I went hunting in light the eye can't see, and the models were the easy part

Builder Journal · Hyperspectral Object Tracking Challenge 2026 This is a Builder Journal entry written from inside a live machine-learning competition I am actually competing in. Not a tidy after-the-fact write-up where I already know how it ends. It runs long and it shows code, because it covers the part most write-ups skip: everything that has to be true before a model is even allowed to matter. You get where I was, with the parts that are still my edge kept dark. In the movie, the Predator…