mager.co

Always learning. Always eating. Chicago.

日本

The Japan trip

Three weeks in Japan, and a top-ten list in the works. Two of the nights that already made it:

May 2026
コツ

Kotsu, a site I built to learn Japanese.

Open kotsu.org → Read how I built it →

My First Japanese Baseball Game: Hanshin Tigers in Osaka

Sumo: My First Grand Tournament in Tokyo
Technology All posts →
  1. 01

    What Happened in AI in May 2026

    A month that turned the "agentic turn" from talking point to shipping product. Google I/O, Opus 4.8, a $65B raise, and the infrastructure race to run your agents 24/7.
  2. 02

    Build your own AI harness: plexus, gbrain, and retiring OpenClaw
  3. 03

    SkillOpt: gradient descent for your SKILL.md
  4. 04

    OpenHuman — an open-source agent harness that learns who you are
  5. 05

    What Karpathy's CLAUDE.md taught me about my own setup
  6. 06

    Killing OpenClaw for a native Claude Code setup
  7. 07

    gbrain: Migrating My AI Brain From Flat Files to Semantic Memory
  8. 08

    Claude: Anthropic just shipped most of OpenClaw
  9. 09

    The Compounding Agent: Why Hermes Is More Than Just a Pretty TUI
  10. 10

    Claude: How prompt caching actually works
Dining Archive →
🍽 Japanese Butter Soy Spaghetti

Japanese Butter Soy Spaghetti
🍽 Italian Sausage Dry-Rub

Italian Sausage Dry-Rub

Garlic Cilantro Lime Rice

Corned Beef: The Dutch Oven St. Patrick's Day Braise
Life Stories →

I skipped Duolingo and built a Japanese tutor with Claude Code

I'm going to Japan in 2 months. Instead of paying for another app, I built a Japanese learning plugin for Claude Code and used it to learn conversational Japanese for free — using Claude Pro I already pay for.

My visit to Valledolmo, Sicily

I had the incredible opportunity to explore a town in Sicily where my ancestors once resided and engage with the local officials.