Recent content in Field Log on Sentimark
Somewhere in every production system there is a function nobody loves. It is four hundred lines of if-statements. It checks a deny list, then a beta flag, then a tenant tier, then a regex somebody wrote in 2019, then a country table, and then, if the stars align, it lets the request through. It is called something dignified like evaluate_policy . It is the slowest thing in the hot path and…
One sentence kept turning up in the literature, in three different papers, in almost the same words: the standard FPGA routing algorithm is intrinsically sequential . Three research groups, three decades of tooling, one verdict, routing on a GPU cannot be done. I disagreed, and I built the engine that settles it. Routing is the dominant stage of FPGA compilation, and the reason it resists…
A week after I wrote about the featherweight pattern , my brother sent me a text. He was sitting at his kitchen table, laptop open, playing a test game of Keth-Veyr . His phone was propped up on his water glass next to his physical character sheet. “I hit myself with a fireball,” he wrote. “I clicked save on the laptop. It took two seconds to upload, and then I had to swipe-down…
Eight weeks ago I was on the wrong side of a question. The question was: Do I actually believe what I’ve been saying out loud for years, that I can build a better embedding engine than the teams shipping the ones the world uses, or am I a person who says that and works somewhere safe? I’d been working in enterprise software for decades, as an architect. The kind of role that pays well…
We call it Riverside living. The river is, technically, right there, forty yards off the back fence. It is also entirely invisible, because between us and the water sits a berm the size of a beached whale, a long earthen wall the flood district built to keep the Sacramento from coming over for dinner uninvited.
It started with a character sheet. My brother and I have been rolling dice together since we were kids: first edition AD&D, the version with the attack matrices and the saving-throw tables you had to memorize. I built him a digital sheet: dice that actually tumble, hit points you drag to spend, spell slots you tap to burn. A toy. A gift. Then he said the thing that turned a toy into a question:…
The numbers were real, and that was the problem. We had an embedding model we believed was about to top MTEB English, and a reviewer had agreed to prove it: reproduce the benchmark against a live endpoint, on their own schedule, over the next three days. That is a wonderful sentence and a terrifying one. Wonderful because someone credible was finally going to confirm the work. Terrifying because…
There’s a particular kind of dinner that isn’t about the food, exactly: it’s about deciding the evening is going to be nice and then making it true, one pan at a time. This was one of those. Dinner for two, prepared with love, eaten at the counter by candlelight while the garden’s first real tomatoes finally earned their keep. The reviews were rave. The wine, I’ll…
A Note Before You Begin Just past the berm at the end of our street, the Feather River runs south toward the valley. Most days it is quiet: green, slow, half-hidden by cottonwoods. In dry years it pulls back to a thread. In wet ones, after the Sierra snows let go, it pushes against the levee and reminds the town it is there. The berm does not stop the river. It lets us live close to it.
This is the kind of trip that looks ordinary if you flatten it into logistics. Redwood City to Eugene. One long day in the Tesla, two charging stops, and we arrive at family. A few days on Damon’s porch. The Oregon coast if the weather cooperates. Then the long road home. That is the map version. The feeling version is stranger and better. I am getting ready to play postman across California…
Forgive me for a moment while I rant. I’m a solo founder running a pre-revenue AI infrastructure company. This week I burned $100 in three hours on Claude Code “extra usage” doing routine work. I want to walk through what happened, because the pricing structure that produced that bill is not an accident, and the pattern is showing up across the industry. For context, I was…
There are machines you understand by reading about them, and there are machines that make reading feel beside the point. Big Boy is the second kind. Union Pacific brought Big Boy No. 4014 through Marysville on April 9, 2026, during its America 250 coast-to-coast steam tour. The public schedule had the stop at the 7th Street crossing from 3:30 to 3:45 p.m. 1 That is the sort of sentence a calendar…
I did not set out to build a negation dataset because models could not understand the word not . The obvious version of the problem has improved. Give a frontier LLM a clean sentence and ask what happens when you insert not , and it will often answer correctly. That does not mean the retrieval layer has learned the same lesson. The failure I cared about lives in the gap between surface similarity…
A speed nerd met spaCy and said… what if we did it this way? That sentence is a joke, but only barely. The problem was not spaCy. spaCy was doing exactly the part I wanted it to do: tokenize text, assign part-of-speech tags, expose dependency labels, and give me stable linguistic features without turning the pipeline into a research project. The problem was the loop after spaCy. I was…
In November 2025, the question was simple enough to sound rude: Why does the world need another vector embedding tool? The honest answer is that the world does not need another wrapper around somebody else’s model. It does not need another dashboard with a prettier cosine similarity demo. It does not need a new place to paste text and receive a list of floats. But it does need better…
Some infrastructure questions become too expensive just by being asked often enough. Is this IP hot? Has this tenant crossed a boundary? Does this key belong to the set of things we should treat differently right now? At small scale, you ask the question directly. You look in a database, call a cache, increment a counter, wait on a network hop, and move on with your day. At meaningful scale, that…