Category
13 post s
DevelopmentAI
What I learned fine-tuning speech models locally · Part 2
I fine-tuned whisper-small on 7.7 hours of real spontaneous speech and made it 2.6 times worse. I had a tidy explanation for it, so I tested the explanation, and the test said I was wrong.
DevelopmentAI
Make the most of cheap compute to do cool things.
DevelopmentTechnology
What I learned fine-tuning speech models locally · Part 1
AMD makes compelling hardware and backs open source, but CUDA is still the default. Here's a little taste of how to change that.
DevelopmentAI
Locally fine-tuning Whisper and ASR models with Listenr · Part 2
A walkthrough of how to fine-tune Whisper end to end with Listenr, fully locally.
DevelopmentAI
Firefox's AI chatbot sidebar can talk to a local Lemonade server. One CLI command and one about:config flip and your prompts never leave your machine.
DevelopmentTechnology
Using LLMs to generate deterministic scripts rather than running real-time AI agents is a more reliable, testable, and repeatable approach to automation. This post explains the strategy, shares real examples from managing this blog, and covers how to keep the output production-ready.
TechnologyOpinion
Large language models are changing the calculus on when to reach for a third-party library versus generating a lightweight, purpose-built implementation. This post examines the tradeoffs and where a hybrid approach of GenAI-generated code refined by a developer makes the most practical sense.
Development
hCaptcha is a privacy-respecting, drop-in alternative to Google ReCaptcha that actually pays you for serving its challenges on your site. This post shows how to integrate it into a Vue frontend and verify tokens server-side in Node with minimal code.
Development
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. This post walks through the full frontend and backend integration with working code examples.
DevelopmentOpinion
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. This post covers practical considerations for keeping aging stacks alive while keeping technical debt in check.
DevelopmentOpinion
Building a URL shortener is a great project for exploring real-world concerns like unique ID generation, database modeling, and abuse prevention. This post covers the core mechanics using Node and MongoDB, focusing on the counter-based schema design that keeps short IDs truly short.
DevelopmentOpinion
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. This post walks through the key choices when building a full Flask application from scratch.
DevelopmentOpinion
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. This post explores why decoupling your frontend from server-side rendering engines makes sense and how to do it incrementally.