Practical tests of AI tools, coding agents, language models, and creative automation. Articles focus on real workflows, measurable results, costs, limitations, and what actually works in production or hobby projects.
The AI music generation space has been dominated by cloud-based services — Suno, Udio, Mureka — each requiring a subscription and offering limited control over the underlying models. ACE-Step 1.5, released in 2026 by ACE Studio and StepFun, shifts this …
ACE-Step 1.5: Open-Source Music AI That Runs Locally and Matches Suno v5 in Benchmarks Read more »
NeuralWatt is a small startup that sells access to AI models — Qwen, Kimi, GLM, MiniMax, Mistral — but bills in kilowatt-hours instead of tokens. A basic subscription costs $20/month for 6 kWh of compute energy, with a flat rate …
NeuralWatt: AI Inference Priced in Kilowatt-Hours — How It Works and What It Costs Read more »
On June 1, 2026, GitHub Copilot Pro switched to token-based billing. The subscription price stayed the same — $10/month. What changed is what that $10 buys. Under the old model: a fixed pool of premium requests, predictable, no surprises. Under …
GitHub Copilot and OpenCode Go Both Cost $10/Month — The Difference Is What You Get Read more »
What Makes Real-Time Operating Systems Different Real-time operating systems (RTOS) power the invisible infrastructure of modern life — from airbag controllers that deploy in 3 milliseconds to cardiac pacemakers that must fire within 1-millisecond windows. Unlike Windows or Linux, which …
RTOS Explained: Why Predictability Matters More Than Speed in Critical Systems Read more »
Microsoft has released Coreutils for Windows, a preview package that brings familiar Unix-style command-line tools to native Windows. After installation, commands such as cat, grep, find, xargs, ls, cp, mv, and rm are available directly from Windows shells. The package …
Microsoft Coreutils for Windows: Unix commands without WSL Read more »
Ubuntu Workshop: The Right Sandbox for Running AI Agents Canonical released Workshop in May 2026 — a tool for launching isolated development environments using LXD system containers with a single command. Its timing reflects a real problem: coding agents, local …
Ubuntu Workshop: The Right Sandbox for Running AI Agents Read more »
Esoteric LLM is a useful experiment wrapped in an unusual domain: a 9-billion-parameter language model fine-tuned on 22 books about tarot, kabbalah, hermeticism, alchemy, the I Ching, astrology, and gnosticism. The full training run took about 11 hours, and the …
Esoteric LLM: Fine-Tuning a 9B Model on Tarot, Kabbalah, and Alchemy for $2 Read more »
markdown.new turns any public URL into clean Markdown by prepending one prefix: https://markdown.new/https://ravlik.com/2026/05/01/how-to-create-a-personalized-song-in-2-minutes-2. For AI coding agents, that is often more useful than a scraper, a browser automation script, or another dependency. This article explains where the trick saves context, …
The Laziest Web Reading Trick for AI Coding Agents Read more »
Alibaba’s latest flagship model Qwen 3.7 Max, released on May 21, 2026, is positioned as a purpose-built AI for the agentic era. The model supports both standard and reasoning (thinking) modes, and ranks in the top 15 across coding, math, …
Qwen 3.7 Max Costs 51% More Outside China: Alibaba’s Geographic Pricing Strategy Read more »
A new class of open-source projects is emerging in 2026: developers feed AI coding agents old game binaries, custom scripts, and decades-old documentation — and get back fully working applications. Legends of Future Past (1992), Disney Infinity (2013), FutureCop: LAPD …