Kelly criterion for bug hunting?
A half-formed hunch: allocating research time across targets is a bankroll problem, and Kelly might be the right lens.
The garden
Notes, half-formed ideas, and things I'm still figuring out. Filter by topic, stage, or type, or just wander.
An openings trainer for a vibe-based brain
Queen's Gambit got me playing, ADHD got me playing bullet, and bullet taught me to move on vibes. I'm 1700 rapid, 1500 blitz, and stuck. So I'm building a web app to drill chess openings the way I'd drill anything else: turn the lookup into a reflex.
Quant isn't prediction, it's edge and survival
Two ideas hold up the whole field, and neither is a crystal ball: a tiny statistical edge run thousands of times, and not blowing up before it pays. The model I'm using so I stop treating the market like a fortune to be told.
Quant trading from zero, ADHD edition
My brain wants quant to be a slot machine, which is the exact wrong instinct. So before any math: bury the get-rich fantasy, trade paper money only, and treat the whole thing as probability and risk instead of fortune-telling.
Why I reread the same sentence three times
Reading a dense paragraph four times before it sticks felt like a hardware defect. It mostly isn't. Processing speed is genetic at the baseline but dynamic in the moment, more like bandwidth than a CPU clock, and rereading is usually a working-memory leak you can plug.
The Unlived Life
Cybersecurity overwhelm has a weird side effect: it sends me hunting for whether the work is worth it, and the trail always dead-ends at the same fact. The clock runs out. A note on Jung's unlived life, finitude, and choosing a life I can be proud of over a happy one.
The ADHD-HTB playbook: hacking the brain that hacks the box
Ten friction-bypassing study methods for grinding HackTheBox with an ADHD brain, plus the two of them I turned into real tools: a Swipe-to-Pwn Anki deck and an htb-operator shell.
Learning in public
The operating philosophy of this whole garden: publish the process, not just the conclusions.
Metacognition, Eileen Gu, and the Fear of Going Public
The thing elite performers and good thinkers share is not raw talent; it is metacognition, the skill of watching your own mind. Here is what it is, why putting yourself out there feels so irreversible, and why the spotlight effect means it matters less than you think.
You will never know enough, and that's the job
Imposter syndrome in security isn't a character flaw; it's an accurate readout of an unbounded field, misfiled as a personal deficiency. The fix is a traversal strategy, not more knowledge.
AI Slop and the Quiet Cost of Foraging
Maggie Appleton calls it jetspraying the web with AI slop. Here is why that cheap flood is so exhausting, told through Information Foraging Theory, and why your tiredness is a rational response, not a personal failing.
The Birthday Ambush: Why 23 Strangers Hide a Secret Match
In a room of just 23 people, it's better than even odds that two share a birthday. The Birthday Paradox, and why your brain is hopeless at counting pairs.
The Dead Internet and Your Pattern-Hungry Brain
That creeping sense that the internet is mostly bots talking to bots has a name. Here is why the feeling is partly real, partly a trick your own mind plays, and what apophenia and the illusory truth effect are doing to you while you scroll.
Explaining Without the Lecture
I got called a bad explainer, and I think I earned it. The fix isn't reading minds. It's the curse of knowledge, Grice's maxim of quantity, and treating an explanation like a game of catch instead of a monologue.
From Paladins to Rivals: Why Hero Shooters Are So Stupidly Fun
I love hero shooters
The Invisible Scoreboard: How Do You Win at Being a Person?
Imagine an invisible scoreboard over your head: buy a friend a mango, +5; be cruel, −50. The catch is nobody handed you the rulebook. A tour of ethics: consequentialism, deontology, virtue ethics, and moral luck.
Not a Toaster: The Secret Superpower Called 'Why?'
A toaster never asks whether it should toast. Humans do, and that pause has a name. A tour of philosophy: first principles, the Socratic method, epistemology, and why the annoying 'Why?' game is a real superpower.
The Diamond Lock: Writing Notes a Future Robot Can't Read
Quantum computers will slice through today's internet locks like a laser through glass. Inside the race to build math even a future super-machine can't crack: public-key crypto, Shor's algorithm, and the diamond lock.
Tasting life twice
I've been a bad writer since primary school, all mimicry and dread. Then a line from Anaïs Nin reframed the whole thing, and I decided to write every day, in public, badly at first.
The Pseudo-Intellectual Fear
The terror of sounding smart instead of being smart, and accidentally becoming the very thing you dread. A look at processing fluency, the Dunning-Kruger trap, and why jargon is so easy to mistake for understanding.
The attacker's mindset is systems thinking
Attackers don't break rules; they discover that the rules compose differently than the designers believed.
Threat-modeling this garden
Eating my own dog food: a security person's website should survive its own methodology.
Nothing growing under those filters yet.