Blog
Shorter notes on engineering, design, and whatever I'm thinking about.
Eigenslur, Defined
The word you searched, the address it landed you on, and why contempt is low-rank.
- essays
- embeddings
- language
The Missing Faces
Three people write one paper and the graph remembers three friendships. A reactor valve reports the command it was sent, not the position it reached. A finished skyscraper turns out to have a load case nobody ever checked. The relation that only means something all at once is exactly the one a clean diagram throws away — and the piece it drops is where the accident waits.
- essays
- systems
- topology
Seams and Signals
A voltmeter that loops back to a different reading. Three rankings that disagree in a cycle. A warehouse whose aisles all reconcile and whose total still comes up short. The gap they share has a name, a 1931 thesis behind it, and a mesh you can poke at.
- essays
- topology
- interactive
Muster: Making Little Linux Services Less Haunted
A repo scaffold you hand to Codex, Claude Code, or any coding agent so the small Linux service you built this weekend is still installable, updateable, and rollback-safe in six months. Includes a worked reference — dvd-ingester — and a pattern library of reusable solution atoms.
- essays
- linux
- tools
Engineering the Compatible Overlap
Five patterns that make a third place actually glue, anchored in Martine Postma's Repair Café, Cynthia Dwork's differential privacy, and a concrete St. Louis design — how to add 1-cochains to your city without surveilling anyone.
- essays
- community
- architecture
The Bridgehead Index
A spreadsheet method for finding the people who quietly hold a room together — and the bridges that break if they stop showing up. From Paul Erdős in Warsaw to Ronald Burt's 673 supply-chain managers to a worked example you can run before lunch.
- essays
- networks
- metrics
A Third Place Is a Sheaf, Not a Room
Jean Leray invented sheaves in a prisoner-of-war camp to answer one question: when does local data glue into a global picture? That is the same question a fragmented city is trying to answer every weekend — with bridgehead people as its 1-cochains.
- essays
- community
- topology
Community Is Not a Density Problem
Ray Oldenburg named the third place in 1989, and most civic attempts to save it reach for the wrong lever. A walk from a high school cafeteria to Granovetter's 1973 paper to Damon Centola's 2010 experiment, and the sharp threshold between a fragmented city and a connected one.
- essays
- community
- networks
Good Systems Know Where to Stop Being One System
Sometimes the right architectural move is not another coordination layer but topological surgery — a walk from the Titanic's bulkheads to ERCOT's February 2021 rolling blackouts to Bezos's 2002 API mandate.
- essays
- systems
- architecture
Most Systems Don't Hide Their Loops
A practical companion to the holonomy essay: how to surface the cycles that make real systems drift, with a spreadsheet and some patience — from a quarter-end inventory discrepancy to Wells Fargo's metrics machine.
- essays
- systems
- practice
Why Systems That Make Sense Still Fail
A quiet mathematical reason why locally correct systems produce globally wrong behavior — traced through Foucault's pendulum, the 2003 blackout, Knight Capital's forty-five minutes, and the night before Challenger.
- essays
- systems
- geometry
Teach git clone where repos belong
A tiny shell wrapper that intercepts the boring case of git clone and drops repos into a canonical path. Remove the forced context switch; leave the override path open.
- unix
- tools
- shell
A Template System for Research Writing
How I built a reusable architecture for publishing paper breakdowns and blog posts on one site — composable primitives, data-driven layouts, and responsive typography.
- engineering
- design systems
- next.js