Pen plotting and filling niches

Notes for the week of February 9, 2026

This week I continued my explorations of generative art and AI-related automation. These are the things obsessing me at the moment.
On the art front I made and released a new album.
- This one uses a different audio engine than the previous ones.
I’ve also begun making generative visual art.
- For a long while I’ve been interested in pen plotting, following various artists and communities online. I’d been hesitant to plop down cash for an expensive plotter, but recently came across a cheap crafting vinyl cutter that could double as a pen plotter—something that was marketed as an afterthought.
- Well, it arrived in the mail and I have been having a blast plotting. Most of the work is in coming up with the visual designs on the computer. There are a number of great tools online that one can use, but now I can also use Claude to help me develop generative tools of my own.
- Again, the artwork is not AI generated. What AI helps build is the software that algorithmically produces the art pseudorandomly within user-specified parameters. The artistic vision is human but the output is machine made and unique. I love it.

I’ve also spent a bunch of time playing with AI and automation. I got myself a VPS with n8n and moved over a lot of the personal assistant functions there.
- I made an automation that will post my photos to Instagram — something that I stopped doing because I hated the manual aspect of it. More interestingly, before a photo is posted, Google Gemini analyzes it and determines the hashtags that describe it.
- I’ve also made a number of automations that simplify my email, school scheduling, and other quotidian matters that required a lot of manual checking and faffing about.
And today, Sunday, I spent a couple of hours with Claude and coded up an app for myself that would previously have taken me months, if I would have done it at all. Basically it is a feed reeder that will learn from my tastes to increase the signal to noise.
- I can subscribe to high volume feeds and then I can give articles thumbs up or down, though it’s only a minority that get the thumbs up.down
- The aha for me came in conversation with Claude when I realized that I didn’t so much care about teaching the system what I found interesting so that it would bubble up those kinds of articles, but that I want it to learn what I absolutely will never find interesting and never want to see (the ragebait, the horserace, the culture war, etc.).
- Each day the system fetches the new articles from my feeds. It then has Ollama 3.2, running locally on my Mac, extract a list of ‘features’ for each article. Features are descriptive keywords for the article, but also source, author, and the like. It saves this along with the article in a database and these are all invisible to me.
- I can then go thru and read all the headlines and descriptions. For most items I can just read the headline to get the gist and move on. For some, I’ll hit thumbs up and that will give it a positive signal that’s recorded in the database and, simultaneously, the full text of the article is added to my Readwise Reader so I can read it later. And when I come across the kind of article I never want to see, I hit thumbs down, which is also noted in the DB.
- With these signals recorded, next time I load articles they will be sorted based on the predicted score based on the features it has compared to the scores for the features of the articles I’ve voted on. If everything goes according to plan, after a couple of days of doing this, all the crap articles will be at the very bottom of the list, which I might not even get to, and all the potentially interesting stuff at the top, but for this to be successful it only has to be right about the bad stuff. After a while, once I understand the thresholds, I could even institute a floor below which I won’t see items.
- If this works I would be able to subscribe to the full feeds of, say, the New York Times or The New Yorker or The Atlantic, without the mental friction that keeps me from doing so now: having to wade through all the garbage to get to the potentially really good stuff that is in there.
What all this stuff I’ve been doing lately is making me realize is that all the niches are going to be filled. The economies of scale of software production were still such that lots of little bespoke or niche software never got made — not even for oneself. But with AI that all goes away. This is going to have knock-on effects for the more-general-purpose producers for whose products one often had to settle. This guys makes the case that the app subscription model is going to die as a result. I can see that.
R.I.P. David Farber.

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