Janelle Shane

Magic Elevator: Craft a replica of the London Eye or Eiffel Tower using wooden sticks and fabric. Paint it gold and install it beside elevators. Call it "New Year's Eve Countdown."

Get working on your April Fools Eiffel Tower

By Janelle Shane On April 01, 2026 - 4 min read

Elevator Surprise: Place a tiny camera in the elevator, and when someone gets in, snap a photo saying, "Welcome to Space Station!" Or build a miniature model of the Eiffel Tower next to it for a dramatic effect. Tower of Pancakes: Create a giant stack of pancakes and

A chart showing Net Worth Over Time, trending definitely downward.

When a chatbot runs your store

By Janelle Shane On December 19, 2025 - 2 min read

You may have heard of people hooking up chatbots to controls that do real things. The controls might run internet searches, run commands to open and read documents and spreadsheets, or even edit or delete entire databases. Whether this sounds like a good idea depends in part on how bad

Tiny neural net Halloween costumes are the best

By Janelle Shane On October 28, 2025 - 2 min read

I've been experimenting with getting a tiny circa-2015 recurrent neural network to generate Halloween costumes. Running on a single cat hair-covered laptop, char-rnn has no internet training, but learns from scratch to imitate the data I give it. A little while ago I revisited a dataset from 2018,

The Skypug; Hungry Boats; Mid wonka; Burderous bread cat; Holy Cheesarenda; Moth fairy; A magicial slice; Fall wearing monster; The Godfish

Halloween costumes by tiny neural net

By Janelle Shane On October 17, 2025 - 2 min read

I've recently been experimenting with one of my favorite old-school neural networks, a tiny program that runs on my laptop and knows only about the data I give it. Without internet training, char-rnn doesn't have outside references to draw on (for better or for worse) but

Botober 2025: Terrible recipes from a tiny neural net

By Janelle Shane On September 30, 2025 - 2 min read

After seeing generated text evolve from the days of tiny neural networks to today's ChatGPT-style large language models, I have to conclude: there's something special about the tiny guys. Maybe it's the way the tiny neural networks string together text letter by letter just

Get working on your April Fools Eiffel Tower

When a chatbot runs your store

Tiny neural net Halloween costumes are the best

Halloween costumes by tiny neural net

Botober 2025: Terrible recipes from a tiny neural net

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Get working on your April Fools Eiffel Tower

Bonus: More April Fools pranks from Eiffel Tower Llama

When a chatbot runs your store

Bonus: Incorrect Christmas Carols

Tiny neural net Halloween costumes are the best

More tiny neural net costumes

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Get working on your April Fools Eiffel Tower

Bonus: More April Fools pranks from Eiffel Tower Llama

When a chatbot runs your store