Category: Geek stuff

If it involves physics, math, computer science, electronics or has general geek cachet, this is the place for it.

Specialized work in precision glass-cracking

I have heard that historians particularly appreciate when people put actual prices as a reference in their diaries, providing that little quantitative insight into the past. In that spirit, I found a July 2026 breakdown of a laser crystal printing business by Bathsheba Grossman, a sculptor and 3D designer who I have always found fascinating and who I am lucky enough to have bought some small pieces from, as well as both given and received others as gifts:

Would you like to be the cube designer? It’s a reliable gig and a fascinating window on the scientific community. It’s complex, high-touch, long-haul, and as it stands not terribly lucrative: a living in most places but not tech money. Getting started could be pretty quick for the right person, getting good takes interest and experience.

This is the 25th year of CrystalProteins, thousands of projects, mainly proteins but also all sorts of other science. It’s mostly just me. I don’t do any marketing, the product speaks for itself and I’ve never wanted to scale past what one person can do. It’s design only, I work in partnership with laser glass manufacturer Precision Crystal. In the last 10 years, average net per year was $57K.

What’s needed? General literacy and love for science. Solid coding, the level where if you need to whip something up in a new language you do it by sense of smell. 3D design. Knowledge or willingness to learn about structural biology and its imaging techniques. A beefy (by household standards) desktop computer. A Rhinoceros license. The tenacity of the cockroach. Desire to belong in the ancient and noble (but not quite artistic) tradition of scientific illustration.

You can pick up the biology, if you’ve got a bit of a knack you can pick up the 3D side. You can’t learn to code for this project. AI does not have reliable knowledge about this very specialized field.

It’s a customer service gig. There’s a lot of emailing with scientists and their administrative colleagues, and one must be courteous, straightforward, respectful of their time and needs. They’re great customers! They truly love the product and are generally happy to work with me, and I’ve never once been stiffed on payment. However when it’s time to write an awkward email or pick up the phone, you’re doing it.

As it stands it’s a part-time job, but not compatible with a 9-to-5 because it’s bursty. Perhaps it could grow. I’ve never felt a limit to demand, only to my willingness to do more. Someone with domain knowledge in molecular biology, or professional programming chops, or (especially) ability to manage a multi-person business, might take this much farther than I have.

I know from friends who are authors and musicians how hard it is to make a living from anything artistic, so it’s intriguing to learn a bit more about this kind of business from an expert who is stepping away from it.

My most notable Bathsheba pieces are the Hemoglobin molecule I gave Amanda; the DNA polymerase cube which Myshka bought me; and the Tetrabox puzzle sculpture I bought in 2018. I also have some jewelery-sized pieces printed in metal.

Far and slow

I took my Dutch bike in for servicing today (to get my brake pads replaced) and calculated some usage statistics.

Indeed, on the ride from home to the bike store, I crossed 7,000 km of total distance on the bike.

One interesting element of that is how it has nearly all been done at a modest pace. 90% of all my travel is at less than 19.3 km/h and 50% was under 12.2 km/h.

It’s a hauler, not a racer, and I am often occupied with tasks more complex than just getting from Point A to Point B.

Talking with Claude

I picked up a Pro subscription to the Claude LLM, chiefly to have more computing power to apply to writing an interactive RPG about a witch in Oxford that I have been working on as a side-project for much of the year.

Their Opus model is impressive at turning a months-long discussion of many hundreds of pages (with updates and contradictions and reversals) into a mostly-coherent and undeniably well-written lore document.

Last night I came across a strangely empowering way to use Claude. In voice mode I can use it on a bike grinding up a hill, and did so last night to start an all-life to-do tracking instance. When I got home, it talked me through organizing and discarding stuff that I had been putting off for months or years. It’s not that the LLM’s output was all that useful or necessary for such tasks — a lot of which amounts to ‘you’re right! keep going!’ — but the feeling of talking it out with somebody makes tedious and unwanted tasks much more tractable. We literally talked through every item in my weird hallway-to-bathroom closet, and will continue with the rest of the mini-bachelor in days ahead.

[Update: 1 June] Claude’s Sonnet on the Pro plan absolutely cannot function for any useful length of time as a personal organizer or task manager. After 2-3 days of interaction, I find it always collapses into saying “Hey, I’ve lost the thread on this — long conversations do this sometimes. Let’s start a fresh conversation.” and it cannot create handoff documents to effectively spin up a new instance. The funniest case was asking it about rabbit ecology and warrens at Tommy Thompson Park. That was too much for this LLM, leading to swift collapse into the “lost the thread” state. Quite possibly it will never be capable of being a decent narrator for my Aslak game.