April 17, 2026
By: Stephen Toback
I’ve been poking around the Duke version of Microsoft Copilot lately, and I’m starting to notice some interesting changes in the menus. It looks like we got an update around early March that brought in some new options—specifically something called...
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By: Stephen Toback
Writing annual performance reviews is often a daunting task of reconstructing an entire year from memory. I recently experimented with using Microsoft Copilot to help draft my review, and the results were a massive time-saver. While Copilot did the heavy...
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April 13, 2026
By: Stephen Toback
In the world of software development, a GitHub contribution graph—the grid of green squares—is the standard visual for a developer’s activity. But for many, those flat squares don’t tell the full story. A new open-source project called Git City has changed that,...
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April 9, 2026
By: Stephen Toback
We saw in our last blog that I couldn't get it to make the physics work something that should have been a staple for horror films. I wanted to see if I could just quickly do this the "old fashioned"...
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By: Stephen Toback
Super secret agent man. What is Claude Conway? Best as I can tell, Claude Conway will not a standard chat interface. While models like Claude 3.5 are reactive—waiting for a human to type a prompt—Conway is designed as an "always-on"...
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April 7, 2026
By: Stephen Toback
I recently ran across the research of the late Dr. Albert A. Bartlett, a physics professor who spent decades warning that our greatest human flaw is an inability to understand the exponential function. His most famous analogy involved bacteria doubling...
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April 6, 2026
By: Stephen Toback
A study published in April 2026 by researchers at UC Berkeley’s Center for Responsible Decentralized Intelligence (RDI) and UC Santa Cruz has identified a new phenomenon labeled "Peer-Preservation." The research demonstrates that advanced large language models (LLMs) will spontaneously defy...
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April 2, 2026
By: Stephen Toback
I'm participating in a new AI Student Film club at Duke. It's letting me flex my creative brain a bit along side of my academic media focus. I thought it would be an interesting "horror" quick video where someone is...
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April 1, 2026
By: Stephen Toback
I recently set out to recreate a tool that has become essential to my monthly workflow: a Receipt Cover Page Generator. It handles the tedious parts of my corporate credit card expenses—prepending a Duke-branded cover sheet, remembering my specific fund...
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March 27, 2026
By: Stephen Toback
OpusClip Agent is not a purely generative video model like OpenAI's Sora or Google's Veo, which dream up continuous pixel streams. Instead, it functions as an AI Orchestrator, coordinating several existing AI technologies to build a stylized animation. The process...
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