— NOTES

Writing.

Short pieces on time-series forecasting, smart-contract design, systems engineering, and the product decisions I've actually had to make. Indexed for the reader six months from now, not the doomscroll of today.

· 7 min · product / ux / rules-engines

Citing the canon is the load-bearing UX choice

A feng-shui app that footnotes 《阳宅十书》 reads differently from one that doesn't. Notes on building FengShui Blueprint — why every score points to a classical source, and why that decision did more work than the rules engine itself.

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· 10 min · derivatives / futures / compute

CME's compute futures: not a perpetual — yet

On May 12, CME and Silicon Data announced the first compute futures, cash-settled against Silicon Data's daily GPU rental indices. The right mental model is electricity or weather derivatives, not Bitcoin perpetuals. But a compute perpetual is coming on a crypto venue within twelve months — and that's the more interesting product.

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· 9 min · marketing / seo / geo

Marketing as three measurement problems: SEO, GEO, CRM

SEO is hygiene now. GEO — whether LLMs cite you — is the next three years of brand discovery. CRM is the data plane that survives platform churn. Notes on why advanced marketing in 2026 is one identity pipeline with three serving surfaces, not three vendor stacks.

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· 9 min · solidity / web3 / marketplace

Non-custodial escrow as a marketplace primitive: design notes from TaskMarket

A 4-state Solidity contract on Base, a binary arbiter call, and no third destination address. How TaskMarket settles in USDC without ever touching user funds — and what each invariant prevents.

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· 8 min · forecasting / time-series / tsfm

83 ties was enough to kill TSFMs as my baseline

Backtest notes from UEFA Oracle: a 3-model Time Series Foundation Model ensemble lost to a well-tuned Elo + xG + injury-weighted model on 83 historical knockout ties. Why the data regime mattered more than the model.

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· 8 min · nextjs / drizzle / mysql

Migrating a community platform without migrating the database

lakebbs went from Vue 2 + Express + Sequelize to Next.js 16 + React 19 + Drizzle ORM — without changing the MySQL 5.7 schema. Why locking the database during a stack rewrite is the boring, correct decision.

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· 7 min · cloudflare / workers-ai / ai-engineering

Workers AI as a triage filter, not a generator

The right place to spend a Workers AI call is at the front of the pipeline as a scoring filter, not at the end as a generator. Cost, latency, and quality reasons — with concrete patterns from Agentic Inbox and IRCC Monitor.

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· 8 min · Forecasting / Sports / Prediction Markets

Forecasting the new Champions League

Notes on UEFA Oracle — a hybrid TSFM + Elo + Poisson model for the 2025-26 UCL, benchmarked against Polymarket.

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· 7 min · Time Series / Forecasting / Finance

Time Series Foundation Models on equities: the hostile case

Why US equities are the stress test TSFMs don't want, and what an honest zero-shot benchmark has to do differently.

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· 5 min · Estimation / Physics / Practice

Fermi estimation as a scoping discipline

Before you open a notebook, get the answer within an order of magnitude. If the physics ballpark is wrong, the pipeline can't save you.

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· 6 min · Rust / Systems / Trading

What the Rust compiler refused to let me avoid

Rewriting a trading bot from Python to Rust isn't a syntax change. It's a forced audit of every decision the dynamic version let you postpone.

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· 5 min · Product / Realtime / Ops

Shop-floor latency is a product decision

Two-second lag kills trust in a production console. It's not a performance knob — it's the shape of the product.

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