Mandarin
Studying Chinese keeps me honest about memory, practice and tool design. Mandarin Stack came out of it.
Hey, I'm Shannon.
I live in Arkansas. By day I'm Principal Architect of Agentic AI at LiveRamp. I help build agentic systems: tools that help engineers work, platforms for building and running agents, and the frameworks underneath them.
The rest of the time I'm in the HACK Lab, pushing old datacenter cards further than they should go, and running Hackers in the Loop.
顾九思 · Gù Jiǔ Sī
How I got here
- 01 · the start Mainframes and mainframe databases.
- 02 · scale Petabyte-scale data engineering, including Hadoop clusters with 80,000 cores.
- 03 · products Building new products.
- 04 · ai AI systems that teams and customers use every day.
- 05 · now Hackers in the Loop, the HACK Lab, and open source local AI with receipts.
How I work
I work on things that solve my problems and the community's.
Most of my projects drive toward three goals. Those goals, and whatever the lab I hacked together can run, drive my decisions.
goal 00 · hackers in the loop
Build a place where others can grow, learn and build together.
hackersintheloop.org ↗goal 01 · small models
Prove or disprove my hypotheses that smaller models can do better than larger ones.
goal 02 · cheap compute
I see the price tags on Sparks and other nice cards, then P100s still sitting around $100. There's so much raw compute there for cheap.
What each project solves for me
- Thermite I need an autoresearch platform to improve engines on the P100, so I can make local AI more affordable. I also need auto-scientist systems: deep research, hypothesis verdicts and more.
- tensorless I want custom quants for the P100 and my own fine-tunes. The first quant and its engine ship as tensorless, so a P100 is useful to others for local AI, without spending thousands of dollars on GPUs.
- fxbot I kept getting in my own way with terminal management, todo tracking and the like, and I didn't trust how other bots connect into home resources. So I built my own.
- Small Model Arena My small model research needs to know how models under 30B params perform in realistic settings, like running on V100s.
- The books I started them because I wanted to learn, and the best way to learn is to teach. Getting every chapter accurate makes me understand things at a deeper level, so each one I release, I'm learning just as much as you.
Ultimately, my goal is to just be here and help others out. Whatever I can do toward that, I line up to work on.
Why Hackers in the Loop
People grow with people. I can name several who changed the direction of my life.
I feel blessed to be where I am today, largely because other people invested their time, energy, and knowledge in me.
Even if it changes just one person's life, it will have been worth it to me.
Off the keyboard
Calligraphy
Shufa, Chinese calligraphy. The seal on this site is my chop: 顾九思, Gù Jiǔ Sī.
Urban sketching
Observation first, clearer lines second.
Work with me
I advise teams on AI integration and transformation, agentic systems, and technical direction. Or just come talk shop about models, old GPUs, or Chinese culture and art.
~ current rates
1 bug fix = 1 V100
1 feature = 1 DGX Spark
"quick question" = 4 P100s
as posted on X ↗ (mostly a joke)