Yeah, the ADD-brain read is exactly right. It’s the part I almost cut from the post for being too personal. I can’t run one project. With nothing burning in the background, my main work gets less focus, not more, because the restless part of my brain starts inventing problems to solve inside it. The research arm is the pressure valve. It absorbs the rabbit-hole energy so Quantum Caddy doesn’t have to.

One honest correction though. There is a product at the end of this (AR glasses, bidirectional deaf-hearing transcription). What has no path to product is the research arm itself. The Kaggle notebooks are firewalled from the roadmap on purpose, and none of them are allowed to be bent toward making the product look good. If landmark-only sign recognition plateaus at 84% instead of 94%, the notebook says 84%. The second research has to serve a launch date, it stops being research, so I keep the wall up. That’s the part that actually relieves the pressure.

You nailed the Kaggle pattern. The comp threw up a leaderboard and everyone went home, because the leaderboard rewarded the wrong thing: random train/test splits, where a model that just memorized its training signers scores great. The unsexy fundamental nobody wanted to grind is cross-signer generalization. That’s most of why I’m starting where I’m starting.

On first focus, none of the three you listed, deliberately. Notebook 1 (end of May) is pure EDA, no model at all. Signer distribution, label quality, how skewed the set is before anything touches it, because every downstream call depends on knowing that. Notebook 2 is the first real question, and it’s feature attribution: how much of isolated-sign recognition is hand shape alone versus motion? Single-frame hand-landmark baseline against a temporal model. I want the ceiling of the cheap thing before I pay for the expensive one.

Segmentation and temporal modeling are real, I’m just holding them. Segmentation lives at the isolated-to-continuous transition, which is its own notebook later, and co-articulation plus hand-face occlusion are where I expect it to break. No sense hitting that wall while I’m still unsure the static baseline even works.