While in the lab

How I get and find music now

Fri, 17 Jul 2026 10:29:08 -0400

Inspired by a few recent posts on HN I wanted to make this post and share some of the ways I’ve been going about finding new music. There’s both a lot of ways to get music and ways to find new music. This is a list of some things that did/didn’t work for me.

While I have a wide range of interests, and after some lofty experimentation, I generally gravitate towards Cinematic Scores and Soundtracks, {Acid, Progressive, Italo, Future, …} House, {Pop, Skate} Punk, Hip Hop, and {Math, Alternative} Rock, so this will mainly be focused on how I found music in those areas.

Creating another MCP server, but this one is for research

Tue, 19 May 2026 20:25:44 -0400

In the weeks following my last blog post, I had a niggling feeling that I could apply an MCP server to my literature review. This post is my first run at exploring that.

During my grad degree, it has been one of the hardest aspects I’ve had to learn: How do you take papers and distill them down to a supporting argument, a newfound gap, or evidence that something you want to build has a high chance of working? It’s initially really time consumptive, and to my surprise, isn’t a uniform process for labs and researchers. For me I have a massive Google sheet with a tab for each area I’m investigating, a column for each aspect I want to explore in that area, and a row for each paper I’ve found. With some starter papers in hand I’ll review the papers it cites (backwards pass) and the papers that cite it (forward pass) and add new papers to the spreadsheet based on relevance to the area. Another student I know tries to follow something similar to a PRISMA approach by reviewing a conference at a time, screening papers, and including works in their manuscript based on eligibility. Another student frantically searches keywords on Google Scholar right before the deadline (this is ill-advised).

Creating an MCP Server to answer questions about me

Mon, 20 Apr 2026 09:41:39 -0400

I caught up with a friend on the phone on saturday who mentioned he was using an MCP Server to interact with Google Flights. Knowing how much it sucks to coordinate travel online, that immediately caught my attention. He told me about one for reddit and that used Gemini CLI (Google, you need to advertise this more!) to do it.

Later, also on the phone, in the same day, my dad asked “What is an MCP Server?”. In passing, I had heard it was a way for LLMs to get data, but I didn’t know for sure.

Organizing my screenshots folder with a local VLM

Fri, 03 Apr 2026 09:22:20 -0400

When I get a new mac the first things I do is run:

## Chosing where I want to store my screenshots
SCREENSHOTS_FOLDER_PATH="$HOME/Screenshots"
SCREENSHOTS_URL_STRING="file://${SCREENSHOTS_FOLDER_PATH}"

## Creating the folder
mkdir $SCREENSHOTS_FOLDER_PATH


## Telling MacOS to store my screenshots here
defaults write com.apple.screencapture location $SCREENSHOTS_FOLDER_PATH; killall SystemUIServer

so all my my screenshots don’t clutter my desktop (which usually has some busy image of a big city; Currently it’s this great picture of NYC).

The problem is that this folder gets full way too quickly. It’s things I want to remember, tweets that made me laugh, error logs from my console, diagrams/graphs from talks over zoom, etc. Over time it gets huge, and while I always say “I’ll organize it later and get rid of the the garbage later”, although later never comes.

Playing with Apple’s MLX

Thu, 25 Dec 2025 03:12:31 -0500

Earlier this year at WWDC 2025 (Apple’s annual developer conference) I got to meet the people who work on Apple’s frameworks and APIs. Most notably, I spoke with the people working on the MLX framework. While I’d heard of MLX in passing, I had no experience with it. I was surprised to see how close it is to PyTorch and how easy it was to jump into. I’ve played with it since then and wanted to make an intro post around it.

I looked out the window and saw it was grey outside

Tue, 13 Feb 2024 20:07:53 -0500

But I wondered how grey? Rochester has some of the greyest skies of all cities in the United States but after 9 years here, this felt like one of the sunniest winters ever. I couldn’t prove it, but I did want to compare the sky colors across months and hopefully see trends over a few years.

I had remembered previously seeing a NYC sky color website and loved the idea. I wanted to build something similar but for Rochester but also build out a dataset for future comparisons. This also gave me the chance to play around with another cloud service (I usually use Digital Ocean for all my hosting needs).