https://www.dewofyouryouth.com/A blog by Jacob Shore about genealogy, language learning, faith, and software — tracing family history, studying Arabic, and thinking carefully about things that matter.Hugo -- gohugo.ioenFri, 28 Aug 2026 17:45:00 +0300https://www.dewofyouryouth.com/post/personal-ops-ii/Fri, 28 Aug 2026 17:45:00 +0300Jacob Shorehttps://www.dewofyouryouth.com/post/personal-ops-ii/ A voice note got misread as a literal agenda item called ‘whatever I missed.’ The fix turned into a general system for catching ambiguous commands, logging corrections, and a plan to move routine parsing off the API and onto a local model.]]>https://www.dewofyouryouth.com/post/my-arabic-music-liner-notes/Tue, 16 Jun 2026 13:17:11 +0300Jacob Shorehttps://www.dewofyouryouth.com/post/my-arabic-music-liner-notes/<div class="featured-image"> <img src="/post/my-arabic-music-liner-notes/liner-notes.jpg" referrerpolicy="no-referrer"> </div>Twenty Arabic songs across Tunisian, Algerian, Levantine, and Sudanese dialects — liner notes for training your ear, song by song.https://www.dewofyouryouth.com/post/count-first/Tue, 02 Jun 2026 15:27:13 +0300Jacob Shorehttps://www.dewofyouryouth.com/post/count-first/ My personal-ops bot’s weekly digest kept turning noisy logs into confident diagnoses. The fix was one rule: count first, interpret second, diagnose cautiously.]]>https://www.dewofyouryouth.com/post/reed-not-cedar/Tue, 02 Jun 2026 09:25:35 +0300Jacob Shorehttps://www.dewofyouryouth.com/post/reed-not-cedar/<div class="featured-image"> <img src="/post/reed-not-cedar/reed-in-wind.jpg" referrerpolicy="no-referrer"> </div>I built a Telegram bot to offload my executive function and accidentally gave myself a taskmaster. So I rebuilt it around one rule from the Talmud and the Daode Jing: be a reed, not a cedar — firm but yielding, advisory not prescriptive.https://www.dewofyouryouth.com/post/clipping-your-wings/Sun, 31 May 2026 15:56:24 +0300Jacob Shorehttps://www.dewofyouryouth.com/post/clipping-your-wings/<div class="featured-image"> <img src="/post/clipping-your-wings/bird-in-flight.jpg" referrerpolicy="no-referrer"> </div>Completion rate is a trap. The moment your productivity system scores you on what percentage of commitments you finish, the rational move is to stop writing down anything you might actually fail at. I ran into this building my own personal ops system, and it turns out fixing it means thinking about Item Response Theory, Glicko ratings, and the Sharpe ratio.https://www.dewofyouryouth.com/post/personal-ops/Thu, 28 May 2026 12:36:11 +0300Jacob Shorehttps://www.dewofyouryouth.com/post/personal-ops/ Two years ago my Elul accountability experiment half-worked. The problem was friction, not motivation — and I had no mechanism to adjust expectations based on actual performance. So I built one: voice capture via Telegram, weekly LLM digest, and a daily agenda calibrated to what I’ve actually been completing versus missing.]]>https://www.dewofyouryouth.com/post/modern-standard-arabic-hebrew-and-the-ghost-of-yiddish/Tue, 26 May 2026 07:54:09 +0200Jacob Shorehttps://www.dewofyouryouth.com/post/modern-standard-arabic-hebrew-and-the-ghost-of-yiddish/<div class="featured-image"> <img src="/post/modern-standard-arabic-hebrew-and-the-ghost-of-yiddish/tlv-cafe.jpg" referrerpolicy="no-referrer"> </div>Hebrew became the mother tongue of millions; Modern Standard Arabic remains a formal register nobody speaks at home. Both underwent deliberate standardization in the same historical window — the difference reveals what language revival actually requires.https://www.dewofyouryouth.com/post/tts-chronicles/Wed, 13 May 2026 12:00:00 +0300Jacob Shorehttps://www.dewofyouryouth.com/post/tts-chronicles/ How Haki’s Arabic audio went from browser text-to-speech to generated MP3s, dialect-specific fallbacks, and a still-imperfect pronunciation system.]]>https://www.dewofyouryouth.com/post/how-hard-is-face-detection/Tue, 28 Apr 2026 12:00:00 +0200Jacob Shorehttps://www.dewofyouryouth.com/post/how-hard-is-face-detection/ I wanted to see how hard face detection is in 2026. I tested Haar cascades, MediaPipe’s BlazeFace, and YOLO on real images. The short answer: it depends entirely on whether your subject is wearing sunglasses.]]>https://www.dewofyouryouth.com/post/sam-shores-82-yahrzeit-a-tale-of-a-spear-and-emigration/Thu, 23 Apr 2026 20:11:34 +0300Jacob Shorehttps://www.dewofyouryouth.com/post/sam-shores-82-yahrzeit-a-tale-of-a-spear-and-emigration/<div class="featured-image"> <img src="/post/sam-shores-82-yahrzeit-a-tale-of-a-spear-and-emigration/sam-shore-naturalization-1.jpg" referrerpolicy="no-referrer"> </div>A story about Shmariahu (Sam) Shore, his father, and a spear kept for self-defense in the Pale of Settlement.