Artificial Life and General System Theory

As an undergrad I opened ‘General System Theory’ expecting the ultimate design principle, and found biology instead. Half a century ago Bertalanffy said life is not matter but organization: Lenia proves it on a computer.

July 12, 2026 · 13 min · rick

The Curse of Talent, the Blessing of Temperament

Is talent a blessing or a trap? An analysis of how talent conditioned by short reward cycles sabotages long-term effort, and a look beneath what we call grit, at the two engines underneath: taste and lack.

July 11, 2026 · 11 min · rick

Personal Information You Can Extract From a Genome

The Y chromosome and the surname are both inherited down the paternal line. That single fact was enough to recover real identities from ‘anonymous’ genomes, as shown in this 2013 Science paper.

July 5, 2026 · 4 min · rick

A ReLU Network Is One Giant Piecewise-Affine Function

A network with ReLU activations secretly carves input space into polytope pieces and, on each piece, collapses into exactly one affine map. This post builds that view up from a single neuron to interactive demos.

June 28, 2026 · 8 min · rick

Setting Up Korean IME (kime) on AWS DCV

How I fixed the issue where kime Korean IME only types one character before reverting to English on AWS DCV remote desktop.

February 21, 2026 · 3 min · rick

Shooting Dead Enemies: Why Academia Keeps Fighting Zombie Debates

Why we keep resurrecting settled debates, and the irony of this very essay doing the same

February 1, 2026 · 8 min · rick

My Father's Technology Timeline

In 1990, my father bought a computer for his five-year-old son.

January 25, 2026 · 4 min · rick

runpod-log: A CLI Log Viewer for RunPod

A CLI tool to fetch and monitor logs from RunPod GPU Pods in real-time.

January 25, 2026 · 1 min · rick

Do LLMs Have Thinking Styles? REI-40 Experiment on 5 Frontier Models

We administered the REI-40 dual-processing personality inventory to 5 frontier LLMs. The results reveal distinct ’thinking style’ profiles: from neutral responders to rational enthusiasts.

January 24, 2026 · 5 min · rick

psyctl: An LLM Personality Steering Tool

Building an open-source tool that controls LLM personality using Steering Vectors.

January 24, 2026 · 1 min · rick