Introducing datasources

Datasets are the absolute foundation of machine learning development. I built a data-discovery and routing layer that lets AI agents know which real-world data source to use, how to access it, whether it is usable, and what it can be joined to. Existing public-data directories are human/topic-centric, the aim of this repo is to be agent-centric. It asks: given a research question, which dataset should an agent reach for, how does it authenticate, what can it join on, and is there an API/MCP/tooling path? ...

22 June 2026 · 2 min · Stephanie Rebecca

Wednesday Post: Identity in early career

If I am going to turn my sporadic ramblings into something worthy of a Substack, I suspect I need to begin by being more honest. Not performatively but just honest in the way private thoughts are. In lieu of overthinking the format, I have written down a reflection on something I am currently moving through… the career transition identity crisis of one’s mid-twenties. There is a strange grief in leaving a prestigious firm. On paper, you lost nothing, in fact you gained experience, relationships, and retained or even grew, your ambition. The challenging part is loosing the answer to the question. ...

22 June 2026 · 3 min · Stephanie Rebecca

Tuesday Post: personal projects

I am currently in the process of building out a messy little constellation of personal projects. Perhaps better described as instruments for thinking. They are things I want to exist because I keep reaching for them, and so likely will be worth sharing when they exist, in case others are reaching for them too :) These projects include: A database-of-databases: and eventually a path into backtesting workflows. Interesting projects like Awesome Public Datasets have previously been carried out, at great scale & with community contributions, but there is a gap I am hoping to address. ...

8 June 2026 · 2 min · Stephanie Rebecca

second-brain pt 2: ontology

Science progresses via a collapsing of ontology into the new. A new framework emerges that alters how we define reality (ontology). The old ontology collapses under the weight of what it can no longer explain. The new order of meaning emerges, whereby yesterday’s observations are redeemed from their isolation and reinterpreted as signs of a deeper order. Examples of this include the shift from the geocentric (Earth-centered) to the heliocentric model of the universe. Or the transition from Newtonian mechanics to Einsteinian relativity. ...

6 June 2026 · 5 min · Stephanie Rebecca

Wednesday Post: mafia

Florilegium: literally meaning “a gathering of flowers” in Latin. In the Middle Ages, this was a book that compiled the finest, smartest extracts and quotes from various writings. Cool things I found this week… I. This personal design portfolio site that carefully documents the process of each work II. AND this personal blog website that documents their friends stories. I love everything about this. Not just the design but the approach, the realisation that our most valuable knowledge is not our own but in our friends, this person’s mindset is incredible. ...

27 May 2026 · 2 min · Stephanie Rebecca

N-of-1: peptides

An N-of-1 trial (or single-subject design) is a personalised clinical trial where a single patient acts as their own study population. Instead of testing a drug on a large group of people, an individual receives sequential, randomised treatments or placebos over time to determine the optimal care. N-of-1 trials are a core tool in precision medicine to evaluate customised and off-label therapies when a traditional large-scale clinical trial isn’t possible, especially in ultra-rare diseases or chronic conditions. ...

24 May 2026 · 7 min · Stephanie Rebecca

second-brain

Second brains are have moved from personal archives into agent-readable cognitive infrastructure. The central constraint is dual legibility. The system has to make sense to me, in Obsidian, and it has to make sense to Claude in the repo. Throughout history, scholars, scientists, philosophers, and writers have kept some version of an external thinking system. Commonplace books serve as working scrapbooks to store arguments, fragments, and half-formed ideas, to be returned to later. They were not kept as diaries in the introspective sense. John Locke even wrote A New Method of Making Common-Place-Books, offering a system for arranging quotations, ideas, and speeches by subject and category. Cognitive scientist Don Norman, in Things That Make Us Smart, explored how humans become smarter by building external aids that extend memory and reasoning. ...

24 May 2026 · 7 min · Stephanie Rebecca

Friday Post: blogging

Interest in blogging over time: Blogging is still far below its historical peak, when analysing trends across a longer hoizon, but its recent rebound is statistically unusual relative to the last five-year baseline. Google Trends do not represent not raw search volume. Each point is divided by total searches for that geography/time window and scaled 0-100, so the spike means “blog” became much more prominent relative to all searches, not that we know absolute search count. That said, the spikes are interesting to investigate with context. ...

22 May 2026 · 4 min · Stephanie Rebecca

Evolution of a Symbol

On the shore of Lake Zürich sits Bollingen Tower. Carl Jung spent decades building it with his own hands. He carried stones, carved symbols into walls, and treated the structure as a physical extension of his inner world. A central tower came first. Later he added a second tower, a private courtyard, and further rooms. Each addition arrived at a different stage of his life until the structure itself began to resemble a psychological map, he described the form that emerged as a symbol of psychic wholeness. One inscription sits on the tower which Jung called his confession in stone: ...

18 May 2026 · 6 min · Stephanie Rebecca

Friday Post: The Reflexive Loop

Journal Entry: The Reflexive Loop In the stillness of observation lies the foundation of understanding. Yet, what we observe is not the whole of what is. It is merely the raw clay, waiting to be shaped by the mind. Echoing the words of Heisenberg from his 1958 book Physics and Philosophy" What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.” Kant suggests we do not see the world as it is in itself (the noumena), but rather as it appears to us through the lens of our own cognition (the phenomena). The clay is shapeless until our minds create a form for it. ...

15 May 2026 · 4 min · Stephanie Rebecca