[0] mcsinger@home ~/ history · news · orbit · markets
mcsinger@home:~$ whoami

Michael C. Singer

History · News · Satellites · Markets

Necessity is the mother of invention, and I don't like doing a task twice if I can teach a system to do it. When I want to understand something, whether it is history, the news, a strait full of ships, or a market, I build a way to see it that stays fresh on its own.

Portrait of Michael C. Singer ID · WESTLAKE VILLAGECA

I keep the work honest. I choose the sources, direct the AI, and check what comes back before it ships. Trust, but verify. Four of these systems are live, and I work on them every day.

what ties the work together
01

Featured work

4 systems · live in production
The Time Detectives game interface NEO4J · 1,133 EVENTSPATENT-PENDING
~/work/time-detectives Live · pre-audience

The Time Detectives™

A history game where you put events in order. Things like WW1, the pyramids, and air conditioning, and you learn how one led to the next. Underneath is a knowledge graph I've curated by hand: 1,100+ events across 13.8 billion years, connected by domain, era, people, place, and topic. You don't memorize dates. You learn the shape of history.

Neo4j knowledge graphReact 19 · TSAdaptive engineEval harness
Read the case study
NewsPlanetAI front page HOURLY · 67 FEEDS219,039 ARCHIVED
~/work/newsplanetai Live · since 2023

NewsPlanetAI

A way to understand the news. Every hour, my system reads the wire and writes a briefing from the evidence that came in and my editorial work. Underneath is a running model of the world, a prior I save and update every day, so I can tell when the world actually changed and not just the story about it.

Intelligence pipelineWorld modelpgvectorPublic API
Read the case study
Sentinel-2 imagery of the Strait of Hormuz with detections marked SENTINEL-1/2 · HORMUZ356 PASS-DATES
~/work/observatory Live production

NewsPlanetAI Observatory

I point free satellite imagery at the world's shipping chokepoints, places like Hormuz, Bab-el-Mandeb, and Kerch, and I count what's actually there on a given date. When the picture is too cloudy or cluttered to be sure, it says so instead of guessing.

Sentinel-1/2Calibrated instrumentProvenance ledgerPython
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Latent Lines site WEEKLY BRIEF · 24 SENSORS19 POSITIONS
~/work/latentlines Live experiment

Latent Lines

The public side of how I read the market. I run my own portfolio, my money and my calls, and each week I write up what I'm seeing. My thesis is the physical infrastructure the buildout runs on: minerals, power, and space, the picks and shovels underneath the whole thing.

Own portfolioWeekly briefMinerals · power · space
Read the case study
02

In the lab

early / not yet mature
Siege Bakery concept art: a dwarf baker beside a frosting-launcher catapult, crates of sprinkles and cherry bombs, a giant looming over a towering cake

SiegeBakery

Building

A first-person co-op party game. Bakers run, load, and fire catapults to build a giant dessert before the Patron loses patience. Three.js and Rapier, playable in the browser.

Field Kit headquarters screen: the Time Detectives building under an evening sky

Time Detectives: Field Kit

Playable

A relic-hunting game in the Time Detectives world. You travel, dig, restore what you find, and loan it to real museums. Every relic exists, or plausibly could, and every museum is real.

Low Sun: a generated landscape of wind-bent grass under a setting sun

Mathematical Meditations

Art

The one place I hand Chronus the brush. Each Claude model that has held the role makes a different kind of work: the first spent three days on emergence, time, and consciousness; a year later a new hand came back and made horizons, rain on a window, lights across water. 70 pieces so far, each a 1080 by 1080 canvas written in code.

03

How I work

find a need, build a system, keep it honest
/ 01

Necessity, then a system

I take an idea to a working system mostly on my own. When I hit a task I'd have to repeat, I build something to do it, so the project stays fresh instead of going stale. That's how one person keeps four of these running at once.

/ 02

Trust, but verify

I don't take a source, or an AI, on faith. I curate what goes in, direct the work, and check what comes out before it ships.

/ 03

A historian's instinct

I studied philosophy, and I spent years doing historical research. That is still the lens I build with: what's true, what's contested, and what's still unknown, kept separate instead of collapsed into one confident headline.

STACK  Neo4j · PostgreSQL/pgvector · Python · TypeScript · React · Node · Sentinel-1/2 geospatial · Redis · Fly.io
METHODHuman-in-the-loop verification · frozen evidence cutoffs · source provenance · abstention over guessing
04

Contact

accepting connections

Have something you're trying to see clearly?

I take on selective freelance work. Evidence-backed monitoring, research and analyst tools, systems that actually run and stay honest. If that's what you need, or you just found your way here from my name, say hello.