About Imortek and Odin Loch

In my own words

Why I work like this

I like all engineering and all the sciences, and I have never been good at staying inside one of them. That is why the shelf has a hardened Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) next to an Authenticated Encryption with Associated Data (AEAD) scheme next to carbide tooling next to a paper about how you would measure national wealth in megajoules. It is not a strategy. It is what I am actually interested in.

Working alone means nobody checks my work, so I built the checking into the work. ParanoidBSD will not mark a file as ported until differential or Intermediate Representation (IR) verification passes, because I know perfectly well that a file which merely compiles has told me nothing. MathScript returns Result<T> everywhere instead of throwing, because I wanted the failure cases visible in the type rather than discovered at three in the morning. AEGIS has one rule — nothing is done until an attack simulation confirms it — because my intuition about traffic analysis was wrong repeatedly, and the simulation was not.

The same reasoning explains the parts of this site that look like they are arguing against me. Cell AI’s perplexity is four orders of magnitude worse than Generative Pre-trained Transformer 2 (GPT-2) and that is on its front page. The decompiler recovers algorithms at F1 0.056 on stripped binaries, next to the 1.000 it gets with symbols. The Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) work failed, and it is published as a failure with the statistics that show why. If I hid those, you would have no way of telling which of my other numbers to trust.

ParanoidBSD describes itself as “a secure operating system made by a Schizophrenic”. That is my line about myself and I am keeping it. It does not mean the engineering is unreliable — the gates on this work are stricter than a lot of commercial software ever sees, and they are written down where you can read them. It means I would rather tell you who is building this than have you find out later.

If you are deciding whether to depend on any of it: read the tests, the provenance records and the published limitations. They are the parts built to be checked, and they will tell you far more than I can.

What this is

An engineering practice, not a startup

There is no team, no funding, no investor money to spend down and no growth plan. There is one person with a trade, two diplomas, and an unusual amount of time spent on operating systems, cryptography, numerical methods and machine learning.

That is a weakness in most respects and a strength in one: nothing here has been shaped by the need to look impressive to an investor. The perplexity number that is four orders of magnitude off gets published. The decompiler F1 of 0.056 gets printed next to the 1.000. The cryptographic scheme says “prototype, not for production” on its own front page, because it is.

The software is real and the tests are real. Where something has not been verified, the page says so, in the same size type as everything else.

The standard

Compile-only is unverified. A file that builds has not been shown to work.
Models never self-certify. They propose; deterministic tooling disposes.
Limitations go on the front page. Not in a footnote, not in an appendix.
Measurement beats intuition. Especially when intuition is confident.
A negative result is a result. The AES work failed, was documented properly, and is published as a failure.

Why the name

Imortek, and the Schizophrenic line

The ParanoidBSD repository describes itself as “a secure Operating System made by a Schizophrenic”. That is the author’s own line about himself, and it stays because it is his to make and because it is more honest than the alternative.

It is worth saying plainly what it does and does not mean here. It does not mean the engineering is unreliable — the verification gates on this work are stricter than most commercial software ever sees, and they exist in writing where anyone can check them. What it does mean is that this is a person building in public, under his own name, with his own conditions stated rather than hidden.

If you are evaluating whether to depend on this software, evaluate the tests, the provenance records and the published limitations. They are the parts designed to be checked, and they will tell you far more than any biography.

The work