[KYLER RUSSELL]

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By year

Everything I've built — research, personal projects, work and high-school engineering — grouped by the year it started. Ongoing work is filed under its start year.

2026

  1. ResearchApr 2026 – presentActive

    Continuous Thought Machine LMs

    Finding 16-tick CTM beats its matched 1-tick control by 0.157 nats @ 400M tokens — pre-registered, FLOP-matched

    Does temporal synchronization (CTM, arXiv:2505.05522) improve recurrent computation in language models beyond what recurrent depth alone provides (arXiv:2502.05171)? Tested against standard and recurrent-depth Transformers on identical data.

  2. ResearchJan 2026 – presentActive

    Living Brain

    Finding Cerebellar module passes a 26-benchmark neurobiology suite — eyeblink, VOR, saccades, interval timing

    A biologically grounded neural engine: GPU predictive coding over thousands of model neurons on hierarchical modular graphs, with NMDA/AMPA dynamics, shunting inhibition, interneuron subtypes, and short- and long-term plasticity.

  3. ResearchMay 2026 – presentActive

    Ternary LLM quantization

    Finding 1.78 bits / weight · 82.1% held-out token agreement · closed-form Gram solve cuts compute 20–30×

    Compressing Qwen3.6-27B — a 64-layer hybrid Gated-DeltaNet / attention model — to {−1, 0, +1} weights that run natively in llama.cpp: rotation → calibration → block-wise reconstruction → latent assignment training → distillation → GGUF.

  4. Personal project2026Active

    AlphaSlayer

    Finding Scripted heuristics out-reached the trained net on bosses → the bottleneck was run policy, not combat

    Slay the Spire is two problems stacked: winning each fight, and steering a whole run so you arrive at the boss with a deck and HP that can win. AlphaSlayer splits them into a fast tactical network and a larger strategic one, both Transformer encoders over set-tokenized game state.

    • Reinforcement learning
    • PyTorch
    • Transformers
    • GAE

  5. Personal projectJun 2026

    Linux desktop environment

    A modular, zero-rounding "tactical" desktop for virtualized machines — flat, dense and grid-based — deployed and kept in sync with one command.

    • Bash
    • Python
    • Hyprland

2025

  1. Personal projectOct 2025 – presentActive

    Home Kubernetes cluster

    A bare-metal Talos Linux cluster managed entirely from Git with Argo CD, running 20+ services and the GPU workloads behind my research.

    • Kubernetes
    • Talos
    • Argo CD
    • GitHub Actions

2024

  1. Client workOct 2024

    HARCKC website redesign

    Design & development

    Graphic-design overhaul for the Heart of America Relocation Council, a Kansas City nonprofit: a custom Wild Apricot theme with new page templates, layouts, typography, color system and widget styles.

    • Web design
    • Wild Apricot
    • HTML/CSS
    • JavaScript

2023

  1. High school2023

    Balsa towers

    Drafted, prototyped and iterated on lightweight balsa towers, then load-tested the final design to failure on a universal testing machine.

    • Structures
    • Drafting

2022

  1. High school2022 – 23

    FIRST Tech Challenge

    Led the programming team for a mecanum-drive competition robot: Java control software with autonomous AprilTag image detection, driver-assist systems and real-time sensor integration.

    • Robotics
    • Java

  2. High school2022

    Cast rings

    Modeled custom rings in CAD, 3D-printed the patterns, and turned them into metal through investment casting.

    • CAD
    • Manufacturing

2021

  1. High school2021 – 24

    CyberPatriot — 5th of 5,266 nationally

    Networking specialist and club president for our team in the Air Force Association's national youth cyber-defense competition — firewall policy, vulnerability remediation and system hardening against the clock — finishing 5th of 5,266 teams at the national finals in Washington, D.C.

    • Cybersecurity
    • Networking

  2. High school2021

    Hand-crank light

    Concept design for a hand-crank generator light — gear train, generator, battery and LED laid out from first sketches.

    • Design
    • Electronics

2020

  1. High school2020

    Pinhole camera

    Took a working pinhole camera from a hand-drawn plan to a light-tight build out of a shipping box, aluminum foil and a precisely punched aperture.

    • Optics
    • Prototyping

  2. High school2020

    Truss bridge

    A lightweight balsa truss bridge built for strength-to-weight testing.

    • Structures

2016

  1. Venture2016 – presentActive

    ComfyCup LLC

    Co-founder & Co-CEO

    I came up with the idea at eight: a more comfortable athletic cup for boys. We co-invented it, brought it to market, and scaled it to customers in all 50 states and abroad — coordinating design, manufacturing and marketing as a small founding team.

    • Entrepreneurship
    • Product