Hello, I’m Sam.
I’m a lawyer, photographer, and musician. My interests turn into projects: a musical co-pilot, an AI art director, tools for portraits, and websites for real-life adventures.
Here’s what I’m making, playing, and figuring out along the way.
AI / Generative AI
AI / Generative AI
Expressive characters, cinematic card art, and an image director I can teach through choices and references.
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November 2025–September 2026
12 articles
Music / AI
A musician’s assistant for trying a rhythm, changing a tone, adding harmony, and remembering the arrangement that belongs to a song.
Board games
There is another hobby inside a board-game box: making everything fit, upgrading the pieces, and enjoying the result.
Travel / AI
My wife wanted to take the kids on vacation. I wanted her to tell me where. Neither of us wanted to do the research. Naturally, I turned this into a website project.
Photography / AI
Separate corrections, editable layers, and models that learn parts of the retouch instead of replacing the photograph.
Video games / Steam Machine
Putting newer upscaling into God of War and Shadow of the Tomb Raider, and finding other ways to revisit familiar worlds.
AI / Music / Photography
A music rig I can talk to, an AI retoucher that works in layers, and a vacation you can explore before leaving. These are the kinds of things I want to build with AI.
Home lab
I used Docker on my Mac to give my two Proxmox servers an external quorum vote without adding another hypervisor.
AI / Generative AI
Expressive characters, cinematic card art, and an image director I can teach through choices and references.
AI / Generative AI
I built a five-pass ComfyUI workflow to improve faces and eyes, then changed the prompting so the foreground, middle ground, and background described one coherent event.
Steam Machine / Video games / AI
Newer PC games, older worlds, arcade curiosities, and a plastic guitar: why I want them within the same reach.
Gyro controls / Video games
The appeal of gyro is a different relationship with the game: turn with the stick, make the small adjustment with your hands. I’m exploring what it would take to make that feel natural.
Video games / AI
The Addams Family from beside the ball, using live VPX physics and Blender.
Sam Piñero
I like having an idea and being able to make something of it.
Sometimes that means a 3D-printed insert for a board game. Sometimes it means a tool that learns how I want a photograph edited, or a music app that connects the song in front of me to the sounds I want to play.
AI has opened up more of those possibilities. I can bring the taste and experience I’ve developed in photography, music, and my working life into projects that used to be much harder to attempt.
This notebook is where I share those projects: what they do, how they came together, and why I wanted them in the first place. There’s also room for games, trips, and things I enjoy without needing to turn them into a product.
Start with the musical co-pilot, the retouching project, or the hobby inside a board-game box.