iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Theo Beers @t6e.dev · 31/05/2026

Arrived today. Will keep me busy for a year and a half.

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Theo Beers @t6e.dev · 30/04/2026

Reading a ghazal of Sanā’i, translated by Frank Lewis (excerpt from a somewhat longer video)

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Theo Beers @t6e.dev · 12/04/2026

~30 seconds of Monty Alexander playing "Amazing Grace" with a nice harmony. (From the intro to a duet on "I wish I knew how it would feel to be free," with Billy Taylor, who can be seen in the background.)

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Theo Beers @t6e.dev · 09/04/2026

Manuscript photo as a standalone

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Theo Beers @t6e.dev · 08/04/2026

Reading a quatrain I know I've shared before, and recently, but only in text. Recorded on the morning of the maybe-ceasefire.

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Theo Beers @t6e.dev · 28/11/2025

The date conversion library underlying Muqawwim has always been open-source, but now it's also published in the NPM package registry. I'll put links below. I'm interested in adding more test cases to document the correctness of the code.

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Theo Beers @t6e.dev · 27/11/2025

Of these two men, neither was stirred by love. Wisdom was far off, the face of love not seen. From fishes in the sea to wild horses on The plain, all beasts can recognize their young. But man who's blinded by his wretched pride, Cannot distinguish son from foe. (tr. Clinton)

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Theo Beers @t6e.dev · 14/11/2025

The work goes on. I already post about these Shāhnāma projects as I make progress on them; a talk is a good way to force myself to keep moving forward.

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Theo Beers @t6e.dev · 30/10/2025

Xunzi on serving as minister to a ruler: “Treat him like riding an unbroken horse, like caring for a newborn, like feeding a starving person.” I have often been reminded of Ghaznavid court literature while reading Xunzi.

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Theo Beers @t6e.dev · 03/08/2025

The one context in which I've ever used bubble sort for real. Does anyone recognize this function? I asked a few LLMs, and they all identified it at once. Bonus question: how much better can this be done?

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Theo Beers @t6e.dev · 31/07/2025

For those who use Claude Desktop or similar MCP clients (a niche group, I know): I just wrote an MCP server to facilitate use of my API for Steingass' Persian-English dictionary. It works! A link to the GitHub repo with installation instructions: github.com/theodore-s-b...

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Theo Beers @t6e.dev · 29/07/2025

I recently trained an ML model, fine-tuning XLM-RoBERTa and using data from Ganjoor, to predict the meter of a hemistich of classical Persian poetry. Still early days, but results are promising. Perhaps colleagues will find this interesting. Model on Hugging Face: huggingface.co/katomyomachi...

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Theo Beers @t6e.dev · 20/05/2025

Some of you may have noticed that Etymonline's website has been redesigned this year—multiple times, I think. I try to keep up with changes to their markup so that my `gloss` CLI util still works (link in reply).

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Theo Beers @t6e.dev · 02/02/2025

I have a very simple paper in this issue on occasional literature that recently came out (with a backdated publication date). There are some fascinating studies in this collection; just please don't read too much into mine if you happen to look at it. riviste.unimi.it/index.php/in...

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Theo Beers @t6e.dev · 24/12/2024

I named her Samak when I adopted her in the fall of 2011 because I was taking Frank Lewis’ Samak-e ‘Ayyār seminar. She lives with my parents now (never moved to Germany) but is doing well, finding warm spots in a big house.

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Theo Beers @t6e.dev · 19/12/2024

I lost most of a work day to learn that I had to add these lines to a config file

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Theo Beers @t6e.dev · 14/12/2024

A couple years ago I bought one of these old Bell telephones, and this week I finally got an ATA and a number from a VoIP provider. The ringtone is quite nostalgia-inducing.

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Theo Beers @t6e.dev · 10/12/2024

Classical music provides the best reference points for prodigy. Mendelssohn wrote this string octet at age sixteen, as a birthday present for a friend. One of my favorite passages in the first movement (starts quiet)… I listen to a lot of Mendelssohn in the cold season and will post more.

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Theo Beers @t6e.dev · 18/11/2024

Looked at this colophon again today, from the oldest dated copy of the Arabic Kalīla wa-Dimna, ms. Ayasofya 4095 in the Süleymaniye Library. The date is perhaps not impressively early: the first day (mustahall) of Jumādā II 618, i.e., ~23 July 1221 CE.

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Theo Beers @t6e.dev · 13/11/2024

Thought of this when I saw the photos of Biden's meeting with Trump

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Theo Beers @t6e.dev · 13/11/2024

Giving a talk next Tuesday at NYU, on the source(s) of Qāniʿī Ṭūsī's 7th/13th c. versification of Kalīla and Dimna. It is a hybrid event.

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Theo Beers @t6e.dev · 12/11/2024

Got a nice commit hash earlier today

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