Jason Dostal
Engineering leader by day. By night: homelabber, cave diver, duck hunter, 3D printer wrangler, and serial side-project starter (and — occasionally — finisher).
I lead engineering teams, hack and build. I like to explore new ideas, root out inefficiencies and solve problems. I encourage my teams to learn and grow by experimenting without fear and this site is one of the ways I live and lead that by example. I wanted a home for my projects and my ideas and my thinking. And c'mon... I can never resist a good pun!
The name? Duck typing is how dynamic languages decide what a thing is: if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a duck. I just happen to also sit in a blind at 5 a.m. with a shotgun and a thermos.
llmbuild-logcodingcrafthome-automationdiyreverse-engineeringfine-tuningbbsgometabuild-in-publicdotnetduck-hunting
- Neuron Census — We trained our own GPT from scratch, then asked every neuron in it whether it has one job. Click around inside the model in 3D, read what two blind raters found, delete its weak and strong firings, and turn one neuron up to see what it does.
- Neuron Explorer — Click a photo and watch it climb four image models, layer by layer, in 3D: every neuron a tile that glows when the photo fires it. Then open any neuron to see the photos it likes most, and the few names that passed a test.
- Git Pond — Git with the lights on: 26 lessons from git init to rebase -i, bisect, pull requests and force pushes, then 12 challenges scored against par, plus a simulator for your team's branching strategy. Branches are sticky notes, HEAD is a duck, and nothing you committed is ever really gone. Real commands, real hashes.
- SQL Rows — SQL with the actual data instead of Venn diagrams. Watch a join test every pair, walk into the traps (the WHERE that eats a LEFT JOIN, fan-out, the NOT IN that returns nobody), then GROUP BY, CASE and window functions.
- Feeding Time — A fish-tank money game in the spirit of Insaniquarium: feed the guppies, grab the coins, buy the egg, and shoot whatever comes through the portal. Built for a phone.
- Hold'em Retriever — A Limit Hold'em trainer against a table of tunable bots, with a coach that shows the pot odds, equity and EV behind every decision.
- Shooting Hours — Wisconsin shooting hours for wherever you are standing, straight from the DNR's own tables: your area, your zone minutes, daylight saving handled. Live countdown, works offline in the blind.
- Power Injection — LED power injection for WLED builds, solved as one circuit. Mix 5, 12 and 24 V strings, drag the feeds, watch the voltage and colour at every pixel.
- Tiny Transformer — A real 432k-parameter model trained on Jules Verne, live in your browser. Every weight on screen: trace a guess, switch off heads, watch it learn.
- Recoil — Recoil & ballistics calculator: shotshell, rifle, pistol, rimfire. Compare two loads, then see why heavy-and-slow kicks harder.
- One Gate — From a single transistor to a Turing-complete machine, using nothing but NAND. Push the switches, watch the signal move.