A field journal about code, artificial intelligence, infrastructure, and experiments that got slightly out of hand.
I signed a SAML login for one test workspace and arrived as an administrator in another. Every cryptographic check passed. The application had forgotten to ask which company trusted the key
Read the dispatch20 field notes and counting.
Written since 2019.
I fine-tuned a 6.7B language model without changing the 6.7B parameters. LoRA turned behavior into a tiny patch — and made the dataset look uncomfortably like source code.
Read storyA fictionalized writeup of the best bug I ever found: an 'export to PDF' feature that, five hops later, was running my code inside someone else's cluster. Target anonymized, chain real-in-spirit.
Read storyChatGPT is ten days old, a million people signed up in five, and my mother has opinions about it. Some notes from someone who's been poking this exact bear since 2020 — on what's actually new, what I got right, and the miss I want on the record.
Read storyThe weights are public, my GPU is warm, and I spent three weekends on a tiny game where one model writes the rooms and another draws them. The hard part isn't generation. It's agreement.
Read storyA daydream. Today I can ship a physics toy where you fling yourself up a tower. But I keep sketching the game I can't build yet — the one where the characters actually understand you
Read storyGPT can't actually hold a hidden word in mind — so I built the version of twenty questions where that's not cheating, it's the rules. John Wheeler got here first.
Read storyDon't give the model hands — give it a pen. A pipeline where GPT writes Kubernetes and Terraform changes as PRs that must survive a mechanical gauntlet before a human ever sees them
Read storyI built a living-room game over the holidays — everyone answers a question, one answer is a language model, find it. Tuning the bot to survive taught me what 'sounding human' actually means
Read storyWiring davinci between Alertmanager and Slack — six weeks of a language model reading my logs at 3am, with a built-in lie detector
Read storyGPT-3 API access finally arrived, so the commit-message benchmark of exactly one silly task gets its rerun
Read storyA guide to building small production systems where every upgrade is a swap, not a rewrite
Read storyPutting the whole stack in Terraform, then proving it by deleting the server — plus the difference between Terraform and Kubernetes everyone glosses over
Read storyMigrating my little stack from Swarm to lightweight Kubernetes, and the mental model that finally made K8s click
Read storyReading the GPT-3 paper, waiting for API access, and rethinking what fine-tuning is even for
Read storyThe GPT-2 commit hook failed exactly as promised, so I turned it around
Read storyFine-tuning GPT-2 small on 3,000 of my own git commit messages, with predictable results
Read storyRunning OpenAI's GPT-2 locally with the Hugging Face transformers library
Read storyBuilding a React App as a widget using WebPack
Read story