Quick update#

I haven’t posted here nearly as much as I planned when I started this blog. Time for a catch-up post.

RLMatrix is going MIT#

I’m relicensing RLMatrix to MIT.

The short version: the deep reinforcement learning chapter of my life is over. I don’t really need RLMatrix anymore and I don’t see a clear commercialization path for it. It’s a solid piece of work that I’m proud of - pure C# with TorchSharp backend, faster and more stable than stable-baselines in a lot of scenarios. But sitting on it while I’m not building a business around it feels selfish. MIT lets anyone pick it up and do whatever.

If you’re doing RL in .NET and want to fork, extend, or just steal ideas out of it - go nuts.

The conveyor belt detour#

Before I fully closed the RL chapter I did a short informal investigation into conveyor belt optimization with folks from Emulate3D and GE. Turns out conveyor belts have a lot in common with microfluidic channels, so there was some weird overlap with things I’d been thinking about. Fun tangent, and a clear sign my interests were drifting.

F# and differentiable programming#

These days I’m writing almost no C# and almost no classical AI. My life has been completely hijacked by F# and differentiable programming, and that’s where most of the content here will be heading from now on.

F# is criminally underrated for scientific computing, and combined with differentiable programming it unlocks a way of thinking that feels very different from the Python ML stack. More on that in future posts.

kaku.so - my first F# backend project#

I also finished my first real F# backend project: kaku.so, a Japanese learning tool combining a dictionary with handwriting practice and spaced repetition.

The backend is F# end-to-end: ASP.NET Core minimal APIs, DDD throughout, Scott Wlaschin’s Domain Modeling Made Functional treated as scripture. A proper technical post about the stack is coming - there’s a lot worth unpacking, including why I went with a geo-replicated stateless backend on bunny.net magic containers and how I’m serving roughly 10 million static files from edge SSD for basically nothing.

Now that I’ve done it once I suspect I’ll be launching a lot more SaaS. The second one is always easier.

Bunny Database#

One quick teaser: I may be among the first people running Bunny Database in production (it’s not a database of bunnies, sadly). It’s bunny.net’s new managed database product, and it’s been a good fit for the Kakuso workload. Post about that coming too.

More soon#

That’s the update. Back to F# now.

Some links in this post are referral links. I only recommend tools I actually pay for and use in production.