Personal
This page is about me; 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 how we can use AI to improve and optimize educational outcomes. Most of it goes into tools for learning Mandarin.
Building
- A graded reader in Mandarin, told in episodes — Tsumugu
- A podcast following the same characters, voiced — Tsumugu Podcast
- A dictionary teaching Traditional characters by shape and by the story behind them — Tsumugu Encoding Dictionary
Uses This
Everyday Carry
I travel a lot, so every item I own needs to earn its place.
- iPhone Air.
- MacBook Pro M3 14”.
- AirPods Pro 3.
- Anker 733 GaNPrime power bank, which doubles as the wall adapter.
- Filson Journeyman, holding all of it.
The Personal Uniform is the longer version, and it covers clothes as well.
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.
Most of the software here gets built by those instead of by hand. What they work to is published in the vault: a writing standard, a script that checks a draft against it, and a file describing the write-act instead of listing rules. Drafts come back and get cut by hand, which is where most of the time goes.
Software
Writing runs on Obsidian, less than it used to. More of it now is conversations with an LLM working from the vault as a corpus, which means the notes get talked to more than read.
Studying
Learning science and Mandarin. On the AI side, how agents actually write and where they fail in ways that repeat, since a tool built on a model gets the average output and has to work anyway.
Arguments
Twenty-two pages taking contested political premises as given and testing whether the reasoning holds. Several end with a defense left standing. What I hold myself is written down separately.
Practicing
Notes
Where the Worldviews pages come out, one line each, with the reason in plain words.
Affiliations are real information, and they do opposite things depending on when they arrive.
Ego turned out to be two words, and this section exists because of the second one.