Essays

Dopamine.Diet: A Local-First Productivity System for Serial Project Switchers

A local-first deep-work dashboard for people who keep switching projects before anything ships.

Parameter Golf: From Zero to a Working Cloud Baseline

Reproducing OpenAI's Parameter Golf language model training challenge on RunPod — covering environment setup, SSH debugging, dataset wiring, and landing a val_bpb baseline on a single H100.

Reproducing the LPCVC 2026 Track 1 Baseline on Qualcomm AI Hub

A walkthrough of reproducing a working CLIP image-to-text retrieval baseline on XR2 Gen 2, covering environment fixes, SSL certificates, dataset paths, and preprocessing gotchas.

I Built 9 AI Agents to Write My Thesis — Here's How It Works

A first-time thesis writer, not a strong coder, built an open-source AI agent system that helped him publish in a Q1 journal and defend his thesis. This is the full story.

A Framework for Flying Smarter: The Practical Deployment Guide

After 8 GSD levels, 6 models, and 3,368 tile-label pairs, here's the condensed operational guide for deploying AI-based oil palm monitoring with a drone.

From Pixels to Meters: The Math Behind Canopy Size Estimation

A segmentation mask is a collection of pixels. Here's how we convert that into a physical canopy area in square metres and an equivalent diameter — with the full derivation and error analysis.

The Hybrid Paradox: Why SAM + YOLO Sounds Better Than It Is

SAM 2.1 was trained on 1 billion masks. My 56MB YOLO model still outperformed the hybrid pipeline in most conditions. Here's the detailed explanation.

Six Models Enter, One Problem Wins: A Head-to-Head Segmentation Showdown

I trained YOLOv8, YOLOv11, Mask R-CNN, and two SAM hybrid pipelines on oil palm drone data. Here's what the numbers actually showed — including the result that surprised me most.

Building the Dataset Nobody Had: Annotation, Corruption, and the Split That Kept Everything Honest

How I built a multi-resolution oil palm segmentation dataset from scratch — including the 301 corrupted label files I had to fix before anything could run.

The Drone That Couldn't See: Why Altitude Breaks Your AI Model

A model trained at 3cm resolution failed at 6cm. Same drone. Same plantation. Different altitude. Here's the physics and math behind why — and what to do about it.

I Built an Obsidian Plugin to Publish to Jekyll

An open-source Obsidian plugin that converts wiki-links, image embeds, and callouts to Jekyll-compatible Markdown — then copies everything to your _posts/ folder.

Why YouTube Comments Are Disabled on University Wi‑Fi

How content filters cause it and why a VPN fixes it.

How I Built This Blog in One Session — With AI as My Co-Pilot

From zero to a fully-featured minimalist blog using Jekyll, GitHub Pages, and AI pair programming. A transparent look at ethical AI-assisted development.

How I Used GIS to Map a Pandemic: Lessons from Spatial Epidemiology

College Buddy: The First Product I Ever Built (Before AI Was My Thing)