Count First, Interpret Second
My personal-ops bot’s weekly digest kept turning noisy logs into confident diagnoses. The fix was one rule: count first, interpret second, diagnose cautiously.
Reed, Not Cedar: Building a Productivity System That Bends With You
I built a Telegram bot to offload my executive function and accidentally gave myself a taskmaster. So I rebuilt it around one rule from the Talmud and the Daode Jing: be a reed, not a cedar — firm but yielding, advisory not prescriptive.
Don’t Clip Your Wings: On Building Systems That Push You Toward Greatness
Completion rate is a trap. The moment your productivity system scores you on what percentage of commitments you finish, the rational move is to stop writing down anything you might actually fail at. I ran into this building my own personal ops system, and it turns out fixing it means thinking about Item Response Theory, Glicko ratings, and the Sharpe ratio.
Personal Ops: Capture, Digest, Adapt, Propose
Two years ago my Elul accountability experiment half-worked. The problem was friction, not motivation — and I had no mechanism to adjust expectations based on actual performance. So I built one: voice capture via Telegram, weekly LLM digest, and a daily agenda calibrated to what I’ve actually been completing versus missing.
Modern Standard Arabic, Hebrew, and the Ghost of Yiddish
Hebrew became the mother tongue of millions; Modern Standard Arabic remains a formal register nobody speaks at home. Both underwent deliberate standardization in the same historical window — the difference reveals what language revival actually requires.
The TTS Chronicles: Making Arabic Audio Work in Haki
How Haki’s Arabic audio went from browser text-to-speech to generated MP3s, dialect-specific fallbacks, and a still-imperfect pronunciation system.
How Hard Is Face Detection?
I wanted to see how hard face detection is in 2026. I tested Haar cascades, MediaPipe’s BlazeFace, and YOLO on real images. The short answer: it depends entirely on whether your subject is wearing sunglasses.
Sam Shore's 82 Yahrzeit: A Tale of a Spear and Emigration
A story about Shmariahu (Sam) Shore, his father, and a spear kept for self-defense in the Pale of Settlement.
The Saranduk / Shore Family: An Overview
A findings-focused guide to three years of Saranduk / Shore family research — what we now know, what was newly discovered, and what remains open.
Categorically Wrong
A jog up Tel Yarmut sparks a reflection on the tension between halachic categories and the lived reality of Jewish destiny.