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Thomas Wood

Phytomech Industries
Profile picture of Mr. Thomas Wood
A bit about me...
🥼 Head of AI Research and Development @ Pieces
👨‍💻 Chief Technology Officer @ Phytomech
📈 MS graduate in Applied Mathematics @ University of Washington

I’m super cool. You should follow me on at-proto.

What I’m Working On

🤖 Robotics & AI

Currently knee-deep in robotics, working on connecting maniskill with lerobot. Building systems that help people explore and share their ideas, whether that’s robotics, math, or anything else.

🌱 Hydroponics & 3D Printing

Designing and printing vertical grow towers using FreeCAD and Python. Working on modular, stackable systems with precise water flow control and optimal plant spacing. The goal is to make high-efficiency growing systems that are both beautiful and functional.

🖥️ High-Performance Computing

Working with Slurm to manage computational resources for everything from robotics simulations to hydroponic system design. Building tools that make it easier to run complex simulations and process large datasets.

✍️ Technical Writing

Building a better system for technical content – not just another AI writing tool, but a system that helps organize scattered knowledge into coherent structures. Whether it’s a tweet, a blog post, or a book, the goal is to help people maintain consistency and build on their ideas without losing the human element.

🖧 Infrastructure

Working on a hybrid setup that combines local development with executable books, cloud runners, and bare-metal hardware so experiments can scale from a laptop to the cluster with minimal friction.

Recent journal entries

DS.jl when?

So I've really gotten into julia over the past few days. Friday morning I sat down with trae-agent and zed and wrote a [whole little agent][openai-tool-calling-jl]. And now I've got the bug. It started with "I'm going to sit down and create my own programming language with MLIR because I

Date: August 24, 2025 | Author: Thomas Wood
plan-execute

:::{tip} My version of plan-execute This comes from [plan-execute][plan-execute] tutorial on langgraph's doc site. I have put it in its [own repo][my-plan-execute] too ::: First we have a bunch of imports ```python from pydantic import BaseModel, Field import operator from typing import Annotated, List, Tuple, Union, Literal from typing_extensions import TypedDict import asyncio from langchain_community.tools.searx_search.tool import SearxSearchResults from langchain_community.utilities import

Date: August 03, 2025 | Author: Thomas Wood
High Frequency versus High Quality

So it feels like I can post with high frequency or with high quality but not with both. I guess that's why I haven't done much with my book(s) I want to write. I'm content to just vomit status updates into the void. I still want to revisit the idea of

Date: August 02, 2025 | Author: Thomas Wood
Advanced Eschatonics

date: "2025-07-28" title: "Gauss Law" [gauss-law](#gauss-law) What do you know? :::{important} Deep research article inbound ::: Great. I’ll gather detailed, connected insights from the past three months on recent academic advances in: * Single-cell omics (especially spatial omics), * Computational systems biology, * Synthetic developmental biology, …with a focus on work from HHMI labs and other leading groups (like the Whale

Date: July 28, 2025 | Author: Thomas Wood
Digital Lazarus

Here are the steps I finally figured out for getting my account's service endpoint changed from advanced-eschatonics.com to pds.advanced-eschatonics.com. I was inspired by whtwnd and how they use my pds to log me in. I also am the head of AI Rearch and Development at a startup and a lot

Date: July 27, 2025 | Author: Thomas Wood
Gear

I guess I absolutely need to get the mystmd system set up because I have been microblogging all week. I even used freaking whtwnd and it's plain jane vanilla markdown smdh. Yeah that's it. The fork of whtwnd must continue. Let's revisit this real quick and take stock of what we've already

Date: July 19, 2025 | Author: Thomas Wood
URDF and trae-agent

I don't know. What did I do this week? Feels strange like the sixth was more than five days ago. The Sim2Real failed because the Real2Sim step wasn't accurate enough. I started putting the meshes that make up the robot base and camera mounts together with the mesh for the base of

Date: July 13, 2025 | Author: Thomas Wood
Real2Sim2Real2Sim2Real2Sim2Real

So I spent a lot of time this weekend trying to align the simulation camera with the actual camera, even going so far as to come up with multiple approaches to solve this problem with varying degrees of math and automation. The quick math one worked well enough that I

Date: July 06, 2025 | Author: Thomas Wood
Qwen3 and trae-agent

So cursor apparently realized now that Cody is dead they're the king of the mountain and the features they currently offer for \20 a month are now going to retail for \200/month. So I've been setting up [continue][continue] with huggingface providers because Qwen3-235B-A22B is a damn good model for only

Date: July 05, 2025 | Author: Thomas Wood
Cleaning house

I really want to get one of those roombas. I had one in Vegas and it was nice. I've got almost everything off the floor in the dining room and kitchen, but there's still a lot of work to do in the rest of the house. I figured I might

Date: June 29, 2025 | Author: Thomas Wood