8 posts
Writing
Things I worked out, written down before I forget them again.
2026
- A typeface from one letter
A tiny model, trained on 2,806 open-source typefaces, that draws a whole alphabet from one letter, right here on your CPU. The first version lost to a lookup table. The second reads your letter, checks its own work, and says how sure it is.
- Everything falls into step
Clapping crowds, two clocks on a wall, a riverbank of fireflies, a bridge in London and a rack of routers all do the same strange thing without being told. Nature wants it. Computers really don’t.
- Why can’t you zip a zip?
I zipped a folder, it got seven times smaller, so I zipped it again. It got bigger. A tour of how compression actually works, from Morse code to the pigeonhole principle.
- Anatomy of a page
A dissection of the page you’re reading, top to bottom: the night above it, the grid under it, the type, the code, the maths, the figures, and every small thing a post here can do.
2025
- What actually happens when you press ^C?
You know that moment when magic becomes real? This is about that moment: the kernel subsystem that turns two keys into a signal.
- Nerds like to ping
The most powerful network diagnostic tool you’ll ever use is 1,000 lines of code written in a single evening in 1983.
- Git diff is just LCS
Every CS student grinds LCS problems on LeetCode. But do they know it powers git diff? A deep dive into the Hunt–McIlroy algorithm and why your DSA practice is more relevant than Twitter debates suggest.
- Programming L-caches
A practical guide to CPU caches, sparked by a slow laptop. How simple changes to your loops and data structures can dramatically speed up your code.