Personal
For what the site is and how it gets built, see About.
I am a freelance American researcher & educator. I have worked for the US Army, as an intelligence Red Teamer from the 82nd Abn during the Global War on Terror. I’m currently interested in learning science and in how we can use AI to improve educational outcomes. Most of that work is building tools for learning Mandarin.
Building
- A graded reader in Mandarin, written in episodes: Tsumugu
- A podcast with the same characters, voiced: Tsumugu Podcast
- A dictionary for learning Traditional characters from their shapes and from the stories about them: Tsumugu Encoding Dictionary
Uses This
Everyday Carry
I travel a lot, so I own few items, and each one has to be useful enough to justify carrying it.
- iPhone Air.
- MacBook Pro M3 14”.
- AirPods Pro 3.
- Anker 733 GaNPrime power bank, which is also the wall adapter.
- Filson Journeyman, which holds all of the items above.
The Personal Uniform is a longer version of this list, and it also covers clothes.
Agents
- Claude Max, for writing and code, on Fable and Opus.
- SuperGrok Heavy, for code, image generation, file and project management, and the bots.
- Qwen TTS 0.7B, downloaded and run locally, for Mandarin voice.
The agents above build most of the software, and little of it is written by hand. The instructions they follow are published in the vault: a writing standard, a script that checks a draft against it, and a file that describes the write-act instead of listing rules. The drafts they return are then cut by hand, and that cutting takes most of the time.
Software
Writing is done in Obsidian, though less of it than before. More of the writing is now done in conversations with an LLM that uses the vault as a corpus, so the notes are more often queried through the LLM than read directly.
Studying
Learning science and Mandarin. On the AI side, how agents actually write and the ways they fail repeatedly, because a tool built on a model receives the model’s average output and still has to work.
Arguments
Each page takes a contested political premise as given and tests whether the reasoning holds. Several end with one defense the testing did not refute. The positions themselves are on a separate page.
Practicing
Notes
The position each Worldviews page reaches, one line each, with the reason in plain words.
Affiliations are real information, and their effect on a reader depends on whether they come before or after the events that produced them.
The word ego has two meanings, self-regard and the author being present in the work, and this section exists because of the second one.