LLMs are genuinely remarkable. Working with them to build akshara.ink, I keep getting surprised by their capabilities. The utility they offer for solving unique personal problems and building passion projects is extraordinary. Things that would have taken me weeks or remained impossible are now achievable in hours. It’s not just about coding assistance — it’s having a collaborator who can help bridge the gap between ambition and ability.

Increasingly, I can’t shake the feeling that there is widespread apathy toward our culture and our historical artifacts — books, letters, art, music, cinema, and so on. And the more I speak to people who actually work on these things, the more ashamed I feel that I just free-ride on all the hard work others do to preserve historical and cultural material in the public domain. Paper Lanterns is simply my small effort to do something. In the grand scheme of things, it’s more or less irrelevant; what I’m doing isn’t a big deal. But I’d rather do even a little than be useless and feel like shit.

I’ve been playing around with Gemini to extract text from old historical books in the public domain, and it’s crazy that it can now extract clean, neatly formatted text with citations in a single shot. It’s making me think about starting a simple project to digitize historic Indian books — something modest, similar in spirit to Standard Books or Gutenberg, though obviously not on that scale. I don’t have the resources. I’m just using a $20 Gemini subscription, but maybe I can start sharing these texts and see if I can find help, see if others want to get involved.

Another thing I’ve been thinking about is curation. FromTheDumpsterFire.com is my attempt at that. It’s live, but I haven’t shared it on social media yet — I will soon.