The Machinery Underneath
When I wrote How Valeon Works in September, I said the house was built. It was, but quite a number of things have moved since, and a lot of it has to do with the machinery underneath. You might have noticed some of that machinery in the new Applied Market Mechanics series, but laying the foundations was essential to reach the quality and standards I'm aiming for across Valeon and the stack of products. It's also the reason some of you will have found my books missing from Amazon. I'll come to the books at the end, since they wouldn't exist without the rest.
The Figure Renderer
The first is the bespoke figure renderer. It's built in Python, and it's currently the primary generator for all cover images, book covers and post figures. Regardless of the class, whether they're custom trading charts or physics collision illustrations, the pipeline handles them all. It even generates them in both light and dark modes, so open a post, change the site theme and watch the figures adapt. The figure below is one such pair, so you can try it here.
Underneath Valeon
The next few changes to Valeon are underneath. Maths handling and display have improved. Equations no longer widen the page on phones: display maths scrolls in place, inline maths scales to fit its line, and maths in figure captions finally renders. Search has improved too, letting you search inside post contents as well as titles, along with headings and tags, with a search page that shows where each match was found. The author dashboard also got a little rework, with lessons learnt from vemail carried over: messages are now composed in the same TipTap editor as posts, improving how authors manage and compose from their inboxes.
A few repairs belong here too. For about three months, links between posts rendered as text you couldn't click; that's fixed, and every post was re-rendered. And if I edit a post after it's been narrated, the audio is now flagged as out of date instead of quietly reading the old text.
On the Surface
The surface changes aren't many, but the landing page has changed, stats are more consistent, and the archive has moved to a dedicated page with its own search and filters. At around 178 posts the front page had stopped working as a feed, so it became a landing page instead. Shared links now carry their cover image on X and Bluesky. Link previews couldn't read WebP covers, and the rest were usually too large for Bluesky's thumbnails, so most shares went out without an image; covers are now converted to a small JPEG whenever a preview asks for one, which also lets every new cover ship as a lighter WebP.
Galley
Galley got some massive changes. Projects let you work with a whole folder of chapters rather than a single markdown file, written the way Obsidian writes them, embeds included. Edits made on your phone over Obsidian Sync are respected too, since Galley refuses to overwrite a chapter that changed underneath it. Books now get proper structure: front, main and back matter, unnumbered sections and a contents depth, all set from a dialog so nobody has to write YAML. Figures and a choice of typeface are in, and the LaTeX compiler got bug fixes and improvements. All of it still runs offline, directly in your browser.
Why the Books Came Down
Some of you will have noticed that over the past few months I took down most of the books I had published. There's a reason for this. After publishing 196 posts, working on Valeon, improving Galley, and a great deal of learning about how to work with AI tooling, my thirst for improving standards kept growing, and that required the foundations above. With those lessons carried forward, and the figure renderer, AMM became the showcase of the quality and standards I'm aiming for across every publication.
I've been working with Claude over the past year, learning how it works, how it responds, how it handles different tasks, and what sort of workflows, guidelines, restrictions and boundaries are necessary to get the results. Claude is now an intricate part of the publication process here on Valeon and in the books: drafting, editorial passes, proofreading, and identifying and collating source citations. It assists in every step of the process.
The restrictions run the other way too. Claude helps keep me in check: reminders, organisation, references across projects, and catching internal details before they leak into something public. I also have a tendency not to post about things I don't actually know, and working across the fields Valeon covers, you end up crossing boundaries. None of my financial posts reference options trading, for instance, since I've never traded them and don't know enough about them to be writing about them. Claude helps keep that boundary safe, and it also teaches me, and learning, as you all know, is a curiosity I cannot shake.
The first to go through this process are The Philosophy of Reason and The Philosophy of Markets. The former is now published again in paperback, hardcover and Kindle, and the latter I expect to finish by Q3 2027. Fluent in Obedience and Meanderings on Ethics are back too, with new covers. Everything else will follow afterwards.
Two New Books
In the meantime, I'm proud to announce two new publications that live up to those very same standards. Both are out now in paperback and hardcover, printed in colour, and both are print only.
Understanding Market Mechanics: The Machinery Behind the Price
The idea came from a game developer whose game was free to download, and who also sold a physical copy on a disk for anyone who wanted to support the work. Understanding Market Mechanics is that disk. The series stays free here, and it always will. Valeon carries no ads and has no way to donate, so the book is how anyone who'd like to support the work can do so.
It's still the same argument, given more room, and the room is the book's alone. Each of the seven parts becomes its own chapter, with fuller explanation and boxed asides where a point deserved more than a link. The posts the series links out to are folded in at full length as companion chapters after the main seven, and relevant concepts from my other finance posts come in too. Of the book's 74 figures, 29 were made for it and appear nowhere on the blog. The whole book is typeset in LaTeX, equations included, and as with AMM, it was planned in full before a single line was written. The cover carries the order book on the front, with a price path running from the back into it and the seven parts laid out on the back.
A book is a fixed edition. Nothing it adds flows back to the blog, and the blog will keep growing in ways a printed book can't, so the two will drift apart over time. They're meant to.
The Perceived Universe: A Snapshot of Reality
The Perceived Universe is new writing. It draws on some of the series' posts, and most of it was written for the book. It starts from the senses and asks, in a roughly Cartesian way, what would remain if we had none. From there it works through synesthesia (numbers, people and smells have colours for me, so some of this is testimony), how language shapes what we perceive, the difference between properties that emerge and properties that inhere, the human in the equation, and how much of what we know describes what's out there, and how much describes what we're able to observe.
Readers of the series will notice the entropic framework is absent. That's deliberate. The book stops where rigour becomes necessary, and a printed book can't be revised the way a post can, so nothing goes in that references something that may or may not hold up. The framework stays here on Valeon, where it can be corrected in public. The book has its own colour scheme, shared by its cover and figures, so it reads as its own thing.
If you've read The Philosophy of Reason, you've met this argument before from the other side. In my mind the two books make the same case, The Perceived Universe from physics and metaphysics, The Philosophy of Reason from epistemology without the maths, which makes the latter the gentler way in.
Both books are on Amazon and Goodreads. Understanding Market Mechanics carries the subtitle The Machinery Behind the Price, and this post has been the machinery behind everything else; from here, it's back to the writing.