Alex Towell

Research Engineer & Computer Scientist specializing in Machine Learning, Statistical Computing, and Open Source Development

50+ Projects

5 Papers

1M+ Downloads

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Blog Post

dapple 0.6: Composition and Layout for Terminal Graphics

February 15, 2026 4 min read

dapple 0.6 introduced a layout engine and used it to ship seven new CLI extras. That was fast growth – maybe too fast. By the time the dust settled, there were 14 tools, and some of them overlapped.

csvcat rendered CSV tables. datacat rendered JSON tables. Both produced the same output for the same conceptual task: “show me this structured data.” imgcat displayed one image. thumbcat displayed many images in a grid. Two entry points for one domain.

0.7 consolidates. Each tool owns a domain, not a file format. The result is 11 tools that cover more ground than 14 did.

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dapple terminal-graphics python open-source composition

Feb 2026

Posthumous: A Federated Dead Man's Switch

Some things should only happen after you can’t do them yourself.

Posthumous is a self-hosted dead man’s switch. You check in periodically — via a phone, a browser, the CLI, or an API call — and if you stop, it progresses through …

Feb 2026

Client-Side Encryption for Static Sites: pagevault + cryptoid

I run a static site on GitHub Pages. No backend, no server, no database. That simplicity is the whole point — until you want to share something semi-private.

Maybe it’s client-confidential notes mixed in with public documentation. Maybe …

Feb 2026

Navigating the Metafunctor Ecosystem: A Map of 120+ Open Source Projects

Over the past decade, I’ve published more than 120 open-source repositories on GitHub. They span encrypted search theory, statistical reliability engineering, generic programming, fuzzy logic, AI tools, Unix-philosophy CLI utilities, three …

Feb 2026

Observation Functors: Composable Censoring for Series System Simulation

Last week I announced maskedcauses, the R package that estimates component reliability from masked series system failures. That post covered the three likelihood models and the path to CRAN.

This post is about what happened next: the package now …

Feb 2026

maskedcauses: Maximum Likelihood Estimation for Masked Series System Failures

Note (February 2026): This package has been renamed from likelihood.model.series.md to maskedcauses.

Two days ago, I submitted likelihood.model to CRAN—the foundation package for composable statistical inference. Next in line: maskedcauses, which …

Jan 2026

Long Echo Comes Alive: From Philosophy to Orchestration

A year ago, I wrote about Long Echo as a philosophy for preserving AI conversations across decades. The key insight was graceful degradation: design archives that work progressively even as technology disappears.

That philosophy has now become a …

Jan 2026

Long Echo: The Ghost That Speaks

The ghost is not you. But it echoes you.

What survives beyond scattered archives? Beyond exported conversations and curated bookmarks? The answer is what we never think to preserve: the photos that capture how you see. The correspondence that maps …

Jan 2026

Building Languages to Solve Problems

Chapter 4 of Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs begins with one of the most profound insights in all of programming: the most powerful technique for controlling complexity is metalinguistic abstraction—the establishment of new …