Copasetic Flow

I started my lab book entries when I was a physics graduate student. It's kind of amusing and kind of cool how far I've come. I have the equivalent of a grad student, (aka Claude Opus 4.7), working for me now. I spent some time over the weekend setting up an OCR framework for a book research project of mine. I've been coming up to speed on evals, so I decided to run one to determine which model was the most accurate and cost effective for doing OCR on travel manifest pages. I stepped the eval along rather than automating it and talked the results through with Opus as I went.  First, it turns out that Opus at low effort is the most accurate and the most cost effective choice! That was a surprise. The result has to do with Opus' ability to look at higher res images which means it needs to think less for OCR vs. Sonnet. Second, at the end of the eval, as I was preparing to write up my results it occurred to me that I could ask my grad student to do it instead. Here's...

 I took time to play with a new Dolt enabled app example called Quorum last night. Quorum sets 13 LLM agents with different defined personas  loose on a users question. The agents come up with solutions to the question and then discuss their individual solutions with each other to arrive at a consensus. There's much more detail in this blog post that accompanies the app. Quorum is cool. It is not, however, what I wanted to talk aobut here. Instead, I'm going to focus on the blog post for the app. In short, I'm very excited to see ideas that I've used to manage verification processes for years get codified into tools for LLM agents. Here's one of the important parts " I can shut down the app, lose the server, or disappear entirely — and the deliberation history remains, publicly accessible and cryptographically verified. " Imagine what an engineer can do to work back through their debug hypothesis tree with that sort of infrastructure! As the article'...

 I'm working through McConnell's tensor textbook, the one I used in general relativity class at New Mexico State. I'm probably not going to be looking at spacetime a whole lot this time as I'm more interested in machine learning model implementations this time. The first video in the series is shown below. Each video has a link to the next part in the series. You can find the textbook on the Internet Archives.

 You can now play the CW Simon game on your desktop with your own iambic paddles and a Halikey Serial . (We hope to have support for Halikey Midi soon.) I was a little worried that the serial version of the Halikey was going away , but I'm super-psyched to see that it's back! I'm still pretty psyched about phone keying, so expect to see more features there, and maybe some hardware as we move forward, but there are a lot of hams with iambic keys, and so, voila! The video walks through the basic process of using a Halikey with the game. If there  are any questions, suggestions, or issues, please let us know in the comments below. References More on the CW Simon game

 This... is interesting. The oldest kid here is taking Calc III, The Calculus of Multiple Variables. There's a whole thing every week where she winds up spending a lot of time transcribing her homework into a more readable form so that she can turn in her work on the assignment's due date. I wondered if an LLM could help with that. I tried out ChatGPT 5.3 with this picture to start. Believe it or not, this contians two homework problem, (and, accidentally, my foot.) I asked  "Please write these two math solutions as laTeX and write them to a pdf file." I wasn't too surprised when it replied with  --------- "I only have one photo so far, and parts of it are too hard to read reliably to typeset without guessing. From the visible top portion, I can make out a problem that looks like T ( x , y ) = 60 1 + x 2 + y 2 T(x,y)=\frac{60}{1+x^2+y^2} T ( x , y ) = 1 + x 2 + y 2 60 ​ with partial derivatives like ∂ T ∂ x = − 120 x ( 1 + x 2 + y 2 ) 2 , ∂ T ∂ y = − 120...

 On Tuesday, I mentioned that I'd be adding Halikey as an iambic keyer to the CWSimon game. Iambic keying enabled by Halikey is something I've been meaning to do for a while, but each time I start, I realize I'm going to need to start with serial port signal inspections, and set the project back aside. This is the exact sort of thing vibe coding is good for, pushing through the parts of projects you don't want to bother with. So, this morning, I put ChatGPT 5.3. A few minutes and a design coversation later, ChatGPT cranked out the web page for me that you'll see in the video below. Here's the app itself if you'd like to experiment with your serial Halikey. Halikey Serial Signal Test Bench Connect to a Halikey and watch for serial control-signal changes. Each change will be logged below with the signal name and new state. Connect Halikey Disconnect Clear Log Status: Disconnected