Lately I've been diving into what I think is the single most underrated fix for back pain. It's called Functional Range Conditioning (FRC). It's essentially strength training for your joints and it basically fixed my back pain (and my brother's) in a few weeks. Last year, my younger brother tweaked his back doing jiu jitsu. A few days later, he woke up unable to move. He was looking at a fairly long recovery time, PT, the whole bit. I sent him to literally one session with my FRC guy Brian, and after an hour (and a week of consistently doing Brian's stretches), my brother was fine. I had a similar experience with some light low back pain from too much computer use. After a few weeks of consistent FRC practice, it was gone. I suspect a lot of people are walking around with some version of this. e.g. a hip that pinches during a squat or lower back that gets cranky after a flight. It's not agonizing enough to fix, so we accept it as the "normal" part of being in our 30s and 40s. The core insight behind FRC is that every joint has two ranges: 1. The passive range - how far a joint goes when something else pushes it. 2. The active range - how far you can move it under your own power. Try it right now. Pull your knee to your chest, then let go and try to keep it there. It will drop some amount. That gap between where you can put it and where you can hold it is where most joint issues are. This gap is driven by your nervous system. Your brain won't let you go somewhere it can't control. If you never train near your end range of motion, the brain goes "okay, well I guess we don't need this range" and it shrinks. Stretching won't fundamentally change how your brain thinks you can move. That's what FRC is all about. (A 2025 review suggested static stretching doesn't actually lengthen your muscles. It mostly just makes them less stiff and increases your tolerance for the stretch, which is a bit depressing given how many hours I've spent on my hamstrings.) If you want to try it, do 10 minutes of CARs (Controlled Articular Rotations) a day for your hips, shoulders, and spine. (I left two YT videos in the tweet below for you to check out) A CAR is moving a joint slowly through the biggest circle it can make (under your own control) with the rest of your body still. e.g. - Hips: stand on one leg, lift the other knee, sweep it out to the side and around behind you, then reverse. - Shoulders: arm straight, trace the largest circle you can from front to overhead to behind you. - Spine: slow cat-cow stretch Basically, go slow enough that it's boring, but hard enough that it isn't. My back pain is mostly gone, for what it's worth. Hope it can help some of you out there.

Dream Together is a little side project I've been dabbling with over the past few weeks. It's been a really fun journey learning about local ML and breath of fresh air to think about something different. The project started with me tinkering with local image diffusion models on my macbook. It was interesting enough for a crude website where a handful of contributors could enter a thought every hour, which my macbook would pick up and generate a photo from. Then I dove into audio, learning about all kinds of folk instruments and ML approaches to both generation and aesthetic judgement. Eventually I also explored video generation, which adds a certain depth to the experience. Here are a few of my favorite dreams from this week