Hope you enjoy this episode!
As an aged father of little ones, I can’t write AND podcast at the same time. My sleep-deprived brain just can’t handle it.
So yes, the written version below is, in fact, AI generated based on what I discuss on the pod. Thus, the best experience I think is the audio, but in case you can’t experience that, a written version is below.
Let me know if you enjoy it by subscribing below, I hope you do! See you next week…
📍 Working From the Kids’ Playroom (And Somehow Liking It)
Good evening, everybody. It’s been a long time since I’ve done one of these, and honestly, this whole stream-of-consciousness podcasting thing might actually be easier than trying to write a full newsletter every week. You have no idea how long those take. Even the simple ones. They look like 15 minutes of typing but they’re not. They’re hours.
So yes — I’ve officially been banished to my kids’ playroom downstairs. That’s my office now. Oddly… I kind of love it? They drift in, grab toys, run back out. I see them more. It feels… nice. Very “dad grinding in a bunker” energy.
If you hear a machine humming in the background on the pod, that is my new 3D printer doing its thing.
🤖 Robotics Season Begins
This leads me to the first topic: robotics.
I’m really going to give this a shot. What’s happening in robotics right now — Figure, Neo, Apptronik, all of these companies dropping new robots — it’s wild, and kind of inspiring. It made me want to dust off the robotics part of my engineering degree from 20 years ago. I cannot believe it’s been 20 years. That hurt to say out loud.
So yeah, I’ve got a Jetson Orin Nano Super sitting here. I’ve got this giant 3D printer printing calibration tests. I haven’t even gotten the board fully running yet. I’m literally crawling before walking. But I’m excited.
And then my wife said something that honestly stuck with me. We were watching the new Fantastic Four movie and she saw Herbie and was like: “Why can’t robots just be cute? Why does everything have to be this sleek creepy humanoid thing?” And I was like… yeah. Why can’t robots just be cute? Why can’t they make little beeps and boops and roll around the house like Star Wars droids?
So maybe that’s the idea: make cute robots. Friendly robots. Household robots that don’t feel like they’re about to file a report on you. I like that direction.
I don’t know if I’ll make anything good. I don’t know if I’ll get beyond testing the printer and booting the board. But I want to try.
🧠 Context Engineering: The Real Work Behind AI Products
On the work side, I’ve been spending a lot of time on context engineering. And here’s the thing most people don’t realize when you build AI products: the models are incredibly capable. They’re powerful. The hard part isn’t usually the model. It’s everything around it. Especially the context.
If you give a model the right context, it does great. If you give it the wrong context… chaos. Hallucinations. Nonsense. So getting the right stuff to the model, in a format it can read and reason over, is the real job.
A lot of the systems we work with are still built for the “old world” — deterministic systems, clean inputs, clean outputs. They weren’t built for non-deterministic systems reading PDFs, documents, contradictory information, structured data, images, all of it. A lot of “normal” search chunking doesn’t work well for LLMs because it strips out too much context. The LLM actually needs the big block of text. The surrounding paragraphs. The page. Sometimes the whole document.
So recently we’ve been expanding our chunks, sending more human-readable info, and pushing more context because these models can handle it now. Larger windows, better reasoning, multimodality… it’s honestly amazing how much more you can send compared to two years ago.
And the thing that helps the most? End-to-end traces. Seeing exactly what happens in the system. It’s the closest thing to debugging an LLM product that feels like real engineering. That and experimenting. Lots of experimenting.
💪 Health Journey: 208 → 190 and Still Going STRONG.COM
Okay — last topic on this little test run before I go to sleep: health.
I started this journey at 208 pounds. I’m at 190 now. Doctor says I need to lose another 20. So I’m maybe halfway. But it feels good. I can actually see the difference in how I move, how I run, how my back feels.
Here’s the big thing I learned: calories matter more than you think. Especially when eating out. We basically stopped eating out because I realized I have no idea what’s in any of those dishes. That chef video of the guy making scrambled eggs with a stick of butter was burned into my brain. That’s why we’re all overweight. It’s not even our fault. No one knows what’s in anything.
Walking helps a lot. Getting lighter helped me run again, which I honestly thought was over for me. I have a bulging disc so I figured, well, that’s that. Turns out losing 10–15 pounds relieves… a lot. And now I can run. And that improved my VO2 max from 28 to 40. I had no idea that was possible at my age.
The weird thing is my Oura ring recently started telling me my cardiovascular age was like six years older than I am. And I was like: dude… what? I’m running! I’m working out! I’m eating better! But then I realized weekends aren’t rest. They’re kid-wrangling. Which is arguably harder than running.
So now my rest days are Tuesdays and Thursdays. Actual rest. And my numbers are improving.
The next 15–20 pounds are going to be brutal. But I’m excited. I feel good. I feel like I’m on the right path.
🎤 Wrapping Up
Anyway. That’s it. End of podcast.
Thanks for dealing with the 3D printer noise — the thing is a monster.
I’ll post a picture of my robotics workstation in the written version.
I’m excited for this next chapter. Maybe the podcast continues weekly. We’ll see.
See you next time!
