Education

The Return of ASCII Art: Fine-Tuning a Small LLM to Think in Terminal Diagrams

In an era of photorealistic AI-generated images, I trained a language model to draw with box-drawing characters and pipe symbols. This isn’t nostalgia. It’s a bet that the most universal visual medium for AI isn’t pixels – it’s text. Why ASCII Diagrams Still Matter Every developer, every terminal session, every SSH connection, every log file, every README – text is the one output format that works everywhere. No rendering engine, no GPU, no browser required....

Teaching a 0.6B Model to See Physics: Fine-Tuning Qwen3 for p5.js Animations

What happens when you take one of the smallest language models available, feed it a thousand physics animations generated by one of the largest, and ask it to teach K-12 students about science? You get a model that weighs less than a gigabyte, trains in under 3 minutes, and generates interactive physics simulations on demand. The Premise LLMs are getting bigger. GPT-5, Claude Opus, Gemini Ultra – they’re all racing to hundreds of billions of parameters....