░░░ optimal frequencies ░░░
hi, i'm broadcasting ★
you can't tell if it's a good idea or a rant.
well met friends, this is optimal frequencies. i am thankful for your presence. i like coding, anime, and plants. this site is a place to put the thoughts about things. feel free to poke around ♥
★NEWI Over Engineered a Journal to Understand My Needs
I cannot say what I need out loud, so I built something that traces friction back to the value underneath it.
Playing Rocket League and Navigating your Career as a Software Engineer are not so Dissimilar Experiences
Rank distribution, mechanical skill, and tech workers as stewards of the history they are letting get deleted.
Intelligent Curation Tagging for Creative Workflows
14,000 RAWs and no taste-shaped filter. CLIP embeddings plus a probe trained on my own stars.
Building an Open-Source Safety Net for Home Hemodialysis
The machine beeps in the room and nowhere else. Ankaa pages a human instead.
A Brief and Impassioned Review of Hamilton the Musical and my Love/Mostly Hate Relationship with America
I love blackwashing US history. Hamilton is what made me admit most of it is wishful thinking.
Where to go from here
Answering the three questions: perception is virtual, and technology is the artifact of mapping lived experience onto a medium.
A Rant on The Genetic Lottery by Kathryn Paige Harden
You say material conditions. Harden says bet, let me test your genes to make sure though.
Emperor, Hostage, Despot!
Foucault, Arendt, Paxton. There is no singular authority — so why do we keep volunteering for a daddy?
Rules for Radicals
Power does not give itself up. Mill towns, prohibition, and what is left of southern organizing.
What Shines
The Temple of the Golden Pavilion. Can an act of destruction be virtuous?
Dont Let the Medium Dictate a Purpose for the Message
McLuhan, Baudrillard, Searle — and three questions about what a medium does to a mind.
Notes on Being Black and 100 Amazing Facts About the Negro
J.A. Rogers, afropessimism, and why the reminder that Black people are in history keeps having to be made.
a gift
Attack on Titan ch. 131 — dread, war, and whether we can hand the next generation anything worth having.
Making Blockbuster Movies that are Ideologically Meaningful Yet Unpolished in Order to Push Your View of the World Isnt Really Enjoyable
Tenet has ideas where a character should be. Nolan keeps trading people for premises.
Black Rednecks and White Liberals
Reading Sowell: culture as inheritance, and middleman minorities catching the blame for succeeding.
Deploying Transformer Models
Serving SOTA language models with FastAPI, Docker, and Huggingface — and where the container gives out.
Consuming the Plaid API with React and Go
A full-stack Plaid auth flow — Go on the back, React on the front, tokens in the middle.
The Undiscovered Self pt. 2
The shadow is the only door out. Individuation as a debt you owe the next generation.
The Undiscovered Self pt 1
Jung's mass man: what is left of a person after the state and the church each take their cut.
- on my deskHistory as a SystemJosé Ortega y Gassetrevisiting for a part three someday
- on loopHxH we are so backYoshihiro Togashi`You should enjoy the little detours to the fullest. Because that's where you'll find the things more important than what you want.`
- on my mindthe web as a garden versus a marketplaceEngelbart / Bush / Nelsonaugmenting intelligence vs selling boxes
two beds. up top, shapes i keep turning over. below, the ones i turned over long enough to say flat out — the post is the receipt. ⋆｡°✩
seedlings7
still a shape, not an argument.
- 🌻Digital IP, Crypto, and the Human Factor stage 3 of 3◉◉◉ownership, privacy, and governance beyond ideological extremes. i'm four drafts deep though so pray for me
- 🌱The Web Does Not Seem Mature stage 2 of 3◉◉○bush, engelbart, and nelson's xanadu, then the protocol wars. the web shipped without an ownership primitive, and surveillance became the business model
- 🌱Moderation Is Property, Not Speech stage 1 of 3◉○○you never owned the account, so a ban isn't censorship, it's eviction. meta → reddit → VPNs, one problem at three scales
- 🌱How Fluid Can Identity Be stage 1 of 3◉○○it's great being black. i don't believe in an a priori racial order. but without one, where does the identity go?
- 🌱SATIRE: The Black Tubi Pipeline stage 1 of 3◉○○when is satire satire? signifyin', Quan Millz, and black media archetypes
- 🌱The Commoditization of Health Data stage 2 of 3◉◉○23andMe went bankrupt making your genome a liquid asset…
- 🌱The Undiscovered Self pt. 3 stage 1 of 3◉○○stalled on Ortega y Gasset. jung got me to the shadow, but not to what a people does with one
taken root6
i will defend the sentence.
a simulation of cognition is not cognition. taking a turtle out and calling it a duck
↳ Dont Let the Medium Dictate a Purpose for the Messagepower has no throne, and kings come and go. build institutions that absorb the worst of them, so even when a despot gets elected nothing goes to shit
↳ Emperor, Hostage, Despot!perception is virtual. technology is the artifact left over when lived experience gets mapped onto a medium
↳ Where to go from herejung is right that the mass man is the crisis, and wrong that the individual is an atom. the self/other line is fluid, and the shadow needs a method, not vibes
↳ The Undiscovered Self pt. 2we should probably stop racializing each other. antiracism is an institutional practice or it is nothing
↳ Notes on Being Black and 100 Amazing Facts About the Negroan alarm that only beeps in the room is not a safety net
↳ Building an Open-Source Safety Net for Home Hemodialysis
posts that build on one another, in the order they were written. read the beats down the rail and you get the argument without me. ₊˚⊹ □ opens all of them at once
the map ate the nation3 posts
started with me and Zo arguing about whether the AI gon' revolt on us. ended up somewhere else entirely. three posts, nine months apart, and i did not clock they were one argument until the third one started citing the other two by name.
- Dont Let the Medium Dictate a Purpose for the Message2022
me and my boy arguing about engineering class hierarchies into AI, which sent me running to McLuhan and Baudrillard. leaves three questions on the table and one rule i am not moving on: a simulation of cognition is not cognition. that is a turtle. you calling it a duck.
- Emperor, Hostage, Despot!2022
so i take those same questions to the state instead of the machine. if a medium shapes a mind, what happens when the medium is a whole nation? turns out there is no throne to sit on — power bubbles up from below, Foucault said it twice — and we still keep volunteering for a daddy.
- Where to go from here2023
the one where i finally answer. perception is virtual, and i do mean virtual, not fake. technology is what is left over when you map lived experience onto a medium. and the myth of the state is load-bearing, which is exactly why the despot keeps working on us.
the self against the mass2 posts
jung's crisis of the west, in two parts. the state takes a cut of you, the church takes a cut of you, and you have to go find whatever is left.
- The Undiscovered Self pt 12020
names the problem and gives it a name i cannot shake: mass man. what is left of a person after both institutions take their piece. jung is not being subtle about who did this.
- The Undiscovered Self pt. 22020
the way back out, and what it costs. the shadow is the door, and the price of admission is admitting you are capable of evil. nobody wants that ticket. that is the whole problem.
◌ pt. 3 is stuck. jung got me to the shadow but not to what a whole people does with one — History as a System is sitting on my desk waiting on me.
who gets to be a person4 posts
four years of me arguing with books about race, inheritance, and what institutions actually do. watch the tone slide from polite note-taking to me telling a behavioral geneticist to beat it.
- Black Rednecks and White Liberals2021
sowell's version, taken seriously for once: culture travels, and the middleman minority catches the blame for doing well. i am writing it down here, not co-signing it yet.
- Notes on Being Black and 100 Amazing Facts About the Negro2022
the counterweight. J.A. Rogers, and the question actually sitting underneath the book — why does somebody have to keep reminding people we been here? that need is the thing worth studying.
- A Rant on The Genetic Lottery by Kathryn Paige Harden2022
and this is where polite ends. you say material conditions, Harden says bet, let me swab you first. make it make sense.
- A Brief and Impassioned Review of Hamilton the Musical and my Love/Mostly Hate Relationship with America2023
then i turn the same knife on my own side. i love blackwashing history and Hamilton made me admit most of it is wishful thinking. burr is a dummy, hamilton is a goof, and i still got patriotic for one whole bar.
freedom, and what it costs3 posts
three months in 2022 where every single thing i picked up was about somebody burning something down and having a reason for it.
- a gift2022
eren chasing freedom past the point where anybody is left to be free in. what i regret is not empathizing with the kid sooner. still think he a sigma idiot though.
- What Shines2022
mishima's acolyte torches the pavilion, and the question stops being literary. can an act of destruction be virtuous? beauty arrives late for that boy, and it arrives late for me too.
- Rules for Radicals2022
drops the literature entirely and looks at mill towns. power does not give itself up. the south is still paying for that and my grandmother's lungs are the receipt.
tools that know you3 posts
the build log. every one of these started as a thing i needed and could not buy, which is the only reason i finish anything.
- Building an Open-Source Safety Net for Home Hemodialysis2026
the machine beeps in the room and nowhere else. if a line comes loose at 3am while the care partner is asleep down the hall, that beep is decoration. ankaa pages a human instead.
- Intelligent Curation Tagging for Creative Workflows2026
14,000 RAWs and no filter shaped like my own eye. so the filter gets trained on my own stars — CLIP embedding, ridge probe, and the score drifts toward what i actually like.
- I Over Engineered a Journal to Understand My Needs2026
i cannot say a need out loud, so i built the thing that traces the friction back to the value sitting underneath it. that is how i found out playfulness was connection the whole time. took me until may.
places that informed the way i think. where one of them is actually holding up something i said here, it says so underneath. click around, donate where you can. ✧
- →she bon— sarah petkus builds body-borne sensors for arousal and publishes the schematics. the whole open-source answer to “whose body data, read by whom”⚖ carries weight for the commoditization of health data
- →being and the screen— vial's ontophany — technologies are not tools, they are structures of perception. the load-bearing beam under my third answer⚖ carries weight for where to go from here
- →the solid project— berners-lee's pods. what owning your data looks like when it isn't a coin⚖ carries weight for digital IP, crypto, and the human factor
- →revolutions podcast— mike duncan, all of it. the napoleon arc is the reason i stopped shitting on france⚖ carries weight for emperor, hostage, despot!
- →the welfare queen experiment— how one woman got turned into a national myth by a reporting incentive. the mechanism, documented⚖ carries weight for a rant on the genetic lottery
- →history of philosophy without any gaps — egypt— peter adamson starting where the canon usually declines to⚖ carries weight for notes on being black
- →save the archive— the NYT, the Atlantic and USA Today are blocking the wayback machine from preserving their journalism. sign it⚖ carries weight for rocket league & stewardship
- →living luminously— alicorn. the sequence that sent me on the whole mental-health thing, and the app is named after it⚖ carries weight for i over engineered a journal
- →metr: ai and experienced devs— measured instead of vibed — devs were slower with the tools and certain they were faster. keep it near any AGI conversation⚖ carries weight for don't let the medium dictate
- →sophie debenedetto— the elixir + liveview writing that made the dialysis monitor buildable by one person⚖ carries weight for an open-source safety net
- →healthcare marketplaces → ad tech— almost every state-run insurance exchange piped applications to meta, google, snap. race, zip codes, incarcerated family members. via a pixel⚖ carries weight for the commoditization of health data
- →captchas are a cookie farm— 819 million hours of clicking traffic lights, sold back to you as security. surveillance as the business model, in miniature⚖ carries weight for the web does not seem mature
- →xanalogical structure, needed now more than ever— ted nelson, forty years on, listing exactly what the web broke. bidirectional links, transclusion, getting paid⚖ carries weight for the web does not seem mature
- →enshittification— doctorow. moderation as an extraction lever, not a safety feature. it isn't incompetence, it's the phase they're in⚖ carries weight for moderation is property, not speech
- →code v2— lessig, free online. code is law, so moderation is architecture, and arguing it as policy never resolves⚖ carries weight for moderation is property, not speech
- →content credentials 2.3— the C2PA's open provenance standard. where a file came from and how it changed, carried in the file⚖ carries weight for digital IP, crypto, and the human factor
- →the crypto anarchist manifesto— tim may, 1988. one of the ideological extremes the essay is trying to get past⚖ carries weight for digital IP, crypto, and the human factor
- →open source bait and switch— open source as a weapon between companies. there's a retail word for it: loss leader⚖ carries weight for the web does not seem mature
- →the society of the spectacle, illustrated— debord for people who won't read debord. friendships and feelings turned into images, then sold back⚖ carries weight for the web does not seem mature
- →beware trivial inconveniences— the great firewall leaks everywhere and still works. you don't have to ban anything if you make it a little annoying⚖ carries weight for moderation is property, not speech
- →the oceanstore project— berkeley, ~2000. a global store on untrusted servers where anyone can sell capacity. ownership at the infrastructure layer, twenty years before crypto said it⚖ carries weight for digital IP, crypto, and the human factor
- →vitalik on network states— crypto's own guy reckoning with where code-as-governance runs out⚖ carries weight for digital IP, crypto, and the human factor
- →arendt, men in dark times— the pariah, and why humanity shows up in friendship, not fraternity. we only humanize the world by talking about it⚖ carries weight for how fluid can identity be
- →stewardship of global collective behavior— PNAS. we're rewiring how billions of people behave with no science of it. collective behavior as a crisis discipline
- →league of entropy— a public randomness beacon nobody owns. drand is what memento mori leans on
- →dougengelbart.org— augmenting human intelligence, 1962
- →as we may think by vannevar bush— the memex, seventy years early
- →mimms museum of technology and art— donate. atlanta needs this to survive
- →internet archive— voyager-for-the-unknown energy
- →heptabase— alan chan on the philosophy behind the tools
- →you may already be a sinner— tversky's hidden-variable blind spot
- →the c10k problem— still the reference for concurrency
- →tilde.town / the friendly web— proof the old internet is not dead
people, works, and living things that have earned permanent rent in my head.
- ⚓Eiichiro Oda"as long as people hunger for freedom, these things will exist."
- ✿Mishima and The Golden Pavilioncan acts of destruction be virtuous? what shines, burns.
- ✵Carl Jungthe undiscovered self. individuation against the mass!
- ♡hi momi made passive alerts for dialysis. safehemo is for people like you.
- ☄︎Rocket Leaguecars with rockets!
- ⚘hibiscus + lavenderangiosperms be real floral with it
engineer, gardener, one piece truther. i build local-first tools, grow hibiscus, and write essays you can't quite categorize.
→ more about me or hit □ to read it right here
Real-time monitoring and alerting for at-home hemodialysis — catches critical events like severe hypotension and blood loss and pages caregivers. Built for NxStage setups with Phoenix LiveView and a Rust sensor layer.
Photo-curation AI that learns your eye: each shot gets a CLIP embedding and a Ridge-regression probe trained on your star ratings, so the match score drifts toward what you actually like. Real-time gallery over a TB of RAWs.
Local-first reflective journal that traces friction back to unmet needs, value conflicts, and behavior patterns. No accounts, no telemetry — localStorage is the source of truth, with an optional Bun + SQLite backup sidecar.
A canvas-based text editor: ProseMirror's document model + Pretext's pure-arithmetic layout, every glyph drawn with ctx.fillText — no contenteditable. Caret and coordinate reads stay flat where DOM editors pay a reflow tax.
Elixir library for native camera RAW decoding on the BEAM — a Rustler (Rust) NIF wrapping libraw. The decode layer under the photo pipeline.
A digital time capsule: leave messages for the people you love, unlocked exactly when the time is right.
stamps → places worth your time
hover to see where they go ♥
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or just write me → qwelian@tutanota.com
- opened a fanfic draft. no, you can't read it yet
- shipped downtime — a d&d downtime planner for my table
- spike lee series: crooklyn → clockers → girl 6
- prosemirror-pretext 0.3.0 — touch, IME, marks survive copy/paste
- the window chrome got real + tags are a filter now
- ideation trace: tana + git → a searchable map of where ideas came from
- built a distributed-systems deep-dive curriculum in tana
- libraw 0.3.0 — camera RAW decoding on the BEAM
- site established. hello world ✦
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