Here Lies

Obituaries for the things that died in your house, written by a model on your own laptop.

It may invent a name. It may not invent a scratch.

Get it on GitHub Run it in three commands

Recently departed

Real cards, downloaded from the app. Gemma 4 looked at each photo on a laptop, wrote the obituary, and plain code checked every detail it cited. Click a card for the full size.

Obituary card for Silas Gourdington III, three carved pumpkins, the smallest collapsed. Cause of death: visible patches of rot. — **Silas Gourdington III.** “A bright glow for a short, fine season.”

Obituary card for Mr. Chester Golden-Crust, two slices of burnt toast on a plate. Cause of death: charred edges. — **Mr. Chester Golden-Crust.** In lieu of flowers, please wipe the crumbs from beneath the toaster tray.

Obituary card for Silas B. Canvas-Sole, a pair of torn canvas shoes. Cause of death: torn fabric on the lower shoe. — **Silas B. Canvas-Sole.** “The pavement called, and he answered it all.”

Obituary card for Agnes Petalbrook, a rotting succulent in a terracotta pot. Cause of death: mushy sections across her leaves. — **Agnes Petalbrook.** Survived by a terracotta shard and the faint smell of potting mix.

Obituary card for Mr. Arthur Glowwick, a scorched light bulb lying in ash. Cause of death: severe charring. — **Mr. Arthur Glowwick.** “It shone when asked, and dimmed when done.”

Obituary card for Eleanor G. Glimmerphone, a phone with a cracked screen. Cause of death: a spiderweb crack across her display. — **Eleanor G. Glimmerphone.** Survived by a charging cord that coils carelessly and several stray coasters.

Some things are still alive

People, pets and healthy plants get a notice instead of an obituary. In the test run it turned away the cat, the dog, the monstera and the person, every time.

Notice from The Household Gazette: Still alive. Give it a treat instead.

Notice from The Household Gazette: This plant is still with us. Water it.

How it works

1 · LookGemma 4 sees the photoIt lists what it can see on the object, injuries first, and code numbers each detail.
2 · Gateplain codePeople, pets and healthy plants stop here with a still-alive notice.
3 · WriteGemma 4, text onlyThe writer never sees the photo. It writes from the numbered list and cites a number for every physical sentence.
4 · Checkplain codeEvery cited number must exist, and the cause of death must be real damage or wear. A failing draft gets one rewrite, then repair.

A name, yes. A scratch, no.

The name, the birth year and the jokes are invented on purpose. The body is not. Each sentence about how the object looks has to point at a detail from the looking step, and Go code checks the pointer before the card is printed. The card footer lists those details, so you can hold the obituary up against the photo.

I ran 17 photos from Wikimedia Commons through the real pipeline on my laptop and checked every detail on every card against its photo by eye.

Gate decision correct	16 of 17
Passed the check on the first draft	12 of 13
Details on printed cards	65
Really in the photo	53
Not in the photo	4
Too close to call	8
Median seconds to look, then write	0.8 + 2.4

The check proves that a sentence points at a listed detail. It cannot prove the detail is real: two of 13 causes of death rested on details I could not find in the photo, a "missing screw hole" and a "torn" umbrella that was only folded. A blurred green glow got buried as a flower. The full table is in eval/results.md.

Run it yourself

You need Ollama, Go 1.26 and Node 20 or newer.

ollama pull gemma4:e4b
git clone https://github.com/nazboyko/here-lies && cd here-lies
make run

Open http://localhost:8787. The server also prints an address for your phone on the same Wi-Fi.

Your photos stay home

The photo goes from your browser to your own laptop and nowhere else. No account, no upload to a company, no retention policy to read.
The browser shrinks it and drops the EXIF data before sending. The server keeps it in memory for one request and never writes it to disk.
The page loads nothing from the internet. The browser test records every request during a full run and found none that left the machine.
With the model pulled, it works with Wi-Fi off, and each obituary costs nothing.

Credits

Gemma 4 by Google under the Gemma Terms of Use, run through Ollama. html-to-image, React and Vite under MIT. Old Standard TT and UnifrakturMaguntia under the SIL Open Font License. Test photos from Wikimedia Commons, turned gray and placed on the cards:

Old jack-o-lanterns, Giulia Forsythe	CC BY 2.0
Two pieces of burnt toast, Sheep purple	CC BY 2.0
Worn-out grey canvas shoes, Wolfmann	CC BY 4.0
Homebase succulent rescue attempt, stephen boisvert	CC BY 2.0
Burnt light bulb on the ground, Shixart1985	CC BY 2.0
MyPhone my27 front panel, JGBlue1509	CC BY 4.0