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Series

Longer arguments, split across posts and sometimes across sections. Each series has an order, a status, and a single page that holds it together.

10 series · 1 in progress

Spanning Technology, Business, Faith, Writing, Security

In progress · Technology

PHP-Native AI Tooling

Local AI for PHP developers, built from the ground up: what embeddings are, semantic search and RAG over your own data, and three native extensions (ext-infer, ext-turbovec, ext-whisper) that run models inside the PHP process. No Python, no remote API.

10 of 12 published

Start at part 1 Follow this series

  1. 01 Meaning as Geometry: What Embeddings Actually Are Sept 8
  2. 02 From Keywords to Concepts: Semantic Search in Laravel with pgvector Sept 10
  3. 03 Seeing in 1,024 Dimensions: How UMAP Makes Embeddings Visible Sept 15
  4. 04 The Case for Local AI: Keep Your Data and Your Models Close Sept 17
  5. 05 ext-infer: Local LLM Inference, Natively in PHP Sept 22
  6. 06 ext-turbovec: A Vector Index Inside Your PHP Process Sept 23
  7. 07 ext-whisper: PHP-Native Audio Transcription Sept 24
  8. 08 ai-contracts & ai-toolkit: The Primitives a PHP AI Ecosystem Needs Sept 25
  9. 09 RAG Over Markdown: An End-to-End Local Pipeline in Pure PHP Sept 29
  10. 10 From Voice to Vectors: Building a Searchable Audio Archive in PHP Oct 1
  11. 11 DailyMedToday: A Production Case Study in Semantic Search Nov 9
  12. 12 What the Embeddings Reveal: A Map of Meaning Nov 12

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PHP-Native AI Tooling Local AI for PHP developers, built from the ground up: what embeddings are, semantic search and RAG over your own data, and three native extensions (ext-infer, ext-turbovec, ext-whisper) that run models inside the PHP process. No Python, no remote API. Technology 10 of 12 In progress The Great Migration In 2024 I moved my blog, a secrets service and a Mastodon server out of the cloud and onto a Linux box in my home office. How I configured the server, moved each service and kept it all off the open internet. Technology 4 parts Complete Cryptopals Working through the Cryptopals crypto challenges in PHP, one per post: encodings, XOR, frequency analysis and breaking real ciphers, with value objects and tests along the way. Technology · Security 9 parts Complete Basic cryptography Three short lessons in how encryption works, from the Caesar and Vigenère ciphers to the Diffie-Hellman key exchange that lets two strangers agree on a secret over an open line. Technology · Security 3 parts Complete Cracking the Uncrackable A client once paid me in Bitcoin and I lost the wallet. So I bought a stranger's forgotten, password-locked one instead. Five posts on how wallet recovery works, from password guessing to Hashcat. Technology 5 parts Complete RingCentral Game Changers A 2019 walkthrough of RingCentral's Virtual Voicemail Assistant tutorials in Python: classify messages with MonkeyLearn, transcribe them with Rev.ai, and text a manager when one arrives. Technology 4 parts Complete Customer-Centric Development Eleven daily lessons from 2014 on building for the people who actually use the product: telling its story, knowing the end customer, pricing honestly and supporting what you ship. Business 11 parts Complete Boundless Summer Challenge Twenty-odd daily tasks from the Boundless Summer Challenge, which I took on in 2010 and again in 2011: prayer, friendship, forgiveness and family, written up as I went. Faith 23 parts Complete Advent of Evil Richard Drake has always caught the edges of other people's thoughts. Then something in the dark starts reaching back. When his wife Mary is murdered, a detective friend who believes him and an occultist who'd rather not get involved help him chase her killers, while a thing he can only call IT grows stronger in his own head. Written in a month for NaNoWriMo and published here in ten weekly parts from November 2009 to January 2010, about 51,000 words in all. Writing 10 chapters Complete Bayesian Statistics Why simple averages lie when one product has eighty ratings and another has five. A 2009 introduction to Bayesian thinking, from the Monty Hall problem to fairer product ratings. Technology 5 parts Complete