about

My name is Charles. I enjoy spending time thinking about how things work — the systems underneath cities, the math inside language models, airport logistics, and other stuff. This site is where I put the things that come out of that thinking: writing, research, and whatever else I'm building at the time.

Right now I'm captivated by mechanistic interpretability — the practice of reverse-engineering neural networks to understand what they're actually doing internally. I think it matters a lot that we understand these systems before they outpace our ability to examine them, and I think more people should be working on it.

Beyond that, I care about public transit infrastructure, chess, design, history, and sports analytics — roughly in that order, though it shifts. The common thread, I think, is that I like understanding things at a level deeper than the surface explanation.

the garden

The title of this site comes from my favorite book, Candide by Voltaire. The story follows a young man through a series of increasingly absurd catastrophes, all while his tutor insists that everything is for the best in "the best of all possible worlds." By the end, the characters abandon grand philosophizing entirely and settle on a small farm.

"il faut cultiver notre jardin" — we must cultivate our garden.

It's a deceptively simple line. Voltaire wasn't saying to ignore the world — he was saying that the most honest response to its complexity is to focus on what's directly in front of you and do that well. Tend to the tangible. Build something real. I think about that a lot, and it felt like the right name for a place where I try to do exactly that.