Recent essays
- 01202604-19Infrastructure · 11 min · medium
I Built 11 Trading Bots, Killed 9, and All I Got Was This $13 Loss
Eleven bots. $95 in starting capital. Nine of them got killed along the way, two limped through, and the whole exercise netted a $13 loss. A postmortem on architecture, slippage, and the specific hubris of assuming edge exists where it does not.
read on mediumEleven receipts. Two survivors. Hubris was the product. - 02202604-01AI experiments · 20 min · medium
The Algorithmic Gaze: Why I Outsourced My Melancholy to a Server Farm in Northern Virginia
Kevin Shields spent two years and $500,000 chasing a guitar sound. I generated a shoegaze album in forty-two seconds while eating a microwave burrito. A field report from Post-Effort Shoegaze.
read on mediumWritten on a Sunday, while a Fender lay untouched on the couch. - 03202603-03Infrastructure · 10 min · medium
The Ghost in the Machine: Setting Up a VLESS + Reality VPN for Perfect Stealth
WireGuard and OpenVPN are cooked the moment DPI sees them. Here is how to stand up VLESS + TCP + Reality + XTLS-Vision so your traffic is indistinguishable from a boring HTTPS visit to a real site.
read on mediumFull config in the piece. Tested from three hostile networks. - 04202601-26Creative coding · 13 min · medium
Roblox vibe coding
My 11-year-old wanted floating islands, gravity flips, and a leaderboard to flex on her squad. Instead of a weekend of Luau pain, we shipped it with Google Antigravity — and watched plays climb from zero to hundreds overnight.
read on mediumCo-authored, loosely, with an excited 5th-grader. - 05202304-17Meta · 8 min · medium
Generating websites content with AI
One evening, four directory sites, a small API bill, and an open question: how does Google actually treat hybrid human-and-machine content? A receipt, not a pitch.
read on mediumFrom the archive. Still holds up; still unresolved.