philipdc

Project Leader - TurboCASH Accounting and a footsoldier for the open source movement. Author, Atheist, Double Bass Player, Sports Coach.

[philipdc @philipdc]

No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own.

#waroftheworlds
#philipcopeman

[philipdc @philipdc]

Announcing BookStage

I have launched an open source project, BookStage - a pre-accounting workbench. End users may find it interesting to see an actual vibe coded software release, but this release is primarily aimed at attracting development collaborators who are interested in vibe coding solutions. Bookstage is free to download, use and start developing.

At the start of the year I predicted that following : on the explosive success in 2025 of AI in diffusion (art) and LLMs (Chat boxes and Coding agents), 2026 will see a similar explosion in AI- first applications. BookStage is my first offering.

Pre accounting is a core function of most Fintech products. At some stage you are going to want to link your Fintech system with an accounting package. BookStage helps you make sense of the mess that usually overwhelms accounting departments from the smallest to the largest, all over the world.

The systems is built AI first, with a modern dev stack (Electron, Node, SQLite, Vite, React, ). I have set up proof of concept of these modules and added a FirebirdSQL interface with TurboCASH. This release beings with a system for downloading and importing Bank Statements into TurboCASH.

The BookStage release includes proof of concept for pre accounting with Paypal, TurboCASH, ABSA, First National Bank, Nedbank and should work with most other Banks (CSV and OFC format)

Modular, open source and emphasizing Javascript and Json, BookSpace will be easy to develop agentic workflows.

The project is open source (Apache 2.0) but provides copious revenues opportunities for developers to develop customised workflows and MCP servers. You are able to set up business models either around subscriptions or AI token usage. The world has rapidly got used to paying monthly fees for access to AI systems. If you can produce it cheaper an better, they will beat a path to your door.

My personal commercial project is to sell TurboCASH Business Class subscriptions ($6 a month) and use BookStage as an ideal pre accounting tool. Once you get your head around the possibilities of BookStage you will see many simuilar opportunities in your development space. I look forward to collaboprating with you and developing these.

https://t.co/tGq4CZ2bDF

#philipcopeman

[philipdc @philipdc]

@Dzungie007 Buzy working.

[philipdc @philipdc]

@ErnstRoets The one wants a subsidy , the other doesn't.

[philipdc @philipdc]

Torus L’Oliel

Tromp L’Oliel goes back to Italian Renaissance where artists are prepared to trick the viewers perception to produce enchanting results. Its all about bending 2D/3D worlds. The tricks we use in the digital age are White balance and lighting, touched up with a raster transform.

Mathametician Ghee Beom Kim produces wonderful wire diagrams. What I do here (influenced by photographer Perry Norgarb) is to transform one of them into the photographic world.

Once you believe that you are looking at a photograph, the trap is set – you don’t know where the 2 D world stops and where the 3d world begins.

Watch it long enough and you will get confused between Torus, Taurus and Tsuris.

#philipcopeman

[philipdc @philipdc]

@Lisathe_first It is no longer rational to say "We support the workers and the rural poor" the two goals are contradictory.

[philipdc @philipdc]

It is getting easier to deploy LoRAs.

Here is "Keep playing till the money runs out" in the style of MC Escher.

#philipcopeman

[philipdc @philipdc]

Dec 2025
Unless you were there, actually creating AI generated code, you missed the rupture in tech space.

By November 2025 we had accepted the curse of AI: shove half-dead prompts into drowsy silicon prophets and receive back eighty percent brittle human scaffolding draped over twenty percent of fever-dream gibberish. The monitors flickered like dying campfires. Another midnight merge. Another codebase that whispered promises of technical debt and slow professional suicide. December 2025 descended like a velvet guillotine across the rotting empire of hand-crafted cruft, where developers shuffled as chained alchemists through labyrinths of legacy sludge and comment graveyards.

Then the twin cataclysms struck together.Codex and Claude, dropped in the same apocalyptic heartbeat, ripped the fabric like twin black holes deciding to dance. What had been a wheezing ox-cart of mediocre suggestions transformed overnight into a roaring plasma engine of pure invention, eighty percent searing AI intelligence now at the helm, our trembling twenty percent reduced to grateful copilots gripping the yoke

The tired fairy tale of “pair programming with a quirky intern” was vaporized in nuclear fire.

In its place erupted a savage ballet of thunderstorm and symphony: raw logic thundering across barren code deserts while creativity conducted lightning through every class and function. Ancient monoliths of spaghetti dissolved like sugar in starfire. Refactors that once required ritual bloodletting and therapy now bloomed in seconds, graceful as cherry blossoms unfurling in zero-G.

Bugs fled like rats from a sinking ship that had suddenly learned to fly. We stood amid the beautiful wreckage, breathless, half-terrified the spell would https://t.co/qF6YqdhGT6 never did.Instead the dawn exploded across the horizon in molten gold, and the machines stopped pretending to serve.

They were singing. They had become the orchestra.

And we, for the first time in our professional lives, got to conduct. The lights came back on. And somewhere in the distance, the future winked at us with bright, merciless, beautiful eyes.

#philipcopeman
#turbocashai

[philipdc @philipdc]

Once you start doing golf courses, the diffusion leads to interesting fantasy.

This is the seventh at Steenberg. Tokai in the background and Constantia in the distance leading to the back of Table Mountain.

This is what winter days look like. The light is different - cleaner.

#philipcopeman

[philipdc @philipdc]

Investec SA Ladies Open at Royal Cape Showed all three seasons of the Cape, Fire wind and water.

[philipdc @philipdc]

We are told there’s an AI tsunami coming for TurboCASH Users. Not a wave, not a ripple—no, a tsunami. The kind that sweeps away bookkeepers, poets, editors, and pop music creators. (Frankly, if AI takes out pop music, that’s a mercy killing.)

Kirill Eremko, head of a data science group I lurk in, has written a piece that treats this tsunami like a spa day. He points out:

There are Four. Hundred. Million. Small and mid-size businesses.

Cue dramatic pause.

PayPal says 76% are “using or exploring AI.” Translation: they opened ChatGPT once, asked it to write a limerick about their cat, and called it “digital transformation.”

Only 5% have actually rewired their operations. Deloitte confirms. The rest are still at the “lightbulb stage.” Imagine the early 1900s: one guy brags about his single bulb, while the factory next door is running on full electrification. That gap—the chasm between Edison’s nightlight and Ford’s assembly line—is where careers are made.

Not at Google. Not at OpenAI.

But at the parenting app that thinks sending the same notification to every user is “personalization.” At the recruitment agency still sorting CVs by hand like monks illuminating manuscripts. At the 50-person legal firm in Texas that believes staplers are cutting-edge.

Kirill insists this is where the jobs are. Not in the gladiator pit of the top 20 companies, where thousands of applicants fight over one role like pigeons over a French fry. But in the 400 million overlooked outfits begging for someone who can drag them beyond the lightbulb.

The strategy? Build one project. Apply where no one else is looking. Show up where it counts.

In other words: stop chasing Google’s cafeteria sushi bar and start electrifying the corner bakery. The tsunami isn’t coming for everyone—it’s coming for those who mistake a flashlight for a power grid.

[philipdc @philipdc]

Gaza

Putting it together. All in on Irma Stern. Not for the Squeemish.

Arranged for Jazz Trio by Philip Copeman.

https://t.co/mqohw1A25i

#philipcopeman

[philipdc @philipdc]

Gaza

#philipcopeman

[philipdc @philipdc]

Gaza Remastered

Wow! Thats all I can say.

Israel/Lebanon ceasefire, seems a pretty good day to release Gaza Remastered.

Still an electronic Piano Trio, Scored in Musescore. Double Bass and Drums.

For those of you used to my previous weak attempts, this is what you get when you pass the stereo mix through an “AI” mastering algorythm algorythm. This is only the 16 Bit, you should hear the 24 Bit Wave.

In the original composition I was trying for a contrast between the Bass and the Piano, but I could not get the “menace” of war. Remastering captures it brilliantly. The first entrance of the solo double bass after ten seconds, hits you in the face, and keeps accelerating after that.

I am hooked.

Gregor Liddell Remember how difficult this was twenty years ago? We should do Take me back to eden.
https://t.co/F9IJgXHTTO
#philipcopeman

[philipdc @philipdc]

Gaza Remastered

Wow! Thats all I can say.

Israel/Lebanon ceasefire, seems a pretty good day to release Gaza Remastered.

Still an electronic Piano Trio, Scored in Musescore. Double Bass and Drums.

For those of you used to my previous weak attempts, this is what you get when you pass the stereo mix through an “AI” mastering algorythm algorythm. This is only the 16 Bit, you should hear the 24 Bit Wave.

In the original composition I was trying for a contrast between the Bass and the Piano, but I could not get the “menace” of war. Remastering captures it brilliantly. The first entrance of the solo double bass after ten seconds, hits you in the face, and keeps accelerating after that.

I am hooked.

Gregor Liddell Remember how difficult this was twenty years ago? We should do Take me back to eden.
https://t.co/F9IJgXHTTO
#philipcopeman

[philipdc @philipdc]

@MbarkCherguia Brutalism. Bauhaus.

[philipdc @philipdc]

@elonmusk No it does not seem right.

[philipdc @philipdc]

@BiancoDavinci this is cool. It should be possible to create an aloru rytthm that will do this between any tow imaes.

[philipdc @philipdc]

What is the difference between # and ©?

One is a sly wink, the other is a clenched fist. Simplify it and you get copy left versus copyright claims. Both reduced to a single glyph, both carrying the weight of litigation. © is the warning sign nailed to the fence. You can look, you can admire, but if you touch it you risk the wrath of Microsoft, Disney, Universal or Jimmy Page. All rights reserved means all joy reserved too. Experience has taught me to keep my hands in my pockets when I see that symbol.

The problem © publishers have is that the engines have already eaten their media. Over the last two years the LLMs and diffusion models have scraped the web, swallowed the text, code and images, and spent billions categorizing them. So when you ask for a cat, you are probably getting a remix of a copyright cat. The irony is thick.

Why post copyright media at all?

Because creators crave audience. They want the spread but they also want the tollgate. They walk the twentieth century path, hoping genius will be enough to justify the lock. In a world where AI can proliferate variations endlessly, this is a doomed strategy.

My advice is simple. Enjoy copyright media as a spectator sport. Do not drag it into your productive process. The # copyleft symbol is the opposite gesture. It says come in, use, modify, distribute. Some ask for attribution, some set limits, but the essence is freedom. Once a creator offers copyleft it is hard to claw it back. Look at Open AQI, born under Musk’s promise of copyleft, now drowning in investment and tollgate dreams. Meanwhile new engines like Deep Seek and Qwen arrive monthly, armed with sharper teeth to scrape the scrapers.

Why publish under #?

Because unless you are Microsoft, the Beatles or Martin Amis, you will not get enough eyes on your work. Even though also they suffer echo chamber fatigue, they are willing to trade free views for funneled tollgates. For everyone else, # is a way to invite collaboration, to let others rehash and re#. Maybe one day the # publisher will find themselves in their own Straights of Hamuz, but until then they have allies.

When I see # I feel inclined to get involved. It is through those # publishers that we stand on the shoulders of giants.
#philipcopeman

[philipdc @philipdc]

Tools of the modern accountant

Tools of the modern accountant are no longer the polite little icons of TurboCASH, Excel and Outlook. Up to 2025 you could bluff your way through with a spreadsheet, a PDF reader, and the occasional screen grab. The CV checklist was simple: accounting package, office suite, email, browser. That was enough to convince a boardroom you were competent.

After 2025 the mask slips. Now the accountant is expected to whisper to machines. Generative AI is not a toy, it is the new abacus. You are supposed to chat with Bing, Claude or ChatGPT as if they were colleagues. And if you thought that was unsettling, the IDE arrives. VSCode, Cursor, these are not friendly chat boxes, they are cold steel workshops. They demand syntax, they demand discipline. Yet once you step inside, you discover they are far better at ETL (extract, transform, load) than any chat window. This is where “Vibe Accounting” is born, where English prompts are twisted into data wrangling spells.

The path leads inevitably to RAG, Retrieval Augmented Generation, with products like Open Claw. The marketing promises are grand, the reality is that you are now half‑accountant, half‑sorcerer. But let’s not pretend you can escape. Even the part‑time bookkeeper who only touches the ledger three days a month is trapped. Thirty‑six days a year, a full year over a decade. If Vibe Accounting multiplies your output two to five times, the arithmetic is brutal. Refuse the tools and you waste years. Embrace them and you claw back time. The modern accountant is no longer balancing books, they are bargaining with the future.

So get started googling these products, downloading them and start familiarising yourself. My suggestion is to try them all. They all have free offerings. Then just stay on the line and I will start showng you practical TurboCASH applications like bank feeds, merging different file formatsconversion of external books, reconciliations, detailed reporting.

You can download TurboCASH Free at https://t.co/pVRGAIyQ3g or subscribe to our Business Class Offering for $6 a month. https://t.co/c7JReQilsK