applied-ai

Keyword

applied-ai

Applied AI in the messy middle: assistants, pipelines, production systems, evaluation problems, and human decisions around when models are actually useful.

Entries: 7
Latest: July 18, 2026
Type: Keyword

OpenAI Build Week: What Would You Ask Sam?

applied-aiweb-developmentProject: samnavsemantic-searchai-workflowsstart-here 4 min read

OpenAI Build Week: What Would You Ask Sam?

OpenAI emailed me about Build Week with four days left, which meant choosing between several questionable Codex projects and figuring out how to make a meaningful addition to SamNav—an application that was already built, deployed, and working. The answer became “What would you ask Sam?”: a question-first way to navigate Sam Altman’s public writing without pretending to impersonate him. The new system uses SamNav’s existing taxonomy, semantic dossiers, and GPT-5.6 to interpret nuanced questions and plot a grounded route through things he has actually published.

Expertise Without Permission

culture-and-critiqueapplied-ailabor-and-classcraftautomationanti-extractionnonsensestart-here 9 min read

Expertise Without Permission

A working-class reflection on AI, expertise, and gatekeeping. The piece argues that expertise is real, but access to it has always been shaped by class, credentials, and permission. AI disrupts that arrangement by letting more people turn ideas into practice before institutions decide they are “qualified.” That democratizing potential is real, but complicated: the same tools that weaken old gates are mostly owned by corporations, turning liberation into subscription-based dependency. The essay defends craft while rejecting the fantasy that craft alone protects workers.

A Machine for Cross-Examining My Greed

applied-aiweb-developmentProject: signal-deskresponsible-webai-workflowsdata-architecturenonsensestart-here 6 min read

A Machine for Cross-Examining My Greed

Signal Desk is a local AI-powered investment research desk I built precisely because I don’t know enough about investing to trust my own instincts. It turns scattered curiosity about AI companies, infrastructure, robotics, sensors, and market hype into a slower research ritual: filings, thesis cards, source-linked briefs, recommendation categories, discovery scans, and ghost trades that test ideas without risking real money. It does not give financial advice or place trades. Instead, it acts as a contradiction engine, helping me separate evidence from narrative before I do something financially...

The Ghost Switcher

media-and-productionapplied-aiProject: autonomous-producerlive-productionsystems-designlocal-firstagentic-systemshuman-in-the-loopstart-here 10 min read

The Ghost Switcher

Part three closes the series by moving from prototype to stakes: a real venue-network failure in London where the remote producer was disconnected, the stream dropped, and the online audience was left staring into the void. From that failure, the article argues that Autonomous Producer is not just about smarter switching, but about removing fragile remote-control dependencies from live production. The answer is a local “ghost switcher” that observes the run of show, source states, transcript cues, and device health; recommends actions in shadow mode; logs every decision; moves through human-confirmed switching; and only earns narrow autopilot after repeated evaluation. Its intelligence is not one giant model, but a resilient local control loop built from constrained commands, structured observations, production rules, and the discipline to hold when the evidence is bad.

The Show Has a Spine

media-and-productionapplied-aiProject: autonomous-producerlive-productionconference-techlocal-firstagentic-systemshuman-in-the-loopstart-here 9 min read

The Show Has a Spine

Part two follows the project from portable livestream workflow into live system architecture, opening with a makeshift hotel-room lab in Killarney where OBS, ATEM control, testing sources, and early automation experiments began turning into something more coherent. The central idea is that an autonomous producer should not be one giant AI model “watching” a show, but a local orchestration system that understands the show through a run of show, device state, sampled video, rolling transcripts, source-state signals, and a director policy. This part argues that scientific livestreams are not just sequences of cuts, but sequences of expectations, cues, timing, identities, and drift, and that the real technical challenge is giving the machine a structured point of view about what is happening before asking it to recommend or execute production decisions.

Notes on the Yellow Pelican

media-and-productionapplied-aiProject: autonomous-producerlive-productionconference-techlocal-firstagentic-systemshuman-in-the-loop 7 min read

Notes on the Yellow Pelican

Part one of this three-part series traces Autonomous Producer back to its practical origin: portable livestream kits built as conferences returned in person while online access remained essential. What began as yellow cases, hand-cut foam, simple signal paths, and laminated diagrams evolved into a more complex workflow involving cameras, OBS, ATEM controls, remote producers, and the latency of operating live shows over a network. The article argues that scientific livestreams often follow a repeatable grammar, and that Autonomous Producer is not a general AI director, but a local system that can observe the show, follow the run of show, execute constrained commands, log decisions, and gradually earn narrow autonomy.

Rebuilding My Portfolio With AI, Static HTML, and Stubborn Taste

web-developmentapplied-aiProject: portfolio-rebuildweb-designai-workflowscraftlocal-first 10 min read

Rebuilding My Portfolio With AI, Static HTML, and Stubborn Taste

The original version of my portfolio was built in 2021 from downloaded themes, hand-edited HTML, layered CSS overrides, and an unreasonable number of animated GIFs. The visual identity still felt right, but the underlying structure had become difficult to maintain and extend. This rebuild became an experiment in preservation through reconstruction: using AI-assisted workflows, static publishing, structured content, local admin tooling, and a lot of small human judgments to modernize the system underneath the site without sanding off the parts that still felt personal.