Return from Guatemala & generative art

Notes for the week of January 19, 2026

Woke up Monday in Antigua, Guatemala. We hiked to Cerro de la Cruz and took in the view, then went back to the hotel and spent a few hours by the pool.
- Can’t say Antigua is much to look at. Things look more falling apart than charmingly ancient. At street level things look run down, but then you enter a building and there is a beautiful courtyard. Everything nice is behind castle walls, and where you’re behind those walls you might as well be anywhere else in the world.
- The weather is amazing. Reminds me of San Diego. A constant 70º and never gets cloudy.
- The point of the trip, tho, was to reunite Penny with her friend Moe and spend time with Moe’s family. That was very nice.
Flew back with Penny on Tuesday while KO stayed one more night at her conference. Got home after midnight but successfully got Penny to school the next day at 7:45.

Spent a lot of time learning how to run local LLMs, as well as CLI interfaces for LLMs.
Been thinking a lot about creating generative art. While I’m using LLMs to help me code, I’m not generating art with AI. I’m using AI to help me build tools to generate algorithmic art.
- One of the first things I’ve made is an asemic writing generator. I can set many different parameters to describe the look of the ‘writing’ and then generate pseudo-random instances.

Enjoyed watching the Arsenal 2 - 3 Man U upset. Beautiful goals from Dorgu and Cunha. They seem to be off the leash and happy while the Gunners are increasingly in their own heads.