Notes
Notes
Technical explanations, build logs, experiments and things worth remembering.
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- EXPERIMENT
Evaluation: How Do You Know It Worked
"Looks right" and "is right" are different claims — an agent only checked by eyeballing the transcript will drift for weeks before anyone notices.
- ARCHITECTURE
Guardrails: Stopping the Agent From Hurting Itself
Capable and safe to leave unattended are different claims. Guardrails close the gap — permission boundaries, confirmation on the irreversible, and a cap on how much one bad turn can do.
- TUTORIAL
Homelab Storage You Can Afford to Lose
The lab rule inverted: decide what is disposable first, protect the tiny remainder properly, and skip the NAS you were about to buy.
- ARCHITECTURE
How AI Agent Memory Actually Works
Memory in AI agents isn't one thing. It's a stack of storage, indexing, and retrieval systems that fail in different ways.
- ANIME
How Anime Fakes Speed Without Moving the Camera
A held frame, held long enough to be uncomfortable, reads as faster than a camera that actually pans — because your eye is doing the moving instead.
- MMA
How Judges Actually Score a Close Round
The 10-point-must system rewards a specific, narrow definition of dominance — and most disputed decisions come from fighters optimizing for a different one.
- TLDR
MFA Fatigue: Why Push Notifications Became the Weak Link
- BUILD
Observability: Watching an Agent Think
Part four called episodic memory the layer most agents skip. This is that layer, built — every decision logged, because a silent failure is the only kind you can't debug.
- TUTORIAL
Picking Homelab Hardware Without Wasting Money
The used-enterprise trap, the mini-PC sweet spot, and why your first server should cost less than your monitor.
- TUTORIAL
Pi-hole: Ad-Blocking for the Whole House
One DNS server, every device on the network, zero browser extensions — and why this is the workload that actually convinces skeptics.
- ARCHITECTURE
Planning and Reasoning: When One Call Isn't Enough
One tool call at a time works until the task has more than one step with a dependency between them. Then the loop needs an explicit plan, not just a next guess.
- TUTORIAL
Proxmox in One Evening
Install the hypervisor first, even for one machine — snapshots make every later experiment reversible, which is the whole point of a lab.
- BUILD
Shipping an Agent That Survives Contact With Reality
Nine parts from the bare loop to a system with real memory, evaluation and guardrails — what actually mattered, and the one layer that made every other layer debuggable.
- TUTORIAL
Tailscale: Reach Your Lab From Anywhere
Flat, private networking to every lab machine with zero opened ports — and why port forwarding was never the answer.
- ELI5
The Agent Loop
Call the model, parse a tool call, run it, feed the result back. The whole mechanism takes an afternoon — everything else in this series is what happens after.
- ELI5
The Difference Between a Risk and a Control
A risk register full of controls with no named risk behind them is the most common failure mode in risk management, and it's invisible until an incident asks the question directly.
- BUILD
The Lab, Eight Parts Later
What actually got built, what it cost, and the two incidents that proved the 'allowed to break' rule from part one was the right one.
- TUTORIAL
Tool Use: Giving the Agent Hands
The tool schema is a contract, not a suggestion. Most tool-calling failures are the contract being too loose, not the model being too dumb.
- ELI5
What a Homelab Actually Is
Not a datacenter in your closet. A place where breaking things is cheap — which changes what you should buy and what you should skip.
- ELI5
RAG Explained Like a Real Workflow
Retrieval-augmented generation is a research assistant with a filing cabinet. The failures are filing failures, not thinking failures.
- TLDR
What MCP Actually Does
- BUILD
Building RepoTwin
A repo intelligence twin — clone, index, embed, map, query. What worked, what I rewrote twice, and where it still falls down.
- EXPERIMENT
Running Small Local Models on My Homelab
Q6_K quantization, GGUF, and what 24GB of VRAM actually buys you in real throughput rather than benchmark numbers.
- VISUAL
AI Agent Architecture Map
- TUTORIAL
How I Structure AI Agent Repos
A clean, boring layout that survives an agent growing from one script into a system — and the one rule that keeps it clean.
- RESOURCE
Cool Tools for AI, Cyber, and Builders
- ARCHITECTURE
Fraud Controls I Actually Look For
The signals, rules and reviews that catch real fraud — and the theatrical ones that mostly generate work.
- ANIME
Anime Interface Design Notes
HUDs, typography and motion language from anime that hold up as real interface design — and the parts that only work on screen.
- MMA
Fight IQ Breakdown
Angles, distance management and timing — the three things that separate a technical fighter from a fast one.
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