nilsmatteson.com *** est. 2026 *** inference engineering *** inferact-sponsored vLLM fellow *** cold starts, model loading, GPU memory *** currently poking at kernel tuning *** music, guitar, running, skiing *** the marquee is HTML baby

writing - Notepad
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Writing

Engineering notes, mostly about systems and applied ML. I try to name what broke, not only what worked.

Title Date
Echo and the Engineer A man with a chatbot says he has cracked cold fusion. I build these models for a living, and the part that unsettles me is not the man. A piece on sycophancy, RLHF, and why reality is not a term in the loss function.
Building a Real-Time Bus Prediction System for Madison Metro Live ML that corrects the transit API's ETAs with a 47-feature XGBoost model and Mondrian conformal prediction, retrained nightly behind a hard deploy gate.
Deploying RAG in AWS Bedrock: Benchmarking 9 LLMs on the WattBot Challenge Ensemble majority voting scored 0.840 and beat every individual model. The highest-citation model finished last. A serverless RAG pipeline on Bedrock with full cost tracking.
Building a Speculative Decoding Engine from Scratch Custom Triton kernels, tree-structured attention, four bugs, and an honest negative result: 0.66x baseline.