which is used to build the Breaka Club RPG (see first link):
https://github.com/godotjs/GodotJS
And last week I also put together the first release of MoonSharp in ~10 years; Lua runtime for Unity. That's not for Breaka Club though, I also consult for Berserk Games on Tabletop Simulator:
PC Part Picker for hi-fi stereos: https://buildhifi.com/
I've wanted this for a long time, so I finally started building it. I've had a lot fun!
- Graph-based signal flow: Products become nodes, connections are edges inferred from port compatibility (digital, analog, phono, speaker-level domains)
- Port profile system: Standardized port definitions (direction, domain, connector, channel mode) enable automatic connection inference
- Rule engine: Pluggable rules check completeness, power matching, phono stage requirements, DAC needs, and more
https://getvalara.com - PDF appraisal document in, grounded appraisal review out in 5-10 minutes to aid in risk management for lending institutions and individual appraisal reviewers.
We use landing.ai to parse the PDF, as well as useworkflow.dev to durably perform other work such as rendering PDF pages for citations, and coordinating a few lightweight agents and deterministic checks that flag for inconsistencies, rule violations, bias, verify appraiser credentials, etc. etc. Everything is grounded in the input document so it makes it pretty fast and easy. We’re going to market soon and have an approval sign up gate currently. Plenty of new features and more rigorous checks planned to bring us to and exceed parity with competition and human reviewers.
There’s plenty of margin for cost and latency versus manual human review, which takes an hour or more and costs $100 or more.
https://github.com/sinancan34/chronomaly
Chronomaly is a flexible and extensible Python library for time series forecasting and anomaly detection using Google TimesFM.
https://symgraph.ai/ - AI-Powered Reverse Engineering Inside Your Disassembler
Open-source plugins for Ghidra, Binary Ninja, and IDA Pro that bring LLM reasoning, autonomous agents, and semantic knowledge graphs directly into your analysis workflow.
Coming soon: A supporting online service. The VirusTotal for reverse engineering. A cloud-native symbol store and knowledge graph service designed for the reverse engineering community.
- Submit files for automated reverse engineering and analysis
- Query shared symbols, types, and semantic knowledge
- Accelerate analysis with community-contributed intelligence
- Versioned, deduplicated symbols with multi-contributor collaboration
I love making games, and I've been building a no-code game engine by extracting reusable components every time I ship a new game. It started as me scratching my own itch, and now it's turning into a real platform.
Each game adds more building blocks to the editor: multiplayer, event systems, NPC behaviors, pathfinding, etc. I build a system once, and then anyone using the editor can use it in a click.
Since my last month, I shipped the asset marketplace and the LLM builder. Artists can now upload tilesets and characters, and unlike itch.io, assets drop directly into the editor. You can preview how they'll actually look in-game before using them [1].
An other problem I kept running into: even with a no-code editor, users don't know where to start. So now I'm extending it with a coding agent. Describe the game you want, and it assembles it — pulling assets from the marketplace, wiring up the event system, and using all the building blocks I've spent the past year extracting. Multiplayer, mobile controls, pathfinding, NPC behaviors — the agent doesn't build any of it, just reaches for what's already there.
Once the LLM assembles it, users will have a game ready to work on, and will still be able jump into the editor and tweak everything [2]. Here's an example of what it can already make [3] (after a lot of prompting), and the goal is to reach games like this one I built with the manual editor[4].
Hoping to release the AI mode in a week or two. The manual editor is live at https://craftmygame.com in the meantime.
[1] https://craftmygame.com/asset/mossy-cavern-JdYWai1
[2] https://youtu.be/6I0-eTmoHwQ
I finally decided to try and make a note taking tool I've been wanting to use. https://chrononotes.com/
As many here, I've found that a single text file is all that I really need, but found that it makes it difficult to keep track of a variety of things. I was also trying to use the file as a simple project tracker, adding some tags like [BUG-N], and updating them by hand. Eventually, it became difficult to track the progress of things, since I had to jump around the file to look for updates.. or use grep.
I condensed the idea to just that - a very simple tool which manages "trackers", and has a simple filtering built in to "trace" the updates. I've been using it, since I've added the BE, and dogfooding it a bunch. Would love for fellow note takers to take a look. It's not perfect, but I'm keeping it around for myself :)
I'm working on Firefly, a programming language for full stack webapps:
I made an idle version of the 1999 MMORPG "EverQuest". There's maybe around 50 people playing at any given time and has a enthusiastic discord group for it. It's relatively fully-featured to the original game, and has a lot of new mechanics to make the idle format work well. The 3D graphics aspect of it is really more of a screensaver, though, and all game interactions are done through menus.
I recently converted a bunch of stuff to be client side instead of server side (turns out running a real-time MMORPG server is expensive) so there's a new round of bugs I'm still resolving, but it's still fun to play:
I’m working on a 2D top-down Zelda-style adventure MMO game. I’m imagining it as a persistent world with Minecraft-like building and procedurally generated quests. I’d like to focus on co-op adventuring and social rather than pvp. Kind of a D&D experience I suppose, though that’s not really a direct inspiration for me.
I have no illusions that this is actually something in capable of building to an actual release-able state but it’s fun to tinker with.
I got laid off a while ago and I’m privileged enough to take time to reconsider what I want to do. I’ve been learning how to sketch which supports my bigger passion- printmaking. I’ve primarily been doing linocut which is carving negative space into linoleum, inking it up, and printing it on paper. I’ve got a membership at a local atelier and have branched out into drypoint, kitchen lithography, and what I guess is called LEGOpress. I’m sparking a lot of joy working with my hands every day. I have been finding adequate challenge in honing my craft as I try to figure out how to draw/carve the images I see in my mind.
I’m building a decentralized Drone-as-a-Service (DaaS) orchestration layer that treats aerial robotics as a simple API endpoint.
The system allows users to submit a JSON payload containing geocoordinates and mission requirements (e.g., capture_type: "4K_video" | "IR_photo"), the backend then handles the fleet logistics, selecting the optimal VTOL units from distributed sub-stations based on battery state-of-charge and proximity.
A solo gamedev project; upgrading my free Skyrim mods; thinking about learning vibe-coding for the little "web 2.0" side-project idea of old, seems could be fun to squeeze it in.
I vibe coded a tiny MUD-style world sim where LLMs control each character. It's basically a little toy sandbox where LLMs can play around. There's no real goal to this, I just thought that it would be fun, like a more advanced tamagochi.
One of the issues I encountered initially was that the LLMs were repeating a small set of actions and never trying some of the more experimental actions. With a bit of prompt tweaking I was able to get them to branch out a bit, but it still feels like there's a lot of room for improvement on that front. I still haven't figured out how to instill a creative spark for exploration through my prompting skills.
It has been quite exciting to see how quickly a few simple rules can lead to emergent storytelling. One of the actions I added was the ability for the agents to pray to the creator of their world (i.e. me) along with the ability for me to respond in a separate cycle. The first prayer I received was from an agent that decided to wade into a river and kneel, just to offer a moment in stillness. Imagining it is still making me smile.
Unfortunately, I don't have access to enough compute to run a bigger experiment, but I think it would be really interesting to create lots of seed worlds / codebases which exist in a loop. With the twist being that after each cycle the agents can all suggest changes to their world. This would've previously been quite difficult, but I think it could be viable with current agentic programming capabilities. I wonder what a world with different LLM distributions would look like after a few iterations. What kind of worlds would Gemini, Claude, Grok, or ChatGPT create? And what if they're all put in the same world, which ones become the dominant force?
I'm building an image editor for macOS. Don't really like Affinity or GIMP so thought I'd go ahead and make my own. https://skullrocksoftware.com
I've been building a collaborative docs tool called Docules. The short version: it's a team documentation tool that doesn't have any embedded AI features. I use Claude Code daily, but putting LLMs into every workflow and charging for it is kinda insane. Every docs tool is adding AI auto-complete, AI summaries, "generate a page" buttons. Docules has an API and an MCP server instead, so you connect whatever AI tools you actually want to use. The core product focuses on being a fast, solid docs tool. Real-time collab, fast — no embedded databases or heavy view abstractions, hierarchical docs, drag-and-drop, semantic search, comments, version history, public sharing, SSO, RBAC, audit logs, webhooks, etc. The stack is React, Hono, PostgreSQL, WebSockets. The MCP server is a separate package that exposes search, document CRUD, and comments — so Claude/ChatGPT can work with your docs without us reimplementing a worse version of what they already do. Happy to talk architecture or the MCP integration.
https://github.com/hsaliak/std_slop a sqlite centric coding agent. it does a few things differently. 1 - context is completely managed in sqlite 2 - it has a "mail model" basically, it uses the git email workflow as the agentic plan => code => review loop. You become "linus" in this mode, and the patches are guaranteed bisect safe. 3 - everything is done in a javascript control plane, no free form tools like read / write / patch. Those are available but within a javascript repl. So the agent works on that. You get other benefits such as being able to persist js functions in the database for future use that's specific to your codebase.
Give it a try!
https://e.ml A free inbrowser inbox for inspecting .eml (email) files. There are many one-off .eml viewers around but I found myself inspecting the same files many times which evolved into this concept of an inbrowser inbox. Plus, world's shortest domain (3 characters) and the domain is an exact match for the file extension, a fun novelty. Very easy to remember!
https://milliondollarchat.com a reimagining of the million dollar homepage for the AI age. Not useful, but fun. A free to use chatbot that anyone can influence by adding to the context. The chatbot's "thoughts" are streamed to all visitors.
I'm writing an essay where I get into how I use GNU Emacs along with gptel (a simple LLM client for Emacs) and Google's Gemini-3 family of models to turn a 1970s-vintage text editor into a futuristic language-learning platform to help me study Latin. I want to show how I liberate poorly aligned, pixelated PDF image scans of century-old Latin textbooks from the Internet Archive and transform them into glorious Org mode documents while preserving important typographic details, nicely formatted tables, and some semantic document metadata. I also want to outline how to integrate a local lemmatizer and dictionary to quickly perform Latin-to-English lookups, and how to send whole sentences to Gemini for a detailed morphological and grammatical breakdown.
I also intend to dig into how to integrate Emacs with tools such as yt-dlp and patreon-dl to grab Latin-language audio content from the Internet, transcode the audio with ffmpeg, load it into the LLM's context window, and send it off for transcription. If the essay isn't already too long, I'll demonstrate how to gather forced-alignment data using local models such as wav2vec2-latin so I can play audio snippets of Latin texts directly from a transcription buffer in Emacs. Lastly, I want show how to leverage Gemini to automatically create multimedia flash cards in Org mode using the anki-editor Emacs minor mode for sentence mining.
I have built npm for LLM models, which lets you install & run 10,000+ open sourced large language models within seconds. The idea is to make models installable like packages in your code:
llmpm install llama3
llmpm run llama3
You can also package large language models together with your code so projects can reproduce the same setup easily.
Wanted to see if AI could figure out how to compress executable binaries better than existing generic tools without me actually knowing much about compression engineering or ELF internals.
The result is an experiment called fesh. It works strictly as a deterministic pre-processor pipeline wrapping LZMA (xz). The AI kept identifying "structural entropy boundaries" and instructed me to extract near-branches, normalize jump tables, rewrite .eh_frame DWARF pointers to absolute image bases, delta-encode ELF .rela structs with ZigZag mappings, and force column transpositions before compressing them in separated LZMA channels.
Surprisingly, it actually works. The CI strictly verifies that compression is perfectly reversible (bit-for-bit identity match) across 103 Alpine Linux x86_64 packages. According to the benchmarks, it consistently produces smaller payloads than xz -9e --x86 (XZ BCJ), ZSTD, and Brotli across the board—averaging around 6% smaller than maximum XZ BCJ limits.
I honestly have no idea how much of this is genuinely novel versus standard practices in extreme binary packing (like Crinkler/UPX).
Repo: https://github.com/mohsen1/fesh
For those who know this stuff:
Does this architecture have any actual merits for standard distribution formats, or is this just overfitting the LZMA dictionary to Alpine's compiler outputs? I'd love to hear from people who actually understand compression math.
I'm building two things, both game related.
Over the last year I've been hacking on Table Slayer [0] a web tool for projecting DnD maps on purpose built TV-in-table setups. Right now I'm working on making hardware that supports large format touch displays.
Since I also play boardgames, this past month I threw together Counter Slayer [1], which helps you generate STLs for box game inserts.
Both projects are open source and available on GitHub. I've had fun building software for hobbies that are mostly tactile.
Still working on:
A hobby project I started putting together late last year; a little spot on the internet for prayer and reflection. I've just shipped a small feature where you get a Bible reading (KJ only for now) in response to a prayer.
https://dugnad.stavanger-digital.no/
A pro bono tech consultancy for local (Stavanger, Norway) non profits. The idea is to help them use tech to better deliver on their mission. Last week I built a little bookmarklet for a non-profit to surface some of their data buried in a SaaS tool ... which will make their apple pressing operation easier.
I wrote this Telegram bot that translates any video with AI-generated subtitles in about 2 minutes. You paste a YouTube, TikTok, or Instagram link, pick your language, and get back the video with burned-in subtitles.
It started because my wife watches Chinese dramas and new episodes never have subtitles for our language. Turns out thousands of people have the same problem — Arabic speakers watching anime, Russian speakers following Turkish series, Persian speakers catching up on K-dramas.
Supports 40+ languages, works with any video link or direct file upload. There's also a Mini App inside Telegram for a more visual experience.
https://k8slogjedi.netlify.app/
working on an AI-native Kubernetes sidekick that watches your pods, reads the logs, and turns failures into clear fixes before they become outages
When I have time between freelance work I make games and tools for myself.
Put One In for Johnny Minn (https://store.steampowered.com/app/3802120/Put_One_In_for_Jo...) - A small soccer game all about scoring nice goals. While I don’t expect it to do well, I’m very happy with how it came out, and it’s the first game I’ve made that I’ll release on Steam! Comes out on Thursday (March 12th).
HeartRoutine (https://www.heartroutine.com/) - I built this a few months ago to help me stay on top of my heart health. I enter my numbers on the (offline) app, and then configure my goals (like “lower Apo B through diet and exercise”), and then the server emails me every morning asking me what I ate yesterday, how I exercised, etc. The goal is to stay on track, and to be able to bring a cardiologist a very detailed report.