About
I’m Ricardo Ledan — a technologist and researcher working across artificial intelligence, distributed systems, and digital archives. I’m the founder of studio1804, an independent AI research lab, and the creator of rasin.ai, an AI-assisted archival research platform for Haitian history.
I build systems that make knowledge easier to access and infrastructure communities can actually own — knowledge graphs for archives, multi-agent systems for document analysis, and self-hosted AI that doesn’t depend entirely on the cloud. I’m interested in how knowledge is preserved, who owns infrastructure, and the technical conditions that shape how people access and interpret information.
I write here about whatever I’m curious about — the technical problems I’m working through, the tools I’m building with, and the questions that come up along the way.
Lately I’ve been reading What Is Intelligence? by Blaise Agüera y Arcas — he makes a compelling case that prediction is the thread running through all intelligence, biological, artificial, or otherwise, and it reframes how I think about the systems I work with daily. Machine Decision Is Not Final edited by Benjamin H. Bratton — useful for stepping outside the Silicon Valley lens on AI; it traces how China’s engagement with artificial intelligence grew out of its own philosophical and cybernetic traditions, the kind of context that’s easy to miss when you only read Western technical literature. And Build a Large Language Model (From Scratch) by Sebastian Raschka — this one has been grounding; working through the architecture of a language model from tokenization to fine-tuning has been useful.