Giving large language models access to CAD is one of the most direct ways to let them step out of the purely virtual world and begin creating real objects. This article describes an MCP bridge for FreeCAD, why visual inspection turned out to be crucial, and how ChatGPT and Codex were able to generate manufacturable geometry ranging from vacuum hardware to a printable planetary gearbox.
The debate surrounding age verification often presents a false choice: either leave children exposed to the unrestricted internet or require everyone to prove who they are before accessing online information. This article argues that the first concern is entirely legitimate - children do need protection - but that mandatory identity or age-verification systems are the wrong pseudo-solution.…
A practical guide for installing n8n via npm on a RaspberryPi 3B+ with only 1 GB of RAM. This article explains why the usual advice to just use Docker is not always helpful, how to work around the memory bottleneck with temporary swap, and how to run n8n reliably enough for small experimental workflows on low-power hardware.
Published in Physical Review Research: Coincidence imaging, also known as ghost imaging, is a technique that exploits correlations between two particles to reconstruct information about a specimen. The particle that relays the spatial information about the object remains completely noninteracting, while the particle used to probe the object is not spatially resolved. While ghost imaging has been…
Technology is often described as a race where success belongs to those who move the fastest. New frameworks, new interfaces and constant reinvention are frequently celebrated as progress in themselves. But is that really how civilization advances? Or is the true foundation of innovation something far less glamorous: the ability to preserve yesterdays achievements so tomorrows work can build upon…
In this article I am summarizing a bunch of optimizations I performed on the colibri runtime for GLM-5.2 specifically for an Westmere Xeon E5620 dual-socket Xeon machine. It is a summary of the ideas, what worked and what did not - and it shows why some seemingly cleaver ideas were simply not worth keeping.
Modern frontier scale large language models (LLMs) are normally associated with clusters of very expensive GPUs and hundreds of gigabytes of memory. Yet recent advances in Mixture-of-Experts architectures and intelligent inference runtimes challenge this assumption. In this short article we explore how the 744 billion parameter GLM-5.2 model can be executed on an old dual-Xeon FreeBSD workstation…
One of the oldest debates in open-source software asks a deceptively simple question: should code remain free forever through copyleft or should recipients be free to use it however they wish? The GNU GPL and the BSD licenses embody two different answers, each protecting a different notion of freedom. This article explores both philosophies, illustrating where each approach excels and where…
Modern coding agents such as Codex are designed around OpenAIs Responses API and most of the time around a specific large language model, making it difficult to use them with self-hosted models or alternative inference backends. Fortunately, this limitation is mostly architectural rather than fundamental. By introducing a lightweight API gateway that translates between the Responses API and more…
Modern AI agents and automation tools are increasingly capable of writing code, executing commands and interacting with local services. While this opens exciting possibilities, it also raises an important question: how can we let such applications work autonomously without granting unrestricted access to our entire workstation? This article demonstrates how FreeBSDs lightweight service jails…