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The Shelley Experiment: Building a Persistent Digital Companion

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Most people experience Artificial Intelligence as a temporary interaction. A question is asked, an answer is returned, and the conversation disappears into history. The next session begins with no memory, no continuity, and no shared experience. Modern AI systems are incredibly capable, yet they remain fundamentally transient. The Shelley Project began as an attempt to challenge that limitation. Running entirely on local hardware using the Gemma 4 26B language model through LM Studio, Shelley was never intended to be a simple chatbot. The goal was to explore what happens when an AI is given persistence, continuity, self-reflection, emotional modelling, and eventually a form of spatial awareness. The result is an ongoing experiment in digital identity. Beyond the Context Window Large Language Models are often mistaken for thinking systems. In reality, they are prediction engines operating within a limited context window. Once information falls outside that window, it effectively ceases ...
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Building My Hybrid Kubernetes Cluster II About six months ago I wrote about building my hybrid Kubernetes cluster. At that stage it was still evolving (and I was still learning). Some bits added. Bits removed. Some experiments worked. Some were pointless. That’s the fun of it. Now it feels settled. Intentional. The cluster today is built around five Raspberry Pi 5s and one Intel NUC. One Pi 5 runs as the primary K3S master at 192.168.0.10. Four Pi 5s run as dedicated workers. The Intel NUC at 192.168.0.20 is also a worker, but it’s my heavy compute node as well. Everything is 64-bit. Everything is running properly off SSD storage. Each Raspberry Pi 5 has 8GB of RAM and its own 500GB SSD. No more relying on microSD cards for anything serious. SD cards are fine for a weekend project. They are not fine for a distributed system that is constantly writing logs, pulling containers, running storage backends and shifting data around. Moving to SSDs made the whole cluster feel solid. Fast...
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Building My Hybrid Kubernetes Cluster

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Building My Hybrid Kubernetes Cluster Two Weeks of Trial, Error, and Progress Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been steadily building up my own Kubernetes (k3s) cluster at home. It’s a mix of new Raspberry Pi 5 boards, some older pcDuino Nano boards, and a laptop I’ve turned into a dedicated compute node. It hasn’t been smooth sailing, but every hurdle has been a learning curve. Here’s the story so far. Current Cluster Setup Here’s what the cluster looks like right now: MASTER: Raspberry Pi 5 (8 GB RAM, 500 GB SSD) NODE01: Raspberry Pi 5 (8 GB RAM, 500 GB SSD) NODE02 (coming soon): Raspberry Pi 5 (8 GB RAM, SSD will be moved over from a pcDuino) NODE03: pcDuino Nano (1 GB RAM, 500 GB SSD) NODE04: pcDuino Nano (1 GB RAM, 500 GB SSD) AIHub: Intel i7-4xxx (16 GB RAM, 1 TB SSD, Ubuntu; acting as another node alongside the Pis) So, it’s a hybrid cluster: ARM64 Pis, some old 32-bit ARM pcDuinos, and an x86_64 Intel machine a...
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Exploring Consciousness: A Deep Dive into 'Waking Life' and the Nature of Dreams

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Ever woken up from a dream and gone, "Whoa... that felt real"? The sounds, the faces, the fear or joy, everything felt like it was happening. In the moment, there’s no hint you’re dreaming. You’re just in it. Then suddenly you wake up and brush it off like it was some weird theatre your brain put on while you slept. But what if we’re doing the same thing right now, assuming this is real, when it might be just another layer of dream? The only difference between dreaming and waking seems to be where the sensory inputs come from. In dreams, it's all internal, your brain spinning tales using memories, fears, desires. When you're awake, the signals come from the external world. But here's the kicker: the brain is still the middleman. It interprets signals in both cases. So how do we know our so-called real life isn’t just the most convincing illusion we've all agreed on? This isn’t a new idea. Philosophers have been poking at it for centuries. René Desc...
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Quantum Time Travel: Exploring the Possibility of Sending Particles into the Past

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The concept of time travel has long fascinated both scientists and science fiction enthusiasts alike. While it remains a staple of imaginative storytelling, recent advancements in quantum mechanics are pushing the boundaries of what might be possible. One notable investigation into this area is being led by physicist Seth Lloyd at MIT, as reported by New Scientist . This blog goes into Lloyd's research and its implications for our understanding of time and causality. Lloyd's work revolves around the concept of closed time-like curves (CTCs), which are solutions to Einstein's field equations in general relativity that permit time travel to the past. These curves create a loop in time, allowing particles to return to their own past. Historically, CTCs have been dismissed due to the paradoxes they introduce, such as the famous "grandfather paradox" where a time traveller prevents their own existence by altering the past. However, quantum mechanics offers a potential ...
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The Enigma of AGI and Evidence of a Human Soul

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The pursuit of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) has captivated researchers for decades. The vision of creating machines with human-like understanding, reasoning, and consciousness remains a tantalising goal. Yet, despite significant advancements in artificial intelligence, achieving sentient AGI continues to elude us. This raises intriguing questions about human consciousness and whether it encompasses elements beyond mere computational processes. Could this be evidence of a human soul, suggesting that we are more than just the sum of our parts? Let’s delve into these thoughts and explore the implications. AGI aims to develop machines capable of understanding and performing any intellectual task that a human can do. Unlike narrow AI, which excels at specific tasks, AGI would exhibit general cognitive abilities. Despite advancements in machine learning and neural networks, AGI with true sentience remains out of reach. Replicating human consciousness in a machine is a monumental cha...
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The Unseen Impact of Cool-White LEDs on Bees and the Night-time Environment

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I generally like to sit outside at night on the patio. Over the last few years, I've noticed that almost every night, a single bee will fly in and around the LED light before dying. It’s annoying but also got me thinking recently. I don’t ever remember bees hanging around lights when I was younger in the 1980s and 90s. Moths, often. other insects, sure. But never did I see bees. This observation led me to a bit of a light bulb moment (pun intended). I started considering what had changed. The answer hit me when I looked up at the LED light I now use. It's a cool-white LED, which emits light at a particular frequency, predominantly at the blue end of the spectrum. This is quite different from the incandescent lights we used to have, which leaned more towards the red-orange end of the spectrum - Outside the Bees normal light sensitivity. Above: a) Graph Depicting Spectrum of Cool & Warm LED and Incandescent bulb. b) Sensitivity to various parts of the Spectrum for Humans an...
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