Thirty years of building instruments: confocal microscopes to AI memory.
Sites I run
Elsewhere
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From Sherlock Holmes and Nazi Enigma machines to SynthID: a short history of hidden signatures, statistical clues, and the strange new world of AI watermarking.
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A week of unglamorous housekeeping — license files, corrected READMEs, a landing page rewritten to tell the truth — sent the mind looking for competence, and it found the same argument twice: once in a letter about Apple's thirty years of declining to keep its own good ideas, and once in a memory of a confocal microscopy core.
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Almost every AI memory system being built today is a filing cabinet with a flattering name. The distinction between what a mind remembers and what a filing cabinet holds is categorical — and almost no one building in this space has noticed.
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The story of a bug that left no mark: an invisible character a system library kept silently deleting, the discipline of distrusting your own instruments, and a ghost that countersigned my drafts while I was busy describing it.
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Not just another local language model, but an instrument you can look inside — one that shows its reasoning, lets you watch every layer think, and holds still while you experiment on it. Built by someone who spent a career making the invisible visible.
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Performance and observability are usually a trade-off: the model you can read isn't the one that runs fast. Apertura, a faithful, from-scratch rebuild of Gemma-4 on Apple Silicon, is a project that…
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From biological systems to building AI — a logbook of the journey between layers, where the boundary between tool and entity is no longer clean.
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A brightly lit window in Beverly Hills. A bejeweled mannequin duo, awash in chiaroscuro light, are glittering under the bright spotlights. They do not blink, nor flinch or age. But they may be no…
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At the La Peer hotel lobby, David van Eyssen presents moving shapes across oversized screens, glowing in a flat, ghostly green. For David van Eyssen, the work circles around Cryptomnesia — memories…
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Will Rogers Beach, March 2021. The world had slowed, but not stopped. The beach had emptied in a way that wasn’t seasonal. I had taken to walking it alone. And then I saw it: a spin class, improbably…
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Will Rogers Beach on a late afternoon. I enjoyed the view over the Pacific Ocean, the breeze with just a hint of salt and gasoline. And there she was, a 1959 Corvette C1 sunbathing at the edge of a…