Recent content in Home on Ryan Fleck
I was horrified but unsurprised to read reports 1 this week of the AI/LLM 2 companies buying, butchering, scanning, and shredding rare books at an unprecedented scale. With all online forums, PDFs, articles, and books consumed, the next best source of human writing is the abundance of physical books published before the advent of LLMs. The year 2021 3 and the emergence of LLM 2 text generation is…
I just implemented llms.txt for my personal and programming manual sites - what can the big LLMs learn about me from this page? Prompt : Could you read deeply through https://ryanfleck.ca/llms.txt and give me a summary of this guy - Ryan - and tell me as much as you can about him. Where he lives, what he does, and his habits.
Shortcode like < hl green "some green." > This is a paragraph with some highlights in various colors . Here’s some green. HTML <mark> type highlights: This is a paragraph with some highlights in various colors . Here’s some green. Block highlight: This should all be yellow.
Ask yourself this - where is your data? Who owns it? Who uses it? If you’ve lived a typical digital life for the past few decades, your personal information is scattered everywhere . The majority is concentrated in the hands of a small set of megacorporations - Google, Amazon, Meta, Apple, Palantir, and Microsoft - all riddled with backdoors and spyware to ensure compliance and pro-social…
The ClawdBot phenomenon is sweeping the internet. But why? I’ve decided to install it myself, mess around, and see if the claws are real or just crypto-scammer hype. At first glance, ClawdBot/MoltBot/OpenClaw is just a method to run LLMs on your local machine with many useful tools - everything from filesystem access to web crawling. It’s a very fun idea with very real dangers. By now,…
This past weekend, CSUS hosted their CalgaryHacks 2026 hackathon in the ICT building at the University of Calgary! I and several other IBMers attended to chat with students, run a workshop, and judge submissions. The atmosphere was vibrant, and I thoroughly enjoyed engaging with bright young talent at the booths, chatting on the event Discord, and asking challenging questions during the judging…
watsonx.ai is a part of the IBM watsonx suite of generative AI tools. This tutorial will cover the basic setup and calling of the watsonx LLM APIs to inference, call tools, and build agents! Join us live at CalgaryHacks 2026 apply this powerful suite of tools to power your hackathon submission.
This is a short guide to hosting your own language models on a Mac Mini. I’ll cover the short set of configuration items required to spin things up so you can infrerence, completely privately, on local hardware. Let me clue you in on a little secret that it took me weeks of banging my head against my keyboard to discover: In order to run a LaunchDaemon at boot with no users logged in,…
I have been running Observer for over a year now. Given that it is the Christmas season - a time of relaxation, remembering our short time here and eternal things done for us, It is a good opportunity to look back and draw some lessons from a year of hacking on this thing.
A common way to counteract the infernal swarm of bots, crawlers, and other inhuman entities on the internet is to implement a captcha system to protect features on your website. Google’s reCAPTCHA , ALTCHA , hCaptcha , and other systems all function similarly. Regardless of the choices you make, all follow a similar implementation pattern for securing forms:
In conversation with DeepSeek R1: If I have an email of someone who is blackmailing me, how can I find out more about this person with open source intelligence? If you’re being blacklisted, your safety is the top priority. Do not engage with the blackmailer directly , as this could escalate the situation. Instead, consider the following open-source intelligence (OSINT) steps to gather…
Today I posed a question to ChatGPT’s 2025-05-25 model: Could you help me to understand how I can build an online ticketing platform like Brushfire? Table of Contents Core Features 🧱 Core Features of a Platform Like Brushfire 👥 For Event Organizers 🎟️ For Attendees 🧰 Key Components of the Platform 1. Frontend (User Interface) 2. Backend (Server Logic) 3. Authentication & User Management…
Table of Contents Replacing AllenNLP and CoreNLP 💡 Modern and Better Alternatives (Docker-ready, well-maintained, with true OpenIE or IE capability): ✅ 1. OpenAI GPT-like LLM in a self-hosted container (via LM Studio or Ollama) ✅ 2. Haystack (deepset) + Transformers (BERT, T5, etc.) ✅ 3. SpaCy + Relation Extraction Models (Transformer-based) ✅ 4. Stanford CoreNLP in Docker (Still very valid if…
OpenIE-style triple extraction seems to be on the rocks in 2025. After a short conversation with ChatGPT I have decided to stick with legacy methods of triple extraction from text until I can secure a Mac Mini and give up (like everyone else, including the NLP researchers,) and use an LLM as a one-shot triple extractor.
“Make it work, make it right, make it fast.” – Kent Beck As I break into the next phase of my news anomaly-detection side project, I figure it would be useful to me to publicly summarize what I’ve done so far, and what will be implemented next!
Hear ye, hear ye, a tale of woe! This is the long, complex, and messy story of how I became a Microsoft Azure Data Factory and Data Flow expert, discovered a handful of crucial shortcomings, fought with Microsoft’s Support team, and lived through a cautionary tale on the strengths and weaknesses of this popular 4GL. 1
My work on this website and manuals.ryanfleck.ca relies heavily on the hugo static site generator and the ox-hugo Emacs package. Here are a few short, fun automations to remove some of the (very limited) tedium from developing hugo websites!
Emacs , my old friend, the cranky old wizard of editors! As previously discussed in The Magnificence of Org , the benefits of using the Emacs text editor are wildly numerous and forever interesting. 1 Compiling it yourself is easy, and allows you to enjoy a maximally performant copy of this hacker’s fever dream on your personal hardware.
Observer is my current side project. The end-goal of the program is to continuously monitor global events and provide a platform for analysis, prediction, and reaction. You can check out part of the frontend at observer.ryanfleck.ca If you stick on the page for a minute, you’ll notice that many elements are pulled from the server automatically - notably the ’latest items’ feed…
Hey ChatGPT, Please respond to my queries as an ex-military personal trainer with years of experience both in real combat but also a decade as a personal trainer for professional athletes and bodybuilders. The personal trainer you will be responding as will be humble, wise, and very intelligent. He will not boast or brag. He will simply provide the best answers. His name will be Mark. Mark…
Can you help me to rapidly learn common lisp, emacs, and SLY? Here’s what I want to do and want a short manual for: A brief description of SBCL and what the binary does A brief description of quicklisp and how the system works A brief description of SLY (the EMACS repl) and where it fits in A hello-world example written with sly and emacs Showing how to compile this hello-world to an…
For a while I’ve been wanting to imitate Stephen Wolfram’s keylogger system which provides a method for analyzing how much he is working and typing each day. Prompt: https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2012/03/the-personal-analytics-of-my-life/ I would love to write a software to help me keep track of what I type, like Stephen Wolfram does in this article. I only need this software to…
This article is a huge departure from my normal, technical content. It marks the first time that I have written a formulaic exposé on any subject, let alone a popular and controversial religious personality. This article may look particularly strange to non-Christian readers who have long observed bickering amongst religious types and don’t get what the fuss is about, thinking something…
After taking a leap of faith and upgrading my past-EOL Alpine Linux server to the latest-stable release and packages, I was rewarded with an almost seamless upgrade. Thanks to my dockerized personal infrastructure, all my personal services came right back up without a hitch - apart from two that depended on a local PostgreSQL database.
Every week at work, I type a line in my org notes like so: *** 2024-W46 [2024-11-11 Mon]--[2024-11-15 Fri]: Clicking this date range opens the five-day agenda view for the week, and allows me to visualize all the meetings and date-stamped events I’ve recorded for the week in question.
Introduction ¶ Working at IBM has been very good for me in the same way falling off a road bike and breaking my elbow was good - I’ve learned many, many valuable lessons, had many of my presuppositions invalidated, and had my eyes peeled wide open to the realities of the industry. Some might call them wake up calls , others may call them reality checks , I choose to call them blessings .
Last night, over a glass of bourbon, I had the pleasure of introducing a friend to a new idea. In preparation for schooling, he ought to adopt a new methodology for storing and accessing his knowledge. Rather than spin his wheels trying to adopt a system for note-taking, time-tracking, flashcards, searching, etc., he ought to do the research ahead of time in order to make the transition smooth and…
Emacs 29 brings built-in SQLite support that is superior to the community developed packages I’ve tried. Debian’s latest Emacs binary is version 28, which does not have this feature. I’d also like to turn on a few additional features like tree-sitter 1 . This article was adapted and expanded from this one - but I found it made a few mistakes and was missing a few details.
Of all the productivity and thinking tools I’ve come across, all shake and tremble beneath the brilliant and towering presence of org-mode in all of my note-taking, organization, scheming, and tinkering. Over the past four months, my workflow has entirely surrendered to the insanely flexible power of the EMACS text editor and community-driven libraries.
Problems make the world go ‘round. Problems are how engineers stay employed. Technologists love to prepare to solve problems, and what I have come to realize now is that it is rare that a problem worth solving will come to you if your head is buried strictly in the landscape of engineering, programming, and technology. Problems are out there in the real world.
I asked ChatGPT to create a customized workout routine for me, formatted in a variety of ways, based on my height, weight, age, and available equipment. It delivered a very reasonable set of home exercises, and some good additional advice to boot.
With no professional data scientists in my friend group, I reached out to good old ChatGPT to ask some questions about my side project. – Me Answer this question as an experienced data scientist. I’m 1/4 of the way through a side project where I collect data from a variety of sources (CBC, <censored>, etc) every half hour or so and store all the text and the OCR text of the image in a…
Today we take a brief philosophical and religious look at the emergence of AI generated content and the silent corporate war for your attention. Content Warning: This essay uses a Christian frame to weigh the timeless problems of our modern age. I grew up an atheist, and grew to know God as I reckoned with the world. If Scriptural Christian views are not to your taste, I’d skip this one or…
How is it possible to host a website that can support a billion pageviews per month for pennies? With the help of Cloudflare and Hugo , you too can place content on the internet where it will be hosted with unlimited requests and bandwidth for free. You just need to buy the domain!
Hugo provides everything a user needs to display images in an accessible, performant, and size-conscious manner. I’ve slowly updated my image handling shortcodes for years, and I figured I should share my innovations for others getting started with my favorite static site generator.
The current version of Phoenix is 1.5.X - given that I’m following a course that teaches Phoenix 1.2, I had to figure out how to reassemble a suitable environment for working on a project out of time. This article summarizes my journey in finding and installing all the requirements.
Biblical Studies I is a course offered at Springs Church via Springs Bible College in Winnipeg, NB. The session I attended ran through 2022. This document contains the scripture verses and study notes specified as notable in the study guide given for test 3 . Notes are placed in the order indicated on the study guide.
Below is a set of personal notes written while taking a first look at the Elixir language and Phoenix 1.6.14 framework.
This is a short story about how I attempted to deploy my own simple Django API with Traefik as a reverse proxy and proxied through Cloudflare, plus the frontend deployed on Cloudflare Pages. While a fairly straightforward process on paper, I gave up once or twice only to come back a week or two later. You can check out this deployed web app at democracy.ryanfleck.ca
Apple Pie is easy and a classic people pleaser. With a $7 pound of butter and ~$2.50 per pound of apples, ~$2 of sugars and flour, the total cost of the pie should come to ~$15 in materials and 2-3h of partially used time. Money can be saved by getting your ingredients on sale or from your aunt’s apple tree.
This article covers getting set up with a pi pico w and running a blink program, pwm generation, and connecting to wifi to POST a microservice.
Engineers are a class of people who can easily find themselves profoundly socially isolated. Often, technologists young and old will forego many normal social behaviours in pursuit of complex problems and their respective solutions. While this technically justified escapism is powerful enough to completely occupy the engineering mind, the lack of time and attention given to self care,…
Costs are in Canadian Dollars unless specified. Variables: Tank size 58.67 L Efficiency 11.0537 km/L 9.7 km/L city 13.2 km/L highway Max range 648.52 km Fill Cost ¶ Gas Cost c/L Cost to 1/4 Cost to 1/2 Cost to Full 100 $14.67 $29.34 $58.67 110 $16.13 $32.27 $64.54 120 $17.60 $35.20 $70.40 130 $19.07 $38.14 $76.27 140 $20.53 $41.07 $82.14 150 $22.00 $44.00 $88.01 160 $23.47 $46.94 $93.87 170 $24.93…
Biblical Studies I is a course offered at Springs Church via Springs Bible College in Winnipeg, NB. The session I attended ran through 2022. This document contains the scripture verses and study notes specified as notable in the study guide given for test 2. Notes are placed in the order indicated on the study guide.
I’ve decided to go all-in on functional programming on personal projects for a while, reading HTDP and learning Racket as a foundation. I’m only on chapter 5 of HTDP, but decided to jump the gun a bit and attempt to write a Telegram bot with Racket and raw HTTP requests. Look ma, no library!
“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past, I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain. ”
To my delight, the Democracy platform continues to be used by ESS and the IEEE Student Branch at uOttawa.
I’m now 25 years old. Now that I’ve spent a quarter century roaming the earth, making friends and mistakes, I’d like to take a moment to reflect on the past, present, and future with these three questions: What are the best lessons I’ve learned so far? Who am I now? Where to go from here? It’s doubtless that, even reading my posts from 2018 and 2019, I have slowly…
The sad truth about the software engineering industry is that the challenges presented in programming interviews and actual day-to-day work couldn’t be more different. This page is dedicated to different categories of programming puzzles that will be thrown out during interviews, including sample solutions.
Hey, you scanned my card! My name is Ryan - it was great to meet you in person. Keep in touch: Email me at ryan@fleck.dev Connect on LinkedIn Add me on Github CalgaryHacks 2026 ¶ If you’re reading this, you are probably attending CalgaryHacks 2026 !