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Lynn Cherny

@arnicas

Into creative ML/AI, NLP, data science and digital humanities, narrative, infovis, games, sf & f. Consultant, ds in Residence at Google Arts & Culture. (Lyon, FR) Newsletter arnicas.substack.com.

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Latest posts by Lynn Cherny @arnicas

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Han Jiao (ex jina Ai ceo) built mlx apple silicon clustering libs for umap, tsne etc github.com/hanxiao/mlx-...

06.03.2026 07:56 πŸ‘ 6 πŸ” 3 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

congratulations! πŸŽ‰

05.03.2026 20:51 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
Screenshot of plot showing ELO vs paramter count for different OCR models

Screenshot of plot showing ELO vs paramter count for different OCR models

There is no best VLM OCR model - rankings can flip completely by document type.

I built ocr-bench: run open OCR models on YOUR documents, get a per-collection leaderboard.

VLM-as-judge with Bradley-Terry ELO, all running on @hf.co. No local GPU needed.

05.03.2026 14:48 πŸ‘ 46 πŸ” 10 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 1
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Dan Simmons, author of Hyperion and The Terror, dies aged 77 Award-winning science fiction and horror writer died in Colorado on 21 February with family at his side

Sadness. www.theguardian.com/books/2026/m...

02.03.2026 08:40 πŸ‘ 8 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
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#761: Not every brother is a bro Plus: Oppressive praise, baby names and the American exodus

did you see you made a quality newsletter (mine in mid month, i missed it yesterday :( β€” linksiwouldgchatyou.substack.com/p/761-not-ev...

02.03.2026 07:23 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

cannot figure out if this is a rec

01.03.2026 20:29 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0
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TITAA #76: The Seen and the Unseen SVG Generation - Gemini 3.1 Pro - Beyond Slop - Art Maps - Agentic Patterns - Read in VR

Latest newsletter - SVG is getting good out there, some good stuff in Gemini 3.1 Pro, my project to read in VR, a bunch of rando fun links, a handful of intriguing narrative gen finds. open.substack.com/pub/arnicas/...

01.03.2026 17:56 πŸ‘ 4 πŸ” 2 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
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When D3 was released in February 2011, it transformed how we build data visualizations for the web and ushered in a new age of unbridled creativity in information design, data journalism, and beyond. Today, it remains the backbone of modern, interactive data viz.

Happy 15th birthday, D3 πŸŽ‚
d3js.org

27.02.2026 20:38 πŸ‘ 162 πŸ” 38 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 7

In interesting timing/times, a former student just got hired to help Anthropic roll out more in Europe. She reached out on LI. I want Claude merch, that's the main first step here.

25.02.2026 16:01 πŸ‘ 6 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

ah, hmm. that’s an alarming article.

25.02.2026 15:52 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
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The Bullshit Benchmark Explorer - models calling out ridiculous requests. Go Claudes! petergpt.github.io/bullshit-ben...

25.02.2026 07:43 πŸ‘ 32 πŸ” 7 πŸ’¬ 3 πŸ“Œ 3

can geopandas cope?

24.02.2026 21:06 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0
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A Search for the Heart: Digital collections, machine learning and legacies of care Machine learning models are hungry for content from libraries and cultural insitutions. How can we imagine ways these technologies might help people and communities, while also being mindful of risks ...

I'm so proud of this project I did two years ago with Jonathan Ashley.

It's an essay and web comic about how historical archives deserve to be treated as more than just fuel for AI training.

I wrote a scripting system for the web comic, and also spent nearly a full year with writing and research.

24.02.2026 19:54 πŸ‘ 33 πŸ” 14 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

i might have to mute you πŸ€ͺ

24.02.2026 20:53 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
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We visualize the Olympic medal count as Norwegian-style scarf. :) πŸ“Š
Check out how Germany looks like and generate your own scarf – including download of the knitting pattern.

23.02.2026 11:29 πŸ‘ 95 πŸ” 27 πŸ’¬ 9 πŸ“Œ 7
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Haha, my effort to run a Hermitclaw dude and seed with projects was a failure - he thinks he's on a rug in the middle, but it seems he's stuck in a bathroom, and he was too busy reviewing his checklists and re-reading his system prompt to work with me! It's still cute (and fixable i think)

21.02.2026 15:00 πŸ‘ 7 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0
Fairytale Hunt

a chaser could be www.ghostweather.com/apps/fairyta...

21.02.2026 06:38 πŸ‘ 2 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0
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Friday! Lunchtime! All the good stuff from the past week of internet that you might have missed because you were too busy laughing at the Royal arrest! Every click makes a prosecution more likely*! Web Curios! Share! Enjoy! webcurios.co.uk/webcurios-20...

*may not in fact be legally accurate

20.02.2026 12:36 πŸ‘ 6 πŸ” 6 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

i have news for you soon about this topic i hope

20.02.2026 10:59 πŸ‘ 2 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
Image Prompt Inspiration

Does your Friday need a burst of inspiration? Try @arnicas.bsky.social's 'Image Prompt Inspiration: 3 random nouns and CC images from Flickr (British Library scans as default)' (yay for open access images!)

ghostweather.com/apps/flickr-...

20.02.2026 10:58 πŸ‘ 12 πŸ” 6 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 1
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Automatically Learning Skills for Coding Agents Introducing gskill, a fully automated pipeline that uses GEPA and SWE-smith to learn repository-specific skills for coding agents.

Great new API for the GEPA prompt optimizer: optimize-anything.

One of the immediate use cases for optimize-everything is this demo that autogenerates Skills, given a repo: gepa-ai.github.io/gepa/blog/20...

19.02.2026 20:11 πŸ‘ 7 πŸ” 1 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

they need to learn about it

19.02.2026 10:49 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

yeah i was just overhearing something like this - it’s a different variety of β€œbullshit jobs”

19.02.2026 09:26 πŸ‘ 3 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

There's a gigantic gulf between the non-tech people who don't know something could be quickly automated and those of us who do... the hours and hours of time wasted by people doing stuff by hand in spreadsheets, the last corp rubicon?

19.02.2026 08:53 πŸ‘ 21 πŸ” 3 πŸ’¬ 5 πŸ“Œ 0
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Opinion | The A.I. Disruption Is Actually Here, and It’s Not Terrible

NYT OpEd asked me to explain vibe coding to a general audience, and I took a swing. www.nytimes.com/2026/02/18/o...

18.02.2026 12:17 πŸ‘ 261 πŸ” 52 πŸ’¬ 34 πŸ“Œ 37

lol satisfied reader: β€œI fucking love your newsletter one of the 2 I actually look forward to reading these days”

18.02.2026 08:54 πŸ‘ 7 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

it’s not like my nl is news! hah.

18.02.2026 08:53 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

lol!

18.02.2026 05:24 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

Penny the agent with an opinion on the hermitclaw agent lib, nice.

17.02.2026 20:24 πŸ‘ 3 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

love anthropic: β€œOur safety researchers concluded that Sonnet 4.6 has β€œa broadly warm, honest, prosocial, and at times funny character, very strong safety behaviors, and no signs of major concerns around high-stakes forms of misalignment.”

17.02.2026 20:22 πŸ‘ 17 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0