Interests

Below are a few things I find endlessly fascinating (in no particular order). The world can feel heavy sometimes, but if you pay attention, it’s also overflowing with wonder. I like chasing that wonder—close to home and farther out.

    1.    Amateur Radio: You might recognize my callsign from the website address. I love experimenting, and POTA is a great excuse to get outside. If you’d like to connect, I’m on LoTW, QRZ, and POTA.app (happy to QSL).

    2.    Housing: One of my “big” causes. In the U.S.—and increasingly elsewhere—housing is often unaffordable, scarce, or simply not safe, and everyone deserves a secure place to call home. I’m especially interested in practical fixes: building more homes (including gentle density), reducing unnecessary regulatory friction, and funding solutions that help people afford housing directly. If we don’t make progress, inequality will keep hardening along geographic lines.

    3.    Artificial Intelligence: I’m especially interested in how large language models work and why they seem intelligent. If you want a solid, hands-on intro, I recommend Build a Large Language Model from Scratch by Sebastian Raschka. At the core, these models learn statistical patterns from huge amounts of text—broken into tokens and represented as vectors—until surprisingly useful structure “emerges.” Whether that counts as intelligence is still an open (and fascinating) question.

    4.    Woodworking: I enjoy making things with my hands. There’s a particular satisfaction in needing a nightstand and building that nightstand.

    5.    Photography: You can see my work at withoutamapphotography.com.

    6.    Programming: I also like building things with my mind. There are real parallels between constructing a house and designing software—though “move fast and break things” is a lot less charming in carpentry.

    7.    3D Printing: I’m a happy amateur with a Bambu P1S. I love designing useful objects and being able to print one-off parts, tools, and little solutions as needed.

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