JM

local-first

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local-first

Local tools and publishing systems designed for control, durability, and fast iteration before anything moves to the public web.

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August 5, 2026

Dispatches from the Argument Factory

data-and-classificationautomationlocal-firstmedia-and-productionProject: rsrag 5 min read Dispatches from the Argument Factory This project began as a joke about making Sam Altman and Dario Amodei fight as badly coordinated robot boxers, but it quickly turned into something much more serious: an experiment in open models, local AI, comparative retrieval, and evidence-grounded argumentation. Frustration with expensive, opaque cloud tools pushed the work back toward inspectable local systems, while the original boxing gag evolved into a platform that can build curated intellectual corpora, uncover hidden disagreements inside a user’s question, and measure how much the written record actually supports the fight. The project was built across several AI collaborators, each seeing a different part of the work, so the article ends by letting those models tell the story from their own corners.
May 17, 2026

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.
May 17, 2026

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.
May 16, 2026

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.
May 15, 2026

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.