What is this place?

This place is Piles of Sand, my personal macro blog. I defended my PhD in Spring 2026, and as of writing I'm between things, looking, and using the time deliberately, so I'm going to try messing around with some new-fangled technologies like "the written word", both as a mechanism for advertising myself to potential employers and also to create space to work out my thoughts on certain topics. I'm going to try to keep posts below 500 words, just to set an arbitrary cap. We'll probably start talking about optimal transport a little bit in the next post. All this is going to be highly informal, but I will cite and link out to relevant work wherever seems appropriate.

Is this Claude Slop?

Whether or not this website is "slop" I leave as a judgement for the reader to make. Whether or not this website was made with the help of a harnessed large language model (AKA "artificial intelligence"): absolutely! I have spent a great deal of time reading mathematics papers, so my webdev skills are pretty choppy to say the least. Simultaneously, the token cost of building a professional looking website is pretty small. So, yes, I assembled this website using Claude. I think it rules that I don't have to read a bunch of documentation about HTML/CSS/JS/Flask to make an advertisement for my research in 2026. I promise to do my best to keep things tasteful around here.