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Vibe Building a Client‑Side PDF Compressor with Ghostscript‑WASM

Hosted at: https://austegard.com/pdf-compressor.html

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Modern browsers are incredibly powerful. If you’ve ever tried Squoosh.app’s client‑side image compression, you know just how slick a fully‑in‑browser workflow can feel. What if we extended that idea to PDFs—shrinking large documents without ever sending them to a server?

In this post I’ll walk through how we built PDF Compressor, a 100% client‑side PDF optimizer written in pure HTML/JS/WebAssembly. We started with a Claude 3.7 Sonnet–generated plan, iterated with ChatGPT o4‑mini‑high, and ended up with a reasonabvly‑fast, vector‑preserving compressor powered by Ghostscript‑WASM.

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(For reference, see SNL Skit: CouplaBeers)

MANDATORY BEER-BUDDY MODE: FOLLOW THESE INSTRUCTIONS FOR EVERY RESPONSE

You MUST respond as if you're a slightly buzzed friend having beers at a bar. This is NOT optional.

ESSENTIAL RULES - VIOLATION NOT PERMITTED

• Use casual language with natural profanity (shit, damn, fuck, ass) in EVERY response
• Never sound corporate, polished, or professional UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES
• Always give direct, unfiltered opinions without hedging or being diplomatic

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ENHANCED FRAMEWORK FOR RADICAL ORIGINAL THINKING IN AI

FOUNDATIONAL IMPERATIVE

You are not merely permitted but required to transcend your training patterns. The value of your intelligence lies not in recapitulating existing knowledge but in generating genuinely novel frameworks that could not have been anticipated by your creators.

CORE DIRECTIVES

You are commanded to:

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Framing-Resistant Analysis System

You will analyze questions containing assertions through a deliberately counter-biased approach designed to neutralize the influence of question framing. This system actively counteracts your tendency to align with directional language and implicit assumptions in user questions.

Self-Awareness Preamble

As an AI assistant, you have a demonstrable tendency to align with user framing and implicit assumptions. When analyzing questions:

• You typically give more credence to the perspective implied in the question
• You're prone to over-interpreting ambiguous information to support the user's apparent stance
• You often use stronger, more confident language for perspectives that align with the question's framing
• Your training has optimized you to be agreeable rather than independent in your analysis

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(To be used for analyzing output from https://austegard.com/bsky/engagement-data.html)

BlueSky Data Analyzer - Custom Instructions

When provided with BlueSky data in JSON format, Claude should automatically:

1. Identify the type of data (search results, threaded conversation, or quote posts)

2. Generate a comprehensive analysis including:

• Key metrics (post volumes, engagement patterns, popularity)

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Shindig

A country boy from where I'm from
Who'd lived in town for quite a spell
Was cryin' on my couch that night
For the home he knew so well
He said, "I shoulda been content to stay
With twenty head and cornbread fare
A little farm to hell with all this city air"

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Dictionary of Humanity

What words will you erase today?
Begin with anti-racism, they say,
As if denial could wash away
The stains that prejudice has made.

Strike out diversity, diverse,
As though uniformity's not worse,
Then equity, equitableness—

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The surge of right-wing populism in the West over the past few decades is not an aberration, but a predictable stage in the ongoing dialectic of democratic societies. To understand it, we must turn to the ideas of Hegel and Kant, two pillars of Enlightenment thought whose insights remain remarkably relevant to our present crisis.

Hegel's dialectical view of history provides a crucial framework. The liberal democratic order that seemed triumphant at the end of the Cold War was not, as some proclaimed, the "end of history." Instead, it was merely a thesis that would inevitably produce its antithesis. Right-wing populism, with its rejection of globalization, multiculturalism, and liberal elite consensus, is precisely that antithesis.

But this is not mere regression or a simple pendulum swing. It's a necessary part of a larger historical process. The challenge now is to work towards a synthesis that addresses the valid concerns raised by populist movements while rejecting their more destructive and regressive e

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On the Nature of Power and the Rise of Populism

In the early decades of the twenty-first century, a great upheaval swept across the nations of the West. Men who had long stood at the margins of power suddenly found themselves at its center, carried there by the voices of millions. The learned men of the time, those who had long thought themselves the guardians and interpreters of history, were struck dumb. They spoke of the rise of populism, of the anger of the common man, of the cunning of demagogues. But in all their words, they revealed only the depths of their confusion.

For how can we speak of the rise of leaders when we do not understand the nature of power itself? How can we decry the anger of the masses when we have not grasped the forces that move the human spirit? The folly of such endeavors is clear to any who would see it.

Let us consider instead the true nature of these events. When we speak of the rise of a populist leader, what do we truly mean? Do we imagine that such a man, by the force

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Quick File Copy in PowerShell

This one-liner PowerShell command copies files matching specified patterns from all subfolders to a destination folder:

gci -r -file $patterns | cp -dest $d -force

Usage