Jacob Emcken

Stumble upon in October 2025

I reflect on AI from time to time, and though I don’t see how it will replace me in the near future, it is worth keeping an eye on.

Scalable LEGO brick labels in SVG

It just looks amazing when things are neatly organized, so of course, I wanted some crisp-looking labels for my drawers with LEGO.

There’s a cool solution for those in possession of an actual label printer, but since that isn’t me, I needed something a bit more “generic”.

Having flirted with Inkscape in a previous lifetime, I turned to SVG.

De-stressing with Lego

The last couple of years, I’ve been finding stress at work more often than I’d like. Apparently, experiencing problems, having the skill to address it, but not being allowed to, is something that really gets to me.

So much that I don’t even feel like working on side projects, open source and writing posts on my blog.

Enter Lego

A local AI setup using Ollama and Open WebUI

Until recently, my AI usage has been limited to ChatGPT and a bit of Midjourney.
No Copilot, no Claude, no nothing.

The most serious thing I’ve used AI for, was getting ChatGPT to give feedback on paragraphs for new blog posts, and Midjourney to help create featured images for blog posts.

The few times I’ve tried using AI (read ChatGPT) for programming related stuff, I very quickly got frustrated with the lack of quality in the responses. To be fair, I’ve mainly wanted it to create Clojure code, and Clojure’s niche status and very different syntax are likely the main reason. That, and the fact that ChatGPT is the “wrong” tool for the job.

Anyway, I’ve acquired some hardware to build a local AI, including a second-hand Nvidia RTX 3090 with 24Gb vRAM, and I thought I’d document and share my progress so far.

Stumble upon in June 2025

I have started a journey to disentangle myself from Big Tech — at least partly. So far, I’ve avoided boarding the Facebook train altogether (including Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok). And after finishing the book “Careless People” by Sarah Wynn-Williams (recommendable by the way), which describes her experiences from inside Facebook, my JOMO choice feels even better. Apparently, friends and family still invite me to their birthdays using alternative (old-fashioned) means 😅 You know, like phone calls, SMS, and sometimes even face-to-face — weird!