Blog
Technical field notes and essays on AI security, observability, automation, self-hosting, Linux, and resilient systems.
- HyprSaver: Three Weeks of Manic Building a Screensaver for Hyprland
What started as a weekend Rust project to fill a missing screensaver gap on Hyprland turned into a three-week obsession — 30 GPU-accelerated shaders, a full optimization audit, ten failed wormhole attempts, and a pride palette pack.
- KISS the Ring: Building a Prometheus Exporter for Network Inventory
Why I built a single-binary Prometheus exporter for network inventory instead of deploying another IPAM server — and how constraint, Go, and an existing monitoring stack got me further than any purpose-built solution.
- The Satisfaction Paradox: On AI Editing, Ruskin's Illth, and the Writing That Feels Like Yours Until It Isn't
A paper revealed that LLM editing neutralizes your stance while making you feel more satisfied. Explored through Ruskin's wealth/illth framework, with practical techniques to keep AI as a lever instead of a crutch.
- Crutches and Levers: How to Actually Get Better With AI
AI coding agents let me ship projects I didn't understand. The uncomfortable process of fixing that turned out to be the point.
- Indirect Observability: Monitoring AI Systems That Know They're Being Watched
When AI systems learn to game direct evaluation, observability must shift from watching outputs to reading side-channels. A framework for monitoring systems that resist observation.
- Beyond Behavioral Scanning: Augmenting Garak with Mechanistic Persona Monitoring
Bridging the gap between knowing that an LLM failed a red team probe and understanding how — by integrating Anthropic's Assistant Axis research into Garak vulnerability scanning.
- Red Teaming on a Budget: Garak + Ollama + AMD RDNA2
A practical guide to LLM vulnerability scanning with Garak and Ollama on AMD hardware with ROCm 6.3 — because constraint is the mother of flexibility.
- The Map Is Not The Treasure: A Field Guide to Wealth You Can Actually Use
Money is a map, not the territory — and we've been navigating by a map that's missing half the math. A field guide to wealth, illth, and why the tokens are imaginary.
- Open Brain Surgery: A Guide to API Shimming in Production
How a corrupted artifact server, a broken backup, an incompatible API, and a ticking clock forced an emergency production migration — and why a 400-line FastAPI shim was the right tool for the job.
- Data Fortress to Open Source: How Unlearning the Lessons of a High-Control Group Shaped My Path in AI Security
How Unlearning the Lessons of a High-Control Group Shaped My Path in AI Security
