So here’s a fun one. A friend’s been researching steganography, the art of hiding a message within another artifact to avoid detection. It made a great LLM proof-of-concept. This short video demonstrates the output of a day’s worth of pair programming with gpt-4: I encoded a short message* into a sample audio file in Morse…
Looking to unwind but not sure what to stream tonight? I’ve built just the thing: a fun phone-based movie recommender with old-school Moviefone vibes. I paired with gpt4 to code this project, which uses APIs from OpenAI, Eleven Labs and TMDB to generate movie recommendations and attach them to real-time streaming availability, all while generating…
It is very hard to google Dr. Stephen Buggie, PhD. Aside from one blog post and some YouTube videos, he’s largely invisible online. This is probably because he does most of his computing from an Apple II. I came across Dr. Buggie this spring in the most unexpected way: I ordered $7.50 worth of replacement…
For twenty years I’d been in possession of a strange, sad box. It contained the last earthly possessions of a woman named Eva Kaye who died with no heirs. A social worker, the executor of her estate, paid me to clean out her house when I was a poor college grad. I couldn’t bear to…
I am absolutely obsessed with subtle interventions that have outsized effects. I’ll give an example from my law school days. Every first-year law student takes a tort law class, and every tort law class spends a lot of time focusing on causation — the inciting incident that triggers the injury at the center of any tort suit. Tracing…
“I used to be a light bulb, but now I’m a laser.” I love this quote (spoken by Nicholas Negroponte, regarding his intense focus on the $100 laptop project). It helped inspire the development of Clara, a brain-sensing, environment-augmenting, focus-enhancing smart lamp I built with Marcelo Mejía Cobo and Belen Tenorio for our combined MFA…
I’ve been working on a bunch of mapping projects lately, mostly designed for pedestrians. Thither is a navigation concept that reimagines efficiency. You give it a destination and an arrival time within the next hour, and it will route you to optimize for that precise arrival time. If you’re in a rush, it will try…
I love my Yamaha A-760 Natural Sound Stereo Amplifier (circa 1981). I came across it on craigslist six years ago, and I knew that it was the one when I discovered this restoration project online. One doesn’t typically put that much effort into something without a good reason. It only confirmed my excitement when I…
If you are playing around with Yosemite’s SMS relay feature and pissing off all your Android-using buddies with your cropped text messages, boy have I got the fix for you. I experienced this problem firsthand as soon as I upgraded to Yosemite and eagerly started sending SMS messages via the Messages app. My friend was…
So, in late August, my girlfriend and I moved into a lovely new apartment in the Slope, and everything was right with the world. …until October. That’s when we were faced with our first true cohabitation challenge — the ginkgo tree outside our front door. Let me get this out of the way first: the ginkgo is…