Search, Tags & AI Comic Books
Italian computer scientist based in Hong Kong, specializing in search, retrieval algorithms, and semantic tagging. Background in International Business (Tamkang University), quantitative finance, EY Milan, and AS Watson. Self-taught in CS during COVID, 100+ technical articles published on Medium (medium.com/@ardito.bryan), and author of the Midjourney-illustrated webcomic "The Leopard: Dawn of the Warrior" (webtoons.com). Currently working on weighted/covariate search algorithms that address the RAG ceiling.
About This Episode
Michelangelo quit quantitative finance during COVID to teach himself computer science from his home in Italy — now he builds some of the most interesting search infrastructure in Hong Kong. We dig into why vanilla RAG is broken, his "covariate search" approach that applies variable weights across multiple semantic dimensions at once, and an algorithmic tagging method he's publishing that aims to outperform zero-shot LLM labelling at scale. Then the fun part: Michelangelo wrote and illustrated a 460-page Lovecraftian comic called "The Crimson Duke" using Midjourney — discovering a probabilistic consistency trick for character generation along the way.