Now

What I am working on, reading, and thinking about.

Updated April 2025

Building

Peacemetrics v2

Rewriting the indicator normalisation pipeline and adding historical playback to the world heatmap. Improving the configurability of the weighting system so it can represent a wider range of analytical frameworks.

LarpClient rendering pipeline

Working through the GLSL layer composition system. The current approach handles transforms correctly but is not performing well at high element counts. Investigating GPU-side instancing.

Conflict pattern analysis

ACLED ingestion pipeline is stable. Currently building out the feature extraction layer — event velocity, geographic clustering, actor co-occurrence. The similarity search component is next.

Writing

—Draft: The commitment problem in counter-terrorism policy

—Notes: Institutional design and the problem of time horizons

—Reading notes on Turchin — cliodynamics and pattern detection

Reading

Complexity: A Guided Tour

Melanie Mitchell

Rigorous treatment of emergence and complex adaptive systems.

War and Peace and War

Peter Turchin

Quantitative modelling of historical cycles. Relevant to the conflict pattern project.

Debt: The First 5000 Years

David Graeber

Revisionist history of credit. Useful for interrogating economic foundations.

Lines of inquiry

—How do information asymmetries affect the bargaining model of conflict at the sub-state level?

—What are the structural limits of machine learning approaches to conflict prediction?

—How does the architecture of a rendering pipeline constrain the expressiveness of a GUI system?

—Can cliodynamic methods be usefully applied to shorter historical time series?

Study

First year at the University of Southampton. Currently covering foundations in political philosophy, introductory economics (micro and macro), and political institutions and international relations. The engineering work runs in parallel — evenings and weekends.