My work lives in a few different places. Elarity Systems is the software workshop; Alpha Recursion follows the research and the questions behind it; Twilight Tales is the photographic journal. Here are the destinations, the professional record, and the latest published work from across them.
Elsewhere
What I make, think about, and see
Recent writing & photographs
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Is SwiftUI Killing Apple's Vision Pro?
SwiftUI is a great tool for wrapper apps. It is also the only door onto Vision Pro's 3D content, and it was never built to know what time it is. What that costs anyone trying to render scientific data — a confocal dataset, a live sensor feed, a CAD model — on the one Apple device built to show things happening in real time.
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Seven Unlocks for Working With AI
Most people stop at the first answer AI gives them. Here are seven small habits, each one unlocking a new capability, that take you from chatting with AI to actually working with it.
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A Weekend on the Stage
In 2010 I left HeLa cells on a confocal for a weekend to see whether they would survive. The raw data is long gone, but one compressed QuickTime export survived. Sixteen years later it was enough to recover the channels, track 959 cells through three generations, and finally answer the question properly.
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The School and the Fire
For two centuries, defeated nations turned to their schools, and the same classrooms produced both renewal and revenge. From Fichte in occupied Berlin to the book burnings on the Opernplatz, a story about education as a catalyst, and a question about AI.
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AI Watermarking, Nazi Enigmas, and Sherlock Holmes
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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When the Mind Wanders
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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Memory Is Not Storage
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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A Study in Invisible Betrayal
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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A Microscope for a Mind
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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Apertura. Peek inside the Artificial Mind
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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Carbon, Silicon, and the Ghost
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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Do Mannequins Dream of Electric Botox?
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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The Artist and the Cipher
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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Sunset Spin Class
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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Parked at the Edge of The Ocean
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…