When Internal Memory Fails: A No-Solder Wii U Recovery
It was just another hot Sunday at smol HQ. My wife and I were playing games with the family during our biweekly FaceTime game night, and as we were getting...
smolnero
Latest posts
The Zen of Parallel Programming: The Posture of a Kernel
As the journey through parallel programming continues, I shift my attention toward GPU kernels, and what better place to continue than the HipKittens: Fast and Furious AMD Kernels paper. A...
The Zen of Parallel Programming: The Big I and the Global Sum
As I continue to trek my way through An Introduction to Parallel Programming, I find myself seeing how parallelism is not only a priority in our communication with hardware, but...
The Zen of Parallel Programming
As I continue reading An Introduction to Parallel Programming, I cannot help but notice a connection between communication among processors, communication among human beings, and communication within the individual self....
Wedding Thank You Cards
In September 2024, Edgar and I got engaged. Little did we know the journey we had just begun. The day we bought our rings, we came home to find out...
I Built Ralphex This Weekend
For Anyone Building Under ConstraintsI'm an independent developer navigating the job market while trying to ship dependable product for Smol Nero. The tools that give you real leverage — Claude...
From Enlightenment to Alignment
At smolnero, we believe enlightenment is not a distant spiritual achievement or a final state to arrive at. It is the ongoing process of discovering truths about yourself — and...
Thank You: The Origin Story of the App
A reflection on gratitude, technology, and first principle connection. When gratitude becomes habitual, it changes how we live. This principle has shaped our philosophy. Years ago, during an office renovation,...
SmolFinance’s Storage Layer
As I continue working to move from a Go noob to a software craftsman—much like someone learning woodworking to craft their own furniture, this piece breaks down /db/store.go from first...
SmolFinance
““What I cannot create, I do not understand.” - RF” What is SmolFinance? SmolFinance is a local-first trading and journaling application, written in Go. When I first began exploring the...
detached reservation: Cold Heart
That fear of being disliked—or worse, hated—by others. You know it, they know it, everyone knows it. It’s a quiet, persistent ache that sits just below the surface. The moment...
detached observation: Evaluation Phase
Eventually, the evaluation phase starts to resemble meditation: a quiet loop, where even mundane thoughts raise questions — not to resolve, but to refine. These aren’t answers; they’re filters. Each...
detached observations: Semantics Phase
Sometimes, challenges are required. And those challenges—without fail—inform you when something isn’t working. Those are the markers. My body stayed longer than it should have, but the feedback loop was...
Looking for Seeds
Merchant Cash Advances (MCAs) are gaining popularity in the loan market. These short-term loans were introduced under the guise of supporting small businesses—providing short-term capital to help cover expenses in...
detached observations: Parsing Phase
After something is dequeued, it doesn’t just disappear. It asks to be made legible. This is where we begin to shape what’s surfaced—assigning structure, context, and meaning. Parsing isn’t about...
Thankless, is Mother
The data gathered from my latest internal conquests is simple: I can really hate myself. But that’s nothing new. Like someone with a timeshare, I’ve got territory permanently reserved in...
detached observations: Dequeue Phase
Markers associated with trauma that are ready to be dequeued often show up as familiar tension, or the subtle acknowledgement of behavioral loops. This is where retrospection can trigger a...
detached observations: Enqueue Phase
Before anything can be processed, it has to be held. Before meaning is made, there has to be space. Not the kind of space that looks good on a calendar,...
Grievance of Time: System Calls We Never Authorized
Time is one of the few real resources we have. That’s not new. But how we measure it—how we experience it—varies wildly depending on where we’re standing. In socioeconomics, it’s...
detached observations
We’re quick to name the copier and the copied—was it stolen, or not? What’s the lineage of the stoles? Does it matter? I don’t believe so. That obsession distracts us...
The Illusion of Time, the Overflow of Being
Time has quite literally been taken too seriously by humankind. Not just time itself — but all the layers we've wrapped around it: schedules, metrics, KPIs, urgency cycles. These clusters...
The Smol Chef: Return to the Classroom
After a year away from teaching cooking classes in Austin, there's something symbolic about finding myself back in a classroom here in Denver. I've always treasured teaching these classes. Each...
Less Scared
Recently, I watched a Lex Friedman interview with Eliezer Yudkowsky about the dangers of AI. Yudkowsky's fear manifested physically – his shoulders tensed, his voice wavered, and his eyes darted...
Slash and Burn
““Watching a forest fire from a distance can be compared to watching a partner go through their own internal journey. The past is burning up - to make room for...
Recovery is The Compiler for Thank You.
1. Lexical Analysis: Breaking down complex experiences into basic units 2. Syntax Analysis: Organizing these units into coherent patterns 3. Semantic Analysis: Extracting meaningful insights 4. Code Generation: Producing actionable...