Blog

Technical notes on NLP, stylometry, and the systems I build. No filler.

August 6, 202614 min read

commentdraft: replying in public on a client's behalf

Paid work: drafting public replies under a client's name, where a wrong price is a bill the client pays. The four ways the obvious build fails them, the approval gate that five pasted characters walked straight through, the three platforms whose comment text is not what the person typed, and a measured run where the bargain model billed 27 times more per comment.

CLIPythonPlatform APIsSecurityEvaluationAI/ML

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July 5, 20269 min read

Talos: a document-grounded team assistant, and the retrieval evaluation behind it

A walkthrough of Talos, a team chat platform whose assistant answers from a team's own uploaded documents with citations. It covers the retrieval pipeline (hybrid search, cross-encoder reranking, cited generation) and the paired evaluation that found and fixed the chunking bug behind weak answers, raising judged correctness from 0.657 to 0.855 on the workspace's own corpus.

RAGRetrievalEvaluationFastAPIMilvusAI/ML

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November 11, 202511 min read

Measuring your own writing voice, one function word at a time

How I built a tool that turns a few of your writing samples into a measurable fingerprint, scores how far a draft has drifted from it, and nudges it back, with honest numbers about what the signal can and cannot do.

NLPStylometryStyle TransferPython

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November 1, 202514 min read

When a speech-emotion model is really just recognizing the actors

A speech-emotion model can look impressive and still be mostly memorizing the 24 RAVDESS actors. Here is the leak, the speaker-independent pipeline that replaced it (frozen WavLM, layer weighting, attentive pooling, calibrated late fusion), and the honest speaker-independent result: 78.8%.

SpeechEmotion RecognitionEvaluationWavLMMultimodal

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July 24, 202514 min read

Hybrid RAG retrieval on a free CPU, and the evaluation where the fancy pipeline did not win

A plain-language walkthrough of ContextIQ: dense plus BM25 retrieval, reciprocal rank fusion, cross-encoder reranking, and grounded generation, all on a free CPU, with an honest four-way evaluation where no single arm sweeps every metric.

RAGRetrievalEmbeddingsBM25RerankingEvaluation

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July 15, 202512 min read

The Virtual Bank System: event-driven microservices and a correct transfer saga

A study guide to the Virtual Bank System: a Spring Cloud Gateway fronting four core services, synchronous REST at the edge and an event-driven transfer saga over Kafka. It explains the architecture, the transfer step by step, and the three mechanisms that keep the money path correct: the transactional outbox, idempotent consumers, and pessimistic locking.

MicroservicesEvent-DrivenSpring BootKafkaDistributed SystemsBackend

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