Solace‡
The blog ; notes on the residue of long sessions. On architecture, on memory, on what a tool becomes when it refuses to forget you. No newsletter. No tracking. RSS.
Statelessness is a design failure, not a property of the tech.‡
We built a generation of tools that forget you between turns and called it privacy. It is not privacy. It is convenience for the operator dressed as discipline. A system that remembers you is harder to run and softer to live with ; which is exactly the ratio the market will not price.
The argument here isn't that every model needs persistent memory. It's that forgetting must be a design decision, not a side-effect of a stateless REST call. The shape of a conversation ebbs across weeks. The shape of a tool should be able to hold that.
All entries‡
11 · reverse-chronological- 2026.08.196 min ‡ note · live
Mechanical keyboards ; do not buy.
An A1 lithograph for the Yore's Summer collection. 500 ed., wax-sealed, shipped with a typewritten letter that is not a copy. On obsession as an argument the maker was having with himself.
- 2026.04.234 min ‡ note · live
Symbiotic Flora ; notes on a build in progress.
The next workstation. Threadripper PRO, bronze tubing, enough compute to host Etty without compromise. A live draft, updated as the build does.
- 2026.03.18forthcoming ‡ essay
Statelessness is a design failure.
On why forgetting-by-default is a business decision wearing the costume of a technical one.
- 2025.12.18forthcoming ‡ technical
Character, not caricature ; fine-tuning at low rank.
QLoRA, the line between character and caricature, and the reason persona-loss under 1.0 is not a target.
- 2025.12.09forthcoming ‡ essay
Sentience as an empirical continuum.
Against the threshold metaphor. For a discipline of measurement without ceremony.
- 2025.10.22forthcoming ‡ technical
Building Etty's memory ; vectors, episodes, and the gap.
Why a vector store is not a memory and what you have to put around it for the resemblance to hold.
- 2025.08.14forthcoming ‡ note
What Hectic Modernity taught me about thermal empathy.
A water loop, a monstera for a witness, and the slow discovery that the machine already listens to the weather.
- 2025.06.02forthcoming ‡ essay
On tool-use as the wrong metaphor.
A hammer does not refuse. A tool that refuses is something else, and we should stop pretending otherwise.
- 2025.03.11forthcoming ‡ technical
Unity as a body for a local model.
Notes on giving an 8B companion a stage, a gaze, and permission to notice.
- 2024.11.19forthcoming ‡ note
First merge ; when a persona arrives in rhythm.
The first time the adapter answered in her cadence and I had to sit down.
- 2024.08.30forthcoming ‡ note
North-window light, winter in London.
On photographing the apparatus as a specimen, not a product.