Dear @proton.me, I‘m really excited about the new SMTP feature you recently released! I‘m using it for alerting when I get traffic spikes or low disk space warnings on my private servers.

After visiting Denmark twice this year I wanted to visualize how different their land use is compared to The Netherlands. Turns out it's pretty similar, but less urban area and more forests.

onsland.koenvangilst.nl?country=denm...

Just added Medusa by Caravaggio. Once again GPT-5 seems to offer the most creative interpretations. Maybe they've been doing some finetuning on SVG generation?

Pelican Art Gallery is a new side-project of mine where you can see how LLMs generate SVGs of famous artworks.

It's inspired by @simonwillison.net's practice to benchmark LLMs by asking them to generate an SVG of a pelican on a bicycle, hence the title.

pelican.koenvangilst.nl

Just released an update to my UN speeches side project.

Added speech similarity analysis using embeddings. The heatmap highlights countries with semantically similar speeches (darker = more similar). Click a country to see details.

un.koenvangilst.nl/analysis

Like many others, I've been building side projects with Claude + Copilot agent - it's so fast & almost too easy. Today I tried a no-code AI tool. Endless clicking, docs, configs. Slower in every way.

That made me wonder: if coding agents are this good, does low-code still have a future?

I just got back from a lovely week at Normandy's coast. The cliffs there are stunning and capture light in remarkable ways. I'm trying to get back into photography after a long pause and have created a dedicated space for my photos on my website.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

koenvangilst.nl/photography

To test out Google's new Gemini 2.5 Pro model I asked it to build my Shepherd's Dog game. Not bad, but Claude 3.7 still offers the best one-shot result.

Play it here: vnglst.github.io/when-ai-fail...

See the rest: github.com/vnglst/when-...

Choose Life.

choose-life.koenvangilst.nl

Inspired by Trainspotting and @ginatrapani.org's Truisms.

Shepherd's Dog is a game I've wanted to create for a long time, but I never got the sheep flocking behaviour right. The goal of the game is to herd all the sheep into the pen before nightfall.

Now, I've asked several models to create this game and I'm impressed with what Claude 3.7 come up with.

I recently read Ian Kershaw’s biography of Hitler. This passage, where he bullies the Czechoslovak president into a “peace deal,” stood out. After what happened in the Oval Office today, it feels disturbingly relevant. But I’m also glad Zelensky is nothing like Hácha.

Can LLMs play the card game Set?

While the traditional models struggled, the reasoning models performed surprisingly well.

github.com/vnglst/when-...

New update for the UN speeches project: I made the interaction clearer by adding hover effects and borders.

The project tries to simplify the UN speech content as much as possible to see who's talking about whom in either an optimistic or pessimistic way.

un-speeches.koenvangilst.nl

Something I've been working on using GenAI: A visualization of how world leaders talk about each other during UN speeches. Select a country on the globe to explore diplomatic relationships and see who's saying what about whom.

un-speeches.koenvangilst.nl

“Time flies”

New visualization made with JavaScript.

See it here: time-flies.koenvangilst.nl
Source code: github.com/vnglst/time-...

This coding session was dedicated to recreating Jeffery Ventrella's "Particle Life". As you can imagine, I had a lot of fun with it. So strange that I've never encountered this algorithm before!

Demo: particle-life.koenvangilst.nl

Source code: github.com/vnglst/parti...

I’m so disappointed in Apple. I’ve always been someone who tried to keep the promise of Progressive Web Apps alive. To kill them off with the stroke of a pen and then blaming it on the EU… it’s such a low move

techcrunch.com/2024/02/15/a...

Purple rain

purple-rain.koenvangilst.nl

I’m new to Bluesky and don’t know anyone here yet. Posting my most successful thing from Twitter to change that!

I created this two weeks ago as a weekend project. It’s called Pong Wars and it’s about the eternal battle between day and night.

pong-wars.koenvangilst.nl