Hello friends, it’s me, the human writer who technically owns this site and theoretically writes material for it. We all know AIs are now doing a lot of the writing in this world, and I have certainly been using AI a lot to do chores like “write me a blog post” and “build me a beaver simulator.” I will even admit that several of my last written posts on this site have been “assisted” by AI tools that probably deserve more credit, but so far I’ve held off on using AI to make generative edits to my photos. And that issue has brought me back to my keyboard, which I am actually typing on with my own human fingers and not letting some AI do the work. My photos are all hand-crafted by me, but does that still make sense in our age of AI wonders? Did it ever make sense? Let’s take a deep dive.

Like a lot of folks, I’ve been using AI to speed up everyday tasks at work and at home, but I’ve been looking for a good excuse to sit down, vibe code, and deploy a full interactive app entirely from scratch.

Recently, I read a fascinating Quanta Magazine article about the Busy Beaver problem—a theoretical computer science puzzle that quickly escalates from simple logic into numbers that literally break the boundaries of modern mathematics. I realized this was the perfect project. I wanted to actually visualize and play this like a game, and AI could help me build the sandbox.

You can try it out right here: Play the Busy Beaver Simulator

It’s a fully functional Turing machine simulator right in your browser. You write the rules, and the little beaver 🦫 runs up and down the tape executing them. Try to leave as many 1s on the board as possible before the program halts, or load up one of the historical champion machines to see how quickly things spiral out of control.

I have a backlog of unpublished photos, including this gem from a prolific trip I took to Europe in 2018. On this same trip, I took a lot of favorites including several from Paris and a panorama of Stockholm. However, a folder of images remained untouched. Finally, I revisited them, and this one stood out. But where was it taken?

In 2019, I took a couple of wonderful sunset photos of Seattle’s West Point Lighthouse while on a business trip. I wrote about one of them in 2020, including details about how and why I ended up in this location. But I’ve long had this second version of the photo in my archives, and I’m happy to share it now.

In the northern reaches of Gloucester, Massachusetts on Cape Ann, where the Annisquam River meets the Atlantic, lies a hidden gem – a secluded stretch of coastline that offers a unique perspective on the setting sun. Unlike most Massachusetts beaches, which face eastward, this western-facing shore provides a rare opportunity to witness the sun’s descent over the land, painting the sky in a vibrant palette of colors.