I'm Ron Picard, a 10X engineer. This is where I post my projects like apps, games, free software engineering lessons, AI musings, and other topics I'm interested in.
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BotLegger™ is a free desktop app from Wyvern Systems for running your own team of AI bots that chat, research, write, and use your apps, with any AI model and your data kept on your own devices. Version 0.7.0 is a Mac beta.
AI Rulebook is a free VS Code and Open VSX extension from Wyvern Systems LLC that installs six always-on engineering rules for AI coding agents (scope, code re…
Auto Color is a free VS Code and Open VSX extension from Wyvern Systems LLC that gives every workspace its own golden-ratio color: pastel title, activity, and…
A walkthrough of agentic programming with Cursor and Claude: the editor workflow, practical patterns for LLM-assisted development, and going from prompts to sh…
A 2026-oriented tour from symbolic AI and deep learning to agentic assistants, then a brain-vs.-silicon comparison (software, hardware, neuroscience, conscious…
An interactive visualizer for arrays, linked lists, stacks, queues, hash maps, trees, and graph BFS, with auto demos, manual mode, and pseudocode.
C++ smart pointers (unique, shared and weak) and the object-oriented ideas behind virtual, abstract and concrete classes.
Examples of common C++ data structures such as vectors, maps, sets, queues and stacks, plus the bubble, selection and merge sorting algorithms and their comple…
An overview of complexity theory: Big-O notation, complexity classes, and the P versus NP question.
Continues C++ data structures with arrays, vectors and lists, and introduces Big-O notation and the P=NP question.
An introduction to C++ data structures: linear structures, associative containers and user-defined types, with arrays, vectors and lists.
Part two of C++ argument passing: pass by reference, by pointer and by value, which variants are legal and illegal, and why the rules work the way they do.
Part one of C++ argument passing: pass by reference, by pointer and by value, which variants are legal and illegal, and why the rules work the way they do.
C++ fundamentals: namespaces, pointers, references and values, declaring versus defining variables, the standard library and preprocessing directives.
An introduction to C++ covering memory management, the stack versus the heap, and basic syntax with a Hello World example.
The third part of a series on Visual Studio Code Docker dev containers and Protocol Buffers, covering what dev containers are and how Protocol Buffers are inst…
The second part of a series on Visual Studio Code Docker dev containers and Protocol Buffers, covering what dev containers are and how Protocol Buffers are ins…
The first part of a series on Visual Studio Code Docker dev containers and Protocol Buffers, covering what dev containers are and how Protocol Buffers are inst…
An introduction to object-oriented programming covering class syntax, inheritance and types, using the classic Animal Kingdom example.
A worked example of the builder design pattern in Python, with a CarBuilder class that uses a CarFactory class.
Continues the object-oriented basics with a calculator class example and introduces the three families of design patterns: creational, behavioral and structura…
A worked example of the factory design pattern in Python, built around a CarFactory class and its supporting classes.
An introduction to procedural programming in Python: variables, control flow, loops and functions, white space sensitivity, and the difference between declarin…
How operating systems run software, the difference between virtual machines and containers, and the main programming paradigms, with an introduction to Visual…
How data travels at the bit level: IPv4 and IPv6 packet formats, binary, ASCII and integers, and an introduction to operating systems, kernels and STIGs.
How data moves across networks: IP packets, upload and download speeds, signal waves, ping versus bandwidth, and the differences between TCP, UDP, broadcast an…
A beginner introduction to how the internet works: IP addresses, ISPs and DNS, IPv4 versus IPv6, netmasks and subnets, the physical signals that carry data, an…
A tour of the four main branches of software engineering, with their languages, frameworks and protocols, plus the networking equipment that connects them: rou…
How a CPU runs code: cores and caches, parallel processing and threads, deterministic versus stochastic systems, and the differences between compilers, interpr…
An introduction to computer hardware: the Von Neumann architecture, CPUs, GPUs, memory and storage, the BIOS and operating system, and the difference between A…
A chatbot for the Stockfish chess engine’s C++ source code: it uses retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) with a Mistral LLM to answer questions like “Where is…
I built a browser game on WebSim purely by prompt programming, comparing how Gemini 2.5 Pro, ChatGPT 4.1, Sonnet 3.7, and DeepSeek V3.1 handled the job.
I built a C++ chess engine with a minimax AI player as fast as possible using ChatGPT. This post covers two attempts, how the engine works, and what I learned…
Got my boating license. ✅ The Gulf Coast is nice this time of year! 🏖️
FuturePulse podcast episode featuring Ron Picard, Director of Autonomy Engineering and former USAF civil servant, on AI and autonomous robotics.
Special night, with colleagues and friends. Incredibly honored and humbled to have played a part.
AI agents from AFRL's AACO and DARPA's ACE programs flew the X-62A VISTA through beyond-visual-range engagements and dogfighting maneuvers against simulated ad…
This paper presents AAAx, an Air Force campaign testing autonomous attritable aircraft, and a plan to speed up autonomy test and evaluation with the crewed X-6…
Lazy eights over the beach in Destin, Florida, in a French TB-10, flying with a retired T-38 pilot.
My first multi-engine flight, in a 1959 Beechcraft (BE95): stalls, steep turns, an emergency descent, and a simulated single-engine failure.
Practicing simulated engine failures in a Piper Warrior II: 360-degree spirals to the runway and 180-degree turn-backs after takeoff, with the altitudes and sp…
Flew a Super Decathlon today: the first center-stick, tailwheel, and aerobatic airplane I have flown.
I passed my amateur (HAM) radio Technician exam, the first of three license levels, to learn more about the radio spectrum. My call sign is K4AGN.
Flew a Cherokee 6 (PA-32), a high-power complex airplane, which has me thinking about more endorsements.
I passed my Private Pilot checkride, one of the accomplishments I'm most proud of, with thanks to everyone who helped me get there.
Videos from my first solo flight as a student pilot: the first solo landing and the celebration afterward.
Videos from my second solo flight as a student pilot: starting the engine, making the radio call, and living the dream.
Part 11 of Formal Methods 101: weak, strong and k-induction, a worked sum proof, and proving an inductive invariant of an extended-state machine.
Part 10 of Formal Methods 101: axioms and models, syntactic (⊢) versus semantic (⊨) entailment, and soundness and completeness.
Part 9 of Formal Methods 101: decidable and undecidable problems, the halting problem and its diagonal contradiction, and why propositional logic is decidable.
Complexity theory: Big-O growth rates, then the classes P, NP, NP-complete, coNP and NP-hard, and what the open question P = NP would change.
Second-order logic extends first-order logic by quantifying over sets, and higher-order logics go further, much like types of types in type theory.
Boolean satisfiability (SAT): truth tables, CNF and DNF, and the solver algorithms DFS, BFS, bounded model checking, ROBDDs and DPLL, with animated search tree…
Satisfiability modulo theories (SMT) extends SAT to numbers and other types, using bit vectoring or DPLL(T) with a domain theory such as linear integer arithme…
Binary relations and functions, their properties (reflexive, symmetric, transitive and more), and the order and equivalence relations they define.
Propositional logic: propositions, the five operators with truth tables, order of operations, and how to write an argument formally.
First-order logic: predicates, functions, quantifiers and the connectives, with an example formula and a worked quantifier figure.
Set notation and membership, the set operators (union, intersection, difference, complement, Cartesian product, power set), and the common number sets.
Five deeper ReLU/Adam/dropout networks classify forest cover from cartographic features, beating the earlier 70.58% network; the best, 54-1024-512-216-7, reach…
ASNets learn wargame policies from LM-Cut labels. On same-size battles they trail LM-Cut, but trained on small battles they win 26.50 and 27.55 of 30 on larger…
We train five Keras CNN variants on 10,000 MNIST images. A third convolution scores best at 98.64% test accuracy, Adam and batch 64 reach 98.44%, and an over-s…
Adam on the same MNIST "is it a 9" network reaches 98.94% at best, behind momentum's 99.2%; one setting collapsed to the always-"not a 9" baseline of 90.39%.
Minibatches and momentum train a 784-20-10-1 network on MNIST "is it a 9" in about 230 s versus 2,118 s for batch 500, with test accuracy near 99.2% in every r…
Trains one sigmoid neuron on MNIST to spot nines, reaching 96.40% test accuracy, and shows why that must be judged against the 90.39% always-answer-no baseline.
We train a 2-20-10-1 ReLU network on two interleaving half-moons and compare no regularisation, L2 and dropout: all reach about 88.5-89.5% test accuracy versus…
Extends gradient descent to a plane over home size and bedrooms using the vectorised Xθ form, then walks a 925 sq ft, 2-bedroom listing through to a predicted…
Fits a food-truck profit line from city population with batch gradient descent on standardised data; the cost falls from 0.662 to 0.149 and the slope settles a…
Fit a line to scattered data with gradient descent, step by step: the loss function, its partial derivatives, the update rules, and a short Python implementati…
A step-by-step build of a two-port Ubuntu router with DHCP, DNS, NAT and an iptables firewall, with the full configuration files and checks.
How a home VPN works and how to build one with OpenVPN on a Raspberry Pi, from keys and server config to router port forwarding and an Android client.
A step-by-step tutorial for building a WordPress site on your own Ubuntu server: domain and DNS, server security, Apache, MySQL, PHP, HTTPS, and installing Wor…
This is a railway-networks-plugin for WebGME that traverses through the tree structures and saves various information in a .zip artifact.
BotLegger
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