作り、考え、繰り返す
Hardware, software, and whatever problem I can't stop thinking about. I've shipped an e-paper computer to 20+ countries and put healthcare software into production. These days it's on-device LLMs, plus a steady stream of side quests, hackathons, and competitions entered purely out of curiosity.
notes from whatever I'm curious about — on-device LLMs, ancient scrolls, and other rabbit holes
My data-loader fix just won a $1,000 Vesuvius Challenge Progress Prize
The Vesuvius Challenge's July 2026 Progress Prizes named my Zarr 3 compatibility fix and chunk cache for the Python vesuvius library. Here's what was actually awarded, and why the boring data-plumbing work was worth writing up.
My readability metric found pockets in a sealed scroll. They were shredded.
I tried to turn the best-scoring pockets from my PHerc1203 readability atlas into a readable surface. They were torn. An opposite coherence-first search found a different failure mode: the seven successfully inspected candidates were densely packed. Together, the searches motivate a joint coherence-and-separability test.
I mapped local readability cues inside a sealed Herculaneum scroll
A CPU-only survey of PHerc1203 found that most sampled sites fail a local geometry gate, while a few rare pockets initially looked comparable to known-readable PHerc1667. Follow-up raw-CT inspection showed that the top pockets were torn fragments, clarifying what the metric can and cannot detect.
software · hardware · tools
On-device LLMs
What actually runs well on a 16 GB Mac, measured honestly: KV-cache costs, speculative decoding, LoRA tool-calling, Metal kernels from scratch — raw data included. Plus merged fixes upstream in Apple's mlx-lm, vLLM's llm-compressor and vllm-metal, and a Zarr 3 fix for the Vesuvius Challenge that won a $1,000 progress prize.
paperd.ink
Open-source e-paper dev board — like Arduino or Raspberry Pi, but built around e-ink displays. I secured the grant funding, managed production in China, handled global shipping, and ran customer support. In makers' hands across 20+ countries.
vcfkit
VCF is the format genomics runs on — and the tooling around it hasn't kept up. vcfkit is a single static binary that normalizes variants, lifts coordinates between genome builds, and filters by expression or plain English via AI (variant data stays local). 4× faster than bcftools on hot paths. Zero dependencies. Runs on macOS, Linux, and Windows.
Redacted 1
Full-stack engineering for a US pharmacy. A staff admin portal, a patient portal, and an analytics dashboard for pharma partners, all built for HIPAA. Plus the catalog, compliance, and monitoring tooling underneath. The kind of software that runs ops and stays invisible.
Redacted 2
Describe a hardware product — pick your power source, MCU, sensors, and peripherals in plain English — and the tool generates a complete PCB schematic with BOM and KiCad export. No EDA knowledge required. Bridges the gap between "I have a hardware idea" and "I have a schematic."
Redacted 3
600+ programmatically generated pages — one for every major university in the UK, US, and Canada — helping Indian students find verified housing abroad. Ranks organically, converts consistently, generates real referral revenue without running ads.
Redacted 4
A SaaS spreadsheet translator that works meaning-for-meaning, not word-for-word. Upload your sheet, pick target languages, get back translations that preserve tone, intent, and cultural register — not literal swaps that read like nobody wrote them.
Redacted 5
A multi-step GPT pipeline for medical content. Select a drug, set keywords and word count — get a fully structured article with FAQs, side effects, dosage, and cost breakdowns. Over 500k words generated across 250+ articles. Content that ranks and reads like a subject matter expert wrote it.
Redacted 6
A voice AI therapist — speak freely, get thoughtful responses. Built around the idea that talking out loud is fundamentally different from typing, and that emotional support should be accessible without a calendar invite.
Redacted 7
Describe the ugliest workflow in your business — the one held together by spreadsheets and Slack threads. The tool breaks it down and shows exactly what to automate, and how. Built and shipped in a day.
Redacted 8
Reads live Hacker News hiring threads via the Algolia API and surfaces companies matching a custom ICP definition. No scraping, no manual trawling — a live feed of companies worth talking to, filtered by what actually matters to the sales team.
Redacted 9
An AI-native care planning tool that maps a patient's healthcare journey — appointments, follow-ups, medication timelines — into a coherent view. Built to show what proactive, coordinated care looks like with an AI layer.
things built out of pure curiosity — no roadmap, no pitch deck
Hacker Newspaper
I quit Instagram and YouTube and switched to Hacker News — great content, frustrating mobile UI. So I built a better one. Comments-first (tap opens discussion, not the link), readable nested threads, auto-resume where you left off. Newspaper layout, no algorithmic noise.
BrainFart
Fast trivia quizzes — a daily quiz, 1v1 duels, and live trivia with friends across 30+ topics. Beat the clock, keep your streak.
FortunePi
Pi Day 2025. The digits of π scroll past one at a time; click to freeze on one and it reads you a fortune based on the digit and where you stopped. Mathematically questionable, emotionally accurate. Pi Oracle is its sequel.
Pi Oracle
Ask the oracle anything. It answers only in π. Built for Pi Day 2026 — absurd premise, oddly satisfying. The kind of thing that makes you think your answer was already somewhere in 3.14159…
Otto
Tell Otto your supplement stack and meal times, and it schedules everything so each one actually absorbs — no fish oil quietly cancelling your iron. A small, fun tool for people who like to over-optimize.
Open to conversations about new products and collaborations. If you're making something interesting, reach out.