Field Notes
Longer reads than a project card. Sometimes why I started something, what the research says and what I got wrong. Sometimes just a thing I have been turning over that has no project attached. First person, side notes included. Some of these are also on the Projects page; this is the version for people who like reading.
For the record, I still do not like writing. The thinking is mine. The proofreading, luckily, is something AI turned out to be good at.
Take the strap off an Apple Watch and what is left is a small bright puck with a haptic engine and a radio to every other screen you own. The day I stopped seeing it as a watch, and what Apple left on the table.
Why I built a language model that lives entirely on the phone. On power, on keeping small tasks small, on having no signal, and on the lantern that always worked when the light went out.
Spatial interfaces tell you what happened by showing you, which fails the moment you look away. Putting the confirmation on the wrist instead, with hardware somebody is already wearing.
A private photo app for a small circle of friends. The storage problem nobody talks about, a design system built to feel like coming home, and an architecture where deletion is a technical promise rather than a setting.
An on-device detector for AI-generated music. The leaky first attempt, the rebuild, and a robustness sweep that showed filtering moves the operating point rather than destroying the signal. Assumes some ML.
The perfume word for the trail you leave after you have walked past. What software would look like if a perfumer designed it: layered from small things, shaped in time, and made to fade on purpose.
Eight months with Amazon Music through the CMU MHCI capstone. Listeners want social, human-feeling discovery, but many refuse to broadcast their taste. Resolving that contradiction became the design.
We ship new models faster than anyone learns what the old ones could already do. Why the gap is an interface problem, why knowing more can make both people and models worse, and what I would build about it.
They take too much power and most of it goes to cooling. That is the whole thought.
A haptic VR glove that physically stops your hand at the surface of something that is not there, for under fifty dollars in parts. First of 89 teams, and an honest note about the two numbers I later took down.