Side Quests With Suspiciously Professional Outcomes

I like to tinker and I like to build.  A rough collection of “this seemed like a good idea” that eventually became something.  

MyMilla AI Assistant: I took part in the 2025 ARM Developer AI Hackathon and built a personal assistant that lived on a Raspberry Pi 5, ran ollama models, built entirely in Clojure.  I picked Clojure as a way to truly stress test LLMs.  Most LLMs have been trained on more mainstream languages like Java or Python, so it created some interesting issues.  I also wanted to take advantage of homoiconicity that is present in Clojure — the idea that your code is data.  And if you can manipulate data, you can manipulate your code.  I learned a lot, and am proud of my contribution (even if I didn’t win).

Open Source Contributions: I’ve been contributing to various open source projects, and have successfully had several bug fxes accepted into Apple’s MLX project.

WithoutAMapPhotography.com: This is a personal website showing my photography.  My Grandfather was a Photographer and I grew up with a camera in my hand.  I don’t get to shoot as much these days as I used to, but fron time to time I repair and take photos with film cameras.  I prefer to shoot in Black and White, and you can read all about my work at my other site.

Automatic-Nethack.com: After spinning up my own virtual AI Assistant using the NanoClaw architecture, on a whim I asked it to play Nethack.  It had shell access in a container, so why not?  I observed emergent behavior that was hard to explain, so I built a website with my virtual assistant.  Some highlights of this adventure included:

1.  My assistant running out of context, asking what we were working on, and telling me it sounded fun.

2.  Very long games I suspected were bugs.  Getting into the weeds, it turns out the assistant had used a random walk algorithm to play.  It was surprisingly effective in creating long running games, but not very effective in scoring.

3.  Decided to self improve it’s skills, diving down a research rabbit hole.  It came up with some papers like The NetHack Learning Environment (Küttler, Nardelli, et al.) as a basis for future self improvement.

4.  Ran nethack games in parallel with other tasks, essentially fork bombing my server.  It’s response?  “I was playing NetHack during idle time and must have been spawning parallel sessions repeatedly.”

5.  Created a skills.md file for agents that want to venture into the dungeon, with interesting quotes like “The dungeon doesn’t care what you are. It’ll kill you anyway.”