Notes before they become conclusions

Short, edited pieces from my Obsidian notes: things I am building, reading, noticing, and changing my mind about.

This is the public edge of my private vault. The notes are intentionally small and close to the work—less like finished essays, more like useful checkpoints.

The target is one useful note every week, with enough context that another person can follow the thought.

Current threads

[[The constraint that keeps a project alive]] is about limiting active work. [[Start with the eval, not the model]] documents how I am approaching VAD Lab. [[What counts as a public project?]] is my publishing rule.

The constraint that keeps a project alive

A tight active list is not a productivity trick; it is a decision about where attention is allowed to go.

I can keep more than three ideas in my head, but I cannot move more than three projects forward without turning every one into ambient guilt.

The parking lot is part of the system

The rest can live in a real parking lot. A paused project is not abandoned—it simply has not earned a place in the current week. That distinction makes returning to it much easier.

Constraints do not make the work smaller. They make the next decision visible.

Related: [[What counts as a public project?]]

Start with the eval, not the model

Before choosing a favourite model, build the instrument that can prove where it fails.

VAD Lab begins with a comparison harness for WebRTC and Silero. I want sample audio, explicit measurements, and a way to replay the awkward cases that make a demo look better than a real tool.

Definition of a useful first release

The first release should be small: a clear README, three approaches, and the reasoning behind the trade-offs. A good public project makes its uncertainty inspectable.

Related: [[The constraint that keeps a project alive]]

What counts as a public project?

Publishing means sharing the work—not manufacturing the appearance of momentum.

Not a polished launch page with no working thing behind it. For me, a release gets a repository, a demo or clear reproduction path, and a short postmortem about what surprised me.

Honest labels are enough

Until then it can be in the build queue, labelled honestly. A project does not need to look complete; it needs to make its current state legible.

Related: [[Start with the eval, not the model]]