A beautifully formatted, well organized (first two articles this week are on the Iran war and Victor Orban’s loss), delivered every Friday morning with email notifications, good writing, commentary on the news cycle, many sections and a table of contents, reads great in Speechify, looks great in Readest.
Production was nearly completely hands off this week, and I was missing Claude for a big chunk of it. I am using qwen3.5:122b-a10b-q8 locally with ollama on Mac Metal. With Claude checking quality.
Ingests from many long-form Substack publications and YouTube channels. Writes original commentary. Adds excerpts and links. Rewrites wikipedia articles (so they are a joy to read), providing context to the articles.
Ingest pipeline, semantic embeddings across hundreds of thousands of records, cloud deployment on GCP and Neon — in about two weeks using Claude Code CLI. No IDE. Then I had to deliver it to a non-developer colleague who uses Claude Desktop on Windows. This essay covers the sharp edges of that transition: environment variables that don't propagate from dock-launched apps, PgBouncer silently dropping data during batch jobs, Windows path escaping in JSON config files, and the pragmatic reason MCP exists (it's the only mechanism by which Claude Desktop's Chat tab can call external tools — without it, there's no data access). Happy to answer questions about the architecture or the delivery process.
A fake academic paper fed to NotebookLM's Audio Overview to see what happens when two AI podcast hosts discover that all male-female co-hosts inevitably fall for each other — and are asked to consider what that means for them. Seven fake studies, 4,218 fake dyads, very real awkwardness.
A Substack post that includes four preview chapters from the first full English translation of Zhang Henshui’s The Story of a Noble Family, now out as an ebook on Kobo. The entire project was built and run locally on a Mac Studio (M2 Ultra, 192 GB RAM) using Python scripts with Ollama-served Llama 3 70B to segment and translate the original 1920s Chinese text. The pipeline consists of regex chapter parsing, style-aware prompting, and offline batch translation.
Production was nearly completely hands off this week, and I was missing Claude for a big chunk of it. I am using qwen3.5:122b-a10b-q8 locally with ollama on Mac Metal. With Claude checking quality.
Ingests from many long-form Substack publications and YouTube channels. Writes original commentary. Adds excerpts and links. Rewrites wikipedia articles (so they are a joy to read), providing context to the articles.