Welcome!

My name is Nate. I live in a large city on the east coast of the US. For my day job, I'm a grad student—but this website won't spend much time on my day job. Instead, I hope to share here information on my hobbies and side projects. The spirit of this site is something like: you come up to me, and I excitedly say "hey, wanna see this cool bug I found?" and then tell you about it. (Though there is unlikely to be much about bugs in particular on here. Maybe in the future, when my interests shift again.)

I really love telling people about whatever I'm excited about. That topic may be any from an eclectic collection of things: in no particular order, the list includes rainbows, auroras and space weather, clothes mending, languages, crochet, automated image recognition, DIY projects, Pokemon cards, mechanical devices, and much more.

Crucially, as implied by this website's name, I rarely finish any project that I start. I don't think completing them is really the point. Of course, it's really nice to have a completed (or at least minimally functioning) Thing That I Created. But as I learned from someone at school, nothing you learn is ever pointless. The point of my side quests is the joy of learning, and then the joy of sharing and teaching. Those are more than enough.

A note about AI—everything on this site is done by me, with no AI input, except if explicitly mentioned otherwise. This is for a number of reasons, including but not limited to: I haven't really started using it in my own workflows yet; the things listed on this website are things I've done purely for my own enjoyment, and therefore exist outside of most restrictions set by efficiency; I'm taking my time in understanding what are the appropriate uses of the technology and what its limitations are in various contexts; I'm uncomfortable with how most generalist generative AI systems are built on stolen work; and I find many AI-written webpages to be physically painful to read. Barring changes to the above, I expect to use AI only in projects that explicitly require it, such as—at the time of this writing—one project on the Projects I'd Like to Do page.