Working notebook
Notes from the founder of ООО ЛИИ on what I'm figuring out as I build: sports broadcast infrastructure, education AI, engineering under constraints. Not a content strategy — a notebook kept in public.
All notes
May 2026
4Recorded my daughter's recital — by Saturday night, a working pipeline came out
Shot it on iPhone as a parent. By Saturday evening — 33 individual portfolio clips for every performer, ready to share with families. Between those two points: 30 hours, five attempts at AI segmentation, and two whisper-cpp bugs.
Fine-tuning, RAG, and reasoning aren't alternatives — they're stack layers
Someone asked why my approach beats RAG and reasoning. It doesn't — it lives underneath them. Where each layer works and where each breaks.
655 questions in one evening. A benchmark for my own model.
Built LII-Sport-Bench-RU v0.1 — 655 expert questions across 35 sports. Eleven AI agents in parallel. Methodology, not magic.
It's not a camera
Spent today sketching out a product that doesn't exist yet. By evening it was clear: it's not a camera. It's an AI system where the hard part runs on the phone — and I'm giving that part away free.
April 2026
18Thirteen sites under 152-FZ in a day — and ten minutes down over a single dollar sign
Closed 152-FZ across thirteen csylabs sites in a day — and lost ten minutes of production over how docker compose reads $ in .env values.
Building a platform so my team can learn how I operate
Courses, onboarding, and ops tooling should not be separate theory. They should be the environment where the team learns to ship real systems.
I moved csylabs to Selectel overnight — but the story is not speed
The overnight migration from Servers.ru to Selectel took about 50 minutes of active cutover time. The point is not speed, but keeping production properties intact: mail, mesh, backups, DNS, and runbooks.
Youth sports: the point is not the tournament, it is the infrastructure
Youth sports does not run on one tournament. It runs on boring infrastructure: courts, schedules, insurance, parent communication, and cheap coverage of every game.
A website is not a system yet
Today I was finishing the Liga Zaliva application form — and it made the line between a landing page and an operating system obvious again.
Three Proxmox-on-ZFS installs, three UEFI shells
Tried to install Proxmox with ZFS on new hardware. Dropped to UEFI shell. Not once — three times. Root cause is in how ZFS-Proxmox boots. Found the safety-net recipe; will verify on the next install.
Thought it was one thing, turned out to be another: 4Kn drives broke the ZFS boot
A correction to the morning post. The root cause wasn't in systemd-boot, wasn't in the fallback path. Provider support went a layer below, swapped physical disks, and the install worked.
iCloud isn't renewing — three options for the family
My sister's iCloud subscription stopped renewing — the card isn't accepted anymore, and her photos will stop syncing soon. Familiar story for a lot of people in Russia right now. Three working paths, from simplest to fully self-hosted.
The headline was in the description
Rewrote the csylabs.com front page in an evening. The strongest copy was sitting in the description, not in the headline.
Launched an LLM integration service — starting with education
Published the product page for an LLM integration service for Russian organizations. 60-90 days to pilot. Starting with education, then healthcare, then law.
Fine-tuned a model to GPT-5.4 quality for $330
$330, 16 hours on an H200, #9 of 30 on EduBench-RU. The 32B version I trained in parallel cost 3× the GPU and scored worse.
Notes on NFS — or why you might need Proxmox Backup Server
The previous post ended with 'let's go' — first backup running tonight. In the morning I opened the panel. Interface doesn't load. :)
Spun up my own video node over the weekend
A weekend project: self-hosted streaming node with SRT in, HLS/WebRTC/RTMP out, and identifiers-as-keys instead of passwords.
A backup on the same machine is not a backup
After rebuilding the infrastructure, I had to set up the backup schema from scratch — connected the home NAS to the private mesh and closed 3-2-1.
Sound: yes. Video: no.
The first inbound stream hit the media server with a metadata bug — video data was on the wire but the server couldn't see it. Found it in an hour.
Handed over the podium
When your partner's interest aligns with yours — hand them the podium.
Shipped the blog in one evening
Zero to daniel.csylabs.com in one evening. Stack, what broke along the way, and how it got fixed.
This is a blog
What this site is, how it works, why it exists. No newsletter, no tracking, no '10 tips.'