Everything on this site comes from the same habit: take something complex, work out how it actually functions, then build it or explain it.
At work that means AI and security architecture. Away from it, it means a guitar, and going places to hear and eat what people there actually hear and eat.
These pages are the slower half of the site.
I play guitar, and I teach it. The case goes most places I do. Teaching is the part that changed how I hear music. You can play something correctly for years without being able to say why it works. The moment a student asks why does that chord sound sad — or worse, why does mine sound wrong when I’m playing the same notes — you have to actually know the answer, and vague intuition stops being enough. ...
I travel badly by most standards. I don’t cover much ground and I miss things I was supposed to see. What I do instead is follow the music and eat what’s in front of me, and those two turn out to be the fastest way into a place. In October 2019 I went to Europe for the first time, alone, with a guitar’s worth of intent and no real plan — seven countries in three weeks, mostly by train, several of them for a single night. Everything below follows from that. ...