I am a programmer and researcher who wants to make computers more fun and empowering for students, researchers, and engineers. I thought the field was stuck, so I moved from computer science to neuroscience in search of ideas for making computers smarter. Then, to my surprise, the computers went and got smarter.

Current project

I’m pulling on two threads:

1. The browser and SSH client can come together into something interesting. It’s a natural platform for a remote-first “outer” shell for servers and edge devices.
2. Now that LLMs can write code, a native web-like platform is becoming practical. We can get the fundamentally good parts of the web (playful sharing, a safe place to run untrusted stuff) without the compromise (a non-native, lowest-common-denominator platform).

Download the Outer Loop Mac app to see all of this in action.

So, in the short term I’m trying to change how we interact with external computers, especially servers and robots. From this niche, I’m trying to help prove out what I think is the new natural web-like platform that will be worth incorporating into browsers and into whatever new AI interface we’re all heading toward.

Blog

A native graphical shell for SSH
2026-06-28

It’s like a web view, but native
2026-05-10

Tip: Use services, not the terminal, to run local backends
2026-04-09

Web apps over SSH can be surprisingly good
2025-10-10

Smooth Pursuit, and how Screens Don’t Mimic Reality
2025-08-04

The web could use machine code
2025-06-08

Expressions are Pragmatic Model Visualizations
2024-01-10

What happens when you vectorize wide PyTorch expressions?
2023-10-19

Gaussian Processes Extrapolate, Sometimes in Goofy Ways
2023-03-28

Maybe Bayesian Optimization Should Be Harder, Not Easier
2022-11-30

Imagine A Deep Network That Performs Successive Cheap Queries On Its Input
2022-07-08

Bayesian Optimization Is More Basis-Dependent Than You Might Think
2022-06-26

Likely ≠ Typical: A Viewpoint On Why We Perturb Neural Networks
2022-01-28

Some “Causal Inference” intuition
2021-11-04

See all posts

Select talks / presentations

Intro to Grid Cells + Quickly Forming Structured Memories
2021-06-07

Testing a possible explanation for grid cell distortions
2021-05-17

Journal Club: Hinton’s GLOM + Numenta’s TBT (after a year without a haircut)
2021-03-24

Using grid cells as a prediction-enabling basis
2020-12-22

The Minimum Description Length Principle, sparsity, and quantization
2020-04-01

Photo

(Photo credit: Rosanne Liu, 2023)

Papers

Other projects, big and small

More

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