I wanted to close a database's public port and reach it from my house as if the VPC were just another room. WireGuard did that in fifteen minutes. The other day and a half went to an IP-address collision I'd created years earlier, a load-balancing router quietly breaking the tunnel's return path, and the slow lesson that a VPN doesn't connect two networks — it makes you confront every assumption each made while pretending the other didn't exist.
A programming language promised that frozen values couldn't change — and didn't keep the promise. The story of finding the holes, fixing them, and then collecting the reward: once immutability is actually enforced, you can stop copying immutable data and just share it. A case study in soundness, hidden bugs, and a 116x speedup, with lessons that apply well beyond one small language.
Google's experimental DiffusionGemma generates text by denoising 256-token blocks in parallel instead of predicting one token at a time. The official instructions assume an H100. I got it running on an AMD Strix Halo APU and a rack of four 2016-era Tesla P40s using an unmerged llama.cpp pull request — and the integrated AMD GPU beat all four NVIDIA cards combined by a factor of two.
A deeply empirical account of training a 51M-parameter transformer to generate correct, optimized Z80 assembly code from task specifications — and the surprising discovery that reinforcement learning actively destroys model performance while simple supervised learning with auto-generated ground truth achieves 100% accuracy.
Getting DeepSeek's newest 284B-parameter mixture-of-experts model running locally on an AMD Strix Halo APU with a custom llama.cpp build, and the surprising reasons why it fails entirely on four NVIDIA Tesla P40 GPUs despite having more teraflops on paper.
Stalker is an autonomous mid-cap equity trading bot that reads a daily macro brief, scores a factor-ranked universe, runs the candidates through a risk gate, and submits orders to Alpaca paper. It sits on top of five other data projects I've been building — Headwater, Estuary, Tributary, PrivateEye, and Goldfinch — each one a separate feeder of structured signal. This is how all six hang together.
