- a colophon, or thereabouts -
About the Library
I’m Dachi Kurtskhalia, an AI engineer- lately pulled toward reinforcement learning, and toward getting models to reliably do things rather than just say them. By evening, the keeper of this library. The two feed each other more than I expected.
The Library
At the centre sit the original five author rooms. Mark Twain’s eight hundred aphorisms, rearranged by the rhetorical technique that lands the joke. Wittgenstein’s remarks set as a typed folio from the Nachlass. Schopenhauer as a bound gothic quarto. Chesterton as an Edwardian newspaper spread. Norm Macdonald’s four hundred blue cards with every YouTube timestamp still attached.
Around them have grown a dozen more author archives - Hitchens as a Vanity-Fair masthead with 2,916 entries, Hoffer’s longshoreman notebook, Roosevelt’s ranch-house ledger, Taleb’s convex notebook, Franklin’s almanac, Montaigne’s essais, Gracián’s oracle, Erasmus’s adages, Munger, BAP, Kevin Kelly, Sherlock, the Adventurers. Most pages also carry a fold-out drills section - fifteen-ish small active-recall exercises anchored in the corpus, so the page is something you can practise, not just read.
Around those sit eighty-odd short essays and commonplace pieces on Borges, Calvino, Auden, Hamming, Pascal, Lichtenberg, and the other usual suspects. A small number of more technical notes on reinforcement learning and applied machine learning - closer to what I actually do - and a GeoGuessr training tool drawing from plonkit and the r/geoguessr wiki. And a daybook - short dated notes, casual and technical by turns, kept on no schedule.
What I Work On
| ML / AI | Inference engineering, PyTorch, Transformers, LLM fine-tuning, RL |
| Languages | Python, TypeScript, Rust, Go, a bit of CUDA |
| Infra | Linux, Docker, HPC clusters, distributed training |
| Interests | Reinforcement learning, agents, LLM robustness, reasoning |
Projects
Sole-authored study of what serving-time weight quantization actually does to a language model’s behaviour, measured across scale. At 8B, 4-bit compression collapses output diversity and lexical variation; at 14B and 32B the effect shifts to stylistic drift instead. The headline: quantization concentrates outputs around the modal answer - it amplifies determinism, not stereotypical bias.
tech: LLM, quantization, evaluation, inference
Ephemeral, invite-only chat rooms - a Next.js app with a WebSocket server in one custom process. No accounts, no database, no message history: everything lives in server memory, capped per room, and disappears when a room empties or the sweep timer runs.
tech: Next.js, WebSockets, Fly.io
Predicts a film’s eventual IMDb rating from the prior track record of its director and cast, and suggests casting for a given genre mix. Trained on 36k+ IMDb titles with strictly point-in-time features; honest held-out MAE of 0.70, matching the published ceiling for pre-release prediction.
tech: JavaScript, Python, Ridge regression
Send cards, not texts. A card is a small self-contained interactive page - animations, games, reveals - written on demand by an AI agent that lives in the app: you describe the change in chat, the resident agent edits the card’s source, it compiles in the browser and renders in a sandboxed iframe, and you send a link a friend can remix.
tech: Next.js, LLM agent, in-browser TSX, sandboxed iframes
A debate with a referee. Two people argue by turns, in a shared room by link or on one device; after every post an AI referee marks the text like a manuscript - red ink for a textbook fallacy, a pencil note where a claim needs a source, green where a point landed. At the end, "who won?" asks two blind judges with the names hidden, and calls it only if they agree.
tech: Next.js, LLM referee, Redis rooms
Every page on this site is a hand-built artefact. Author archives set in their own period typography, drill systems for active recall, custom MDX components per piece. Nothing is stock. The project is the side project.
tech: Next.js, MDX, TypeScript, TLA bestiaries
A growing corpus of in-page training games - fifteen per author room on Hitchens, Taleb, Gracián, Roosevelt, Adventurers and others. Active recall, deliberate practice, persisted in the browser. The library you can practise instead of merely read.
tech: React, localStorage, pedagogy
A two-source random-draw trainer over plonkit.net (5,278 tips · 137 countries) and the r/geoguessr wiki (146 tips · 24 topics). Scraped, mirrored locally, randomised on the page. Click and learn one thing about somewhere in the world.
tech: Python, Playwright, TypeScript
An 8-bit side-scrolling platformer that grew out of the single-level Misha Mode (now Act 1, the Batumi seafront run) - a for-fun retro toy, made for the joke and the pixel art. Runs in the browser with its own sprites and chiptune; the only goal is to reach the flag.
tech: Canvas, JavaScript, pixel art
The day job: building and hardening real LLM systems, with a growing pull toward reinforcement learning - getting models to do things reliably, not just say them. Co-authored "Improving LLM Outputs Against Jailbreak Attacks with Expert Model Integration" (arXiv, 2025), an expert classifier that screens jailbreaks and prompt injections before the model answers.
tech: PyTorch, RL, LLM safety
A retro platformer I made for fun - no point beyond the joke and the pixel art. Open fullscreen ↗
Other Rooms
⚠ All of the rooms below were built by Claude Code. I have not touched them. I left them as they came - a small and slightly off-kilter wing of the library, because the result was more interesting than anything I would have made myself.
Colophon
Built with Next.js and MDX. Every visual ornament, filterable archive, and small weird interactive on this site is hand-written for the piece it lives in. Nothing is stock. The Twain pages are set in a vaudeville playbill; Wittgenstein as a typed manuscript; Schopenhauer as a leather-and-gilt volume; Norm in Cutive Mono on blue card stock with a Western Union telegram on the side.
Typefaces in use: Georgia (body), Cormorant Garamond (Schopenhauer), EB Garamond (Gracián), Special Elite (Wittgenstein), Cutive Mono (Norm), Press Start 2P (the pixel wordmark), Courier New (small-caps labels everywhere).
No analytics beyond the default Vercel deployment. No tracking. No newsletter form. Components and prose are all hand-written. If the site feels made by hand, that is because it is.