FretField
An interactive bass-fretboard app that teaches the neck as a spatial field of harmonic possibilities instead of a grid of shapes to memorize, with live pitch detection and guided practice.
Notes
Essays, studies, lab notes, and logs from across the lab. 15 in total.
Thinking in Groove
An interactive, piano-score-based book on how musicians design bass lines through harmony, motion, and time — the companion to Thinking in Layers, with the left hand as the bass and the right hand as its context.
Chessroll
A deterministic CLI that turns PGN games and FEN positions into polished short-form vertical videos, rendered from real Stockfish analysis and real chess rules rather than screen-recorded from a website.
Notaroll
A CLI that turns a single ABC notation file into a synchronized rolling-score video: modern engraved notation scrolling under a fixed playhead in sync with a realistic sampled piano.
Thinking in Layers
A mental model for jazz piano harmony built on superimposition — an underlying function, a structure placed above it, and the resulting color — taught through one fixed progression with playable, inline notation.
Thinking in Cycles
A practical, intuition-first guide to Linux performance engineering, paired with cyclelab, a CLI for generating controlled workloads and testing what a hypothesis-driven measurement actually proves.
Thinking in Packets
A conceptual mental model for computer networks — signals, frames, IP addressing, routing, TCP/UDP, DNS, TLS, HTTP, and cloud and container networking — built up from the smallest possible problem.
Thinking in Tokens
A conceptual mental model for modern AI systems — tokens, embeddings, attention, transformers, hallucination, retrieval, and agents — written with no math and no ML background required.
Efficient AI Systems
A 12-week research and engineering program investigating small language models on CPU-only infrastructure, from raw transformer inference to a production Go service on Kubernetes.
The Wrong Level of Abstraction
Playing *Love on Top* revealed a chord progression that looked foreign until I stopped analyzing chords and started following voice movement. A reminder that many complex systems appear irrational only because we are observing them at the wrong level of abstraction.
The Problem with "Dead Economy" Catastrophism
A critique of catastrophist AI narratives that transform conditional systemic risks into deterministic theories of collapse. The stronger critique of AI does not need apocalyptic certainty — it needs sobriety and better questions.
Relational Systems
Reading Carlo Rovelli's relational interpretation of physics led me into an unexpected rabbit hole through psychology, sociology, and organizational behavior. The result was a reflection on how human traits, performance, and professional growth may be far more relational than we usually assume.
Autumn Leaves
A study of Autumn Leaves — its ii–V–I movements, the harmonic relationship between G major and E minor, and why B7 creates such a strong resolution.
On Quality
Finishing Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and what stayed with me: the idea of Quality, impatience, and staying with things longer than you'd like.
Why I Started Bessi Labs
A field note on what Bessi Labs is, why it exists, and what it is not.