Writing
Men's health, clinical observations, maker projects, and personal writing.
Men's Health
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5 Barriers That Keep Men From Getting the Care They Deserve
Most men don't avoid the doctor because they don't care. They avoid it because the system wasn't designed for them. Five real barriers — and why none of them have to be final.
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The Male Brain: Why It's Harder to Ask for Help Than You Think
You're not weak for pushing through. You're wired for it. But when the issue is your hormones, that same instinct to handle it alone can work against you.
Building & Tinkering
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Teaching an AI to Feel Things: How Activation Steering Works (and What It Means for Blip)
Most approaches to making AI more emotionally responsive rely on prompt instructions. Activation steering works differently — injecting a direction into the model's internal representations during the forward pass. Here's the method, 21 emotion concepts, and what happened when RLHF fought back.
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The Smaller Model Won, and the 70B Ran at 1.6 Tokens Per Second
I A/B/C tested three local models as the offline fallback for my voice assistant. GLM-4.7-Flash beat both Qwen3 32B and Llama 3.3 70B. Also Llama ran six times slower than it should have, and I think I know why.
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I Had a Council of AIs Grade Itself. Here's What It Said.
Built a 5-stage voting pipeline where multiple AI models extract atomic claims from their own deliberation and vote on each one. Shipped it in a day. Then asked it to evaluate its own design. It was sharper than I was.
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I Benchmarked 78 AI Models and Almost Picked the Wrong Winner
A four-phase benchmark of 78 local and cloud AI models to choose a production default. The highest-scoring model turned out to be unusable. Here's what happened and what I picked instead.
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My Test Suite Was Lying to Me
When I ran Blip's text emulator against live Claude API for the first time, most of it failed. The cause: the Claude code path was returning placeholder strings and I hadn't noticed. 18/18 pipeline utterances passed including a new parent (Barry) voice. 5/9 fully passing, 0 failures after fixes.
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I Trained Five Versions of Blip's Brain. TriviaQA Won, and I Still Didn't Use It.
Five fine-tuned blip-edu variants, one 28-test benchmark, and a surprising winner I'm not actually shipping — because winning a head-to-head tournament and being better for two specific kids are not the same thing.
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Blip Is Getting Faster — Latency Fixes, a Local Model Win, and What Comes Next
The SER5 went from 8 seconds to 2.5 seconds end-to-end. blip-edu beat Claude on spelling drills. And I'm building a cloud brain so Blip can run on an iPhone. Three changes from the last two weeks.
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The 31B Merge Finally Worked. The Qwen3 Fine-Tune Is Broken.
blip-edu-gemma4 scored 921/1150 on 28 tests — 9th out of 30 models, best blip-edu variant built so far. blip-edu-qwen3 timed out on 20 of the same tests and produced nonsense on the other 8. GLM-4.5 Air debuted at 8th.
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Gemma 4 Crashed the Benchmark and a Bug I Didn't Know I Had
Four new local models, a GLM-Z1 content bug I didn't catch until I looked at the token lengths, and a GLM-based blip-edu fine-tune that generates 14,000-character walls of text. Gemma 4 31B is now the best local model I've benchmarked.
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Deploying Blip on a $300 Mini PC Is Humbling
The Beelink SER5 MAX is the machine that actually goes in the kids' room. Getting it to work like the dev workstation — no CUDA, different audio hardware, everything GPU-intensive running over a LAN — has been an ongoing exercise in assumptions I didn't know I was making.
Clinical Notes
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What to Expect in Your Child's First Speech Evaluation
Getting an evaluation doesn't mean something is wrong — it means you're paying attention. Here's exactly what happens, start to finish.
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Articulation vs. Phonological Disorders: What Parents Need to Know
Both can make a child hard to understand, but the cause — and the treatment — are different. Here's how to tell them apart and why it matters.
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Why Can't My Child Say 'R'? Understanding Articulation Challenges
Difficulty with the R sound is one of the most common reasons children see a speech-language pathologist. Here's what's actually happening and what to do about it.
Personal
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Before Revive
In 2012 I co-founded a men's health clinic with a colleague I trusted. By 2013 I'd left it behind. Here's what that year cost.
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Richmond Beach, April
We drove to Richmond Beach on a Saturday afternoon. The kids found driftwood and built something with an entrance. I watched the Sound.
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First Sparring Day
Jaxsen had his first real taekwondo sparring match on a Friday in April. I was more nervous than he was.
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The Morning Bus
There's a narrow window between "we're on time" and "we're going to miss the bus." We live in that window most mornings.
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Adalind at the Barre
Six years old and she has this look of complete concentration at the barre that I don't see anywhere else.
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Lacrosse in March, Somehow Still Snowing
Kenmore, 8:36 a.m. The field was dusted white and they went out anyway.
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The Show
A thirty-foot puppet. Two tightrope walkers above a silent crowd. Jaxsen didn't say anything for twenty minutes.
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Welcome to Personal Writing
Outside the clinic — fatherhood, the Pacific Northwest, and more.