BLOGS
Thoughts, notes & things I've learned
Writing about tech, ideas, and whatever I find worth sharing.
5 posts
Open Source LLMs Aren't Free: The Break-Even Math of Self-Hosting
The reasons to self-host an LLM, the break-even formula step by step, and the hidden costs that move it.
Cropping is all you need in OCR, not prompt tuning
A vision model kept misreading handwritten digits. Three prompt rewrites changed nothing. Cutting out each field and enlarging it took critical fields from 58% to 83%.
How to read an AI's thoughts before it speaks
Anthropic built a tool that translates Claude's internal numbers into readable text. When they tested it on a safety scenario, Claude's own thoughts revealed it knew it was being tested the whole time.
Is NVIDIA NIM's free tier good enough for a real-time voice agent demo?
NVIDIA NIM gives you free hosted STT, LLM, and TTS under one API key. I plugged it into Pipecat and built a real-time voice agent with VAD, smart turn detection, and idle reminders in a weekend. Here's what the numbers actually look like.
How WebRTC Actually Works, All in one post
Before any audio or video flows, WebRTC does a lot of work upfront to find the best candidate pair. This post walks you through exactly how that works, step by step.