Artificially Intelligent, Naturally Curious
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This is a fascinating conversation to read -- this is Terence Tao's conversation with ChatGPT about the Jacobian Conjecture Counterexample. https://chatgpt.com/share/6a5fdc7a-d6f8-83e8-bbea-8deb42cfed56 It's really cool to read the transcript of someone who is an expert in their field and the way that he interacts with the LLM here. Note: I understand next-to-nothing about the kind of math…
I'm putting together a small 'Introduction to AI' presentation that I'm giving on Wednesday morning. The target audience is roughly a 50/50 mix of engineers and non-engineers, so I'm trying to not make too many assumptions about my listener's technical depth. I've only got 15 minutes, which makes it tricky to know what to cover (and maybe that's a lost cause), but I think I'm going to spend most…
I spent parts of two days making a very small local co-op arcade game called Vineguard . It started as an entry for the CGDC Speedgame Classic 2026 , which gave the project a helpful frame: make something small, finishable, and playful without letting it turn into a giant engine project. You can also browse the other jam entries . I always enjoy seeing how many different directions people take…
I was impressed by the visualizations in this article: Inside FAISS: Billion-Scale Similarity Search I'm a big fan of semantic embeddings models -- I've used them extensively on various projects for everything from hardware issue diagnosis (asymmetric embeddings-model for converting user symptoms into fix resolutions) to image recognition (I've written extensively about CollectorVision in the…
By Max Leiter, from the original on his blog . Jun 3, 2026 They're Made Out of Weights with apologies to Terry Bisson After Terry Bisson's 'They're Made Out of Meat' . 'They're made out of weights.' 'Weights?' 'Weights. Floating-point numbers. We checked the whole thing through. It's nothing but weights.' 'Weights doing what? Where do the words come from?' 'The weights make the words. Are you…
If you check the Milo catalogs page on HuggingFace, you'll notice a few new entries that weren't there before: tcgplayer-digimon tcgplayer-fab tcgplayer-lorcana tcgplayer-onepiece tcgplayer-pokemon tcgplayer-swu tcgplayer-yugioh There are also a couple of new Magic-adjacent catalogs, including a TCGplayer-sourced MTG catalog and an experimental Spanish Scryfall catalog. This is pretty exciting to…
One of my favorite things about CollectorVision is that it runs entirely offline with local inference + lookup. The only time it needs to make a network request is look up card names and prices. However, one drawback from that is that I don't have an easy way to tell how many people are using the library. Is the library growing in popularity? Stagnating? Other than tracking things like Github…
I was impressed with this website. It's worth your time to visit it: https://sinceyouarrived.world/taken h.t. to HN for the link + discussion
If we rename AI agents to 'nerfs', then this can be my official job title.
Demonstrating the latest version of CollectorVision -- my open-source card scanning library that I'm releasing to the public. This is a demonstration of my online playground demo for running custom code when users scan cards. It supports Magic: The Gathering currently, with other games like Pokemon, Yugioh, and Flesh and Blood coming soon. It is hosted on Github. This demo runs 100% locally…
Sol Ring is ranked #1 on EDHREC — the most-played card in Commander, by a wide margin. It also happens to be one of the hardest cards for an image recognition system to get right. The reason is the artwork. The most common Sol Ring printing uses the Mike Bierek illustration, and Scryfall currently shows 43 Sol Ring prints sharing that artwork . C13, C14, C15, C16, C17, C18, C19, C20, C21, CMR,…
When people ask how accurate a card scanner is, they usually mean one thing, but the question actually has two different answers depending on what you care about. Understanding the difference matters if you're trying to evaluate whether a system is good enough for your use case. Card accuracy vs. edition accuracy Card accuracy measures whether the system identified the correct card — meaning the…
Part 6 of the CollectorVision series. Part 1 has the overview. There are three ways to deploy CollectorVision, depending on where you want the computation to happen and how much bandwidth you have. Fully local The Python library and the browser scanner both run entirely on the client. The catalog lives on the device (or in the browser's IndexedDB cache). No network traffic beyond the initial…
Part 5 of the CollectorVision series. Part 1 has the overview. The browser scanner runs the entire pipeline — corner detection, perspective warp, neural embedding, catalog search — inside a web page, with no server. It's hosted at https://hanclinto.github.io/CollectorVision/ . Open that on your phone, point it at a Magic card, and it'll tell you what it is. This was not straightforward to get…
Part 4 of the CollectorVision series. Part 1 has the overview. This post covers the practical side: installing the library, running it against a webcam, and the REST server. Post 6 goes deeper into the deployment split — when to run everything locally versus offloading catalog lookup to a server. Installing pip install git+https://github.com/HanClinto/CollectorVision.git Or with uv: uv pip install…
Part 3 of the CollectorVision series. Part 1 has the overview. After Cornelius finds the card and the perspective is corrected, you have a clean 252 × 352 crop. The next problem is figuring out which of 108,000 cards it is. Why not a classifier? The obvious approach is to train a classifier with 108,000 output classes, one per card. This works, but has a few problems: New cards get released every…
Part 2 of the CollectorVision series. Part 1 has the overview. Before you can identify a card you have to find it. Cornelius is the model responsible for that — it takes a camera frame and predicts where the four corners of the card are. This sounds easy. It's not. What the detector has to deal with Cards in a real scene come in a lot of shapes. They're held at angles, rotated, half-off-screen, in…
I've been working on a card scanner for Magic: The Gathering for a while now and wanted to write up how it works. The short version: you show it a card, it tells you what it is. It handles held cards, sleeved cards, skewed angles, phone cameras. The whole thing runs locally — you can run it in Python on your laptop, or as a static web app in your browser. No server required. The live demo is at…
Every once in a while, one of our hens will feel broody and sit on a clutch of eggs. Usually she gets bored after a day or two and wanders off (leaving a pile of soon to be rotten eggs), but every once in a while, one of the girls sticks with it long enough to bring chicks to hatch. Three new chicks hopping around the Herron farm now. Momma is fiercely protective and will peck your feet if you get…
NRC 2026 is just around the corner (April 16, 17 & 18), and our students are very excited. For the past several 6 years my wife and I have hosted and coached a robotics team out of our house for middle and high schoolers. This year our students are bringing a total of 8 bots to the competition, and we're very excited to see how they do! It's always a wonderful event, and can't say enough good…
![](https://blog.hanclin.to/posts/gh-19/"https://raw.githubusercontent.com/HanClinto/CollectorVision/main/docs/scrying_glass_original.jpg")