Four jobs,
one person

I have spent twenty years keeping other people’s systems up. Ten thousand servers at Salesforce under FedRAMP. Seven and a half thousand retail systems migrated at CVS Health without taking a single store offline. Somewhere in there I co-invented a way to make machines tag photographs, and the patent office agreed it was new.

That last one turned out to be the tell. The patent is for automated image classification — teaching a machine to look at a photograph and say what it is. I have been doing the manual version of that job on the Colorado Plateau ever since.

Most nights the work is the same shape: drive somewhere with no streetlights, wait for the galactic core to clear the horizon, and photograph whatever people left behind out there. A drive-in screen still standing in Escalante. A truck rusting in Rhyolite. A stone tower in the New Mexico bootheel that nobody has a name for. An abandoned depot ten minutes from my house. The Milky Way is the easy part. The hard part is finding something underneath it worth the drive.

I also play music, and I host a late-night call-in show out of Alpine, Texas called Luke at the Roost, where every caller is an AI and every conversation is real. Fifty-nine episodes so far. It is the most technically complicated thing I have built and the least serious thing I have ever done.

These four things look unrelated. They are not. All of them are the same instinct — build the rig, point it at something, see what comes back.