SYSTEMS BACKGROUND / EXPERIMENTAL METHOD

About Justin Garringer

I’m an independent AI systems researcher and founder of Cyberelf Labs. I’m interested in the point where models become persistent computational systems with state, tools, history, environments, permissions, and relationships to other machines.

01 / BACKGROUND

Systems first

My path into this work was not academic in the conventional sense. It ran through UNIX systems administration, Solaris and UltraSPARC machines, hosting infrastructure, command-line systems, C and C++, and self-directed experimental work.

That background still shapes how I approach AI. I want to know where the state lives, which component has authority, what the actual control flow is, how the system fails, and what evidence survives after a run.

02 / OPERATING LOOP

The loop is simple

hypothesis → smallest executable experiment → instrumentation → run → unexpected behavior → revised hypothesis → repeat

I prefer executable artifacts over decks, measurements over rhetorical certainty, and local or inexpensive tests before GPU-scale commitments. I am happy to entertain a ridiculous-sounding analogy if it can eventually be made to lose.

03 / RESEARCH VALUES

What stays true

  • Weird hypotheses are allowed.
  • Evidence beats confidence.
  • Negative results are useful.
  • Observation and interpretation stay separate.
  • Analogy is not mechanism.
  • Publish enough detail that another person or agent can tell what was actually tested.

04 / OUTSIDE THE LAB

The person in the system

I make music as Colors Conflicted, with a recurring goal of making the meltiest, swirliest music possible. Music is also one of the places I borrow technical questions from: prediction, salience, timing, learned expectation, representation, and why some transitions matter much more than others.

I also care about games and simulation, visual storytelling, robotics, Japanese, martial systems, physics, and any domain that exposes an interesting rule system.