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thoughts & experiments

Writing about distributed systems, full-stack engineering, design, and the occasional deep-dive into developer tooling.

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How Do You Know AI Is Actually Working?

Demos always look good. Production AI degrades silently. Here's the evaluation framework — from exact match to human review — and how to catch hallucinations.

Jul 15, 2026 read more →

How Do You Know AI Is Actually Working?

Demos always look good. Production AI degrades silently. Here's the evaluation framework — from exact match to human review — and how to catch hallucinations.

#ai #evals #testing #hallucination

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Latency, Tokens, and Cost — The Physics of AI Products

🤖 AI / ML

Jul 8, 2026

Part 14 · AI Demystified

Latency, Tokens, and Cost — The Physics of AI Products

Why is AI slow? Why does it cost money? What does streaming actually change? The mechanics of inference, visualized.

#ai #cost #latency #tokens

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🤖 AI / ML

Jul 1, 2026

Part 13 · AI Demystified

Do You Really Need GPT-4?

Frontier models are impressive — and often the wrong choice. Here's the model selection map: cost, capability, latency, and when local wins.

#ai #llm #model-selection #efficiency

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How AI Reasons (And Why It Sometimes Breaks)

🤖 AI / ML

Jun 22, 2026

Part 8 · AI Demystified

How AI Reasons (And Why It Sometimes Breaks)

o1, o3, DeepSeek-R1 — reasoning models behave differently. What chain-of-thought actually is, what 'thinking longer' means, and where it still fails.

#ai #reasoning #chain-of-thought #llm

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🤖 AI / ML

Jun 20, 2026

Part 7 · AI Demystified

What AI Cannot Do

8 structural limitations of every language model — not bugs, not temporary — built into how they work. Illustrated.

#ai #limitations #reasoning #reliability

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Fine-tuning vs. Prompting — When to Use Which

🤖 AI / ML

Jun 15, 2026

Part 12 · AI Demystified

Fine-tuning vs. Prompting — When to Use Which

Prompt engineering gets you 80% of the way. Fine-tuning gets you the last 20%. Here's a clear decision framework for choosing between them.

#ai #fine-tuning #prompt-engineering #llm

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Embeddings & Vector Databases — The Memory Layer of AI

🤖 AI / ML

Jun 8, 2026

Part 10 · AI Demystified

Embeddings & Vector Databases — The Memory Layer of AI

How neural networks encode meaning as numbers, why similar things end up close in vector space, and what databases like Pinecone and pgvector actually do.

#ai #embeddings #vector-databases #semantic-search

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RAG Explained — How AI Knows What You Didn't Train It On

🤖 AI / ML

Jun 1, 2026

Part 11 · AI Demystified

RAG Explained — How AI Knows What You Didn't Train It On

Retrieval-Augmented Generation lets LLMs answer questions about documents they've never seen. Here's how the pipeline works and when to use it.

#ai #rag #llm #vector-databases

Sweden Migration Globe — 3D Arc Flows 2010–2023

🗺️ Visuals

Jun 1, 2026

Sweden Migration Globe — 3D Arc Flows 2010–2023

A 3D interactive globe mapping every major immigration and emigration route to and from Sweden from 2010 to 2023. Watch India's rise, Syria's refugee spike, and the COVID collapse — all in animated arcs.

#sweden #immigration #emigration #3d

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5 Mental Models You Need Before Diving Into AI

🤖 AI / ML

May 24, 2026

Part 0 · AI Demystified

5 Mental Models You Need Before Diving Into AI

Before you learn how AI works, learn how to think about it. These five mental models will save you hours of confusion.

#ai #mental-models #concepts #beginner

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🤖 AI / ML

May 24, 2026

Part 9 · AI Demystified

Prompt Engineering — How to Talk to AI

Five techniques that cover 95% of real-world prompt engineering. Zero-shot, few-shot, role prompting, chain-of-thought, and structured output — with before/after examples.

#ai #prompt-engineering #llm #tips

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How DNS Works — The Internet's Phone Book

⚙️ Tech

May 23, 2026

Part 1 · How the Internet Works

How DNS Works — The Internet's Phone Book

You type google.com. Your browser stares at it blankly — it has no idea where that is. Here's how the internet turns a name into an address, and why it's faster than you'd expect.

#dns #networking #internet #protocols

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🤖 AI / ML

May 23, 2026

Part 6 · AI Demystified

Why AI Lies (And Doesn't Know It)

AI sometimes states false things with complete confidence — fake citations, wrong numbers, invented APIs. This is hallucination. Here's why it happens and how to catch it.

#ai #hallucination #reliability #llm

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How HTTP Works — The Language of the Web

⚙️ Tech

May 23, 2026

Part 4 · How the Internet Works

How HTTP Works — The Language of the Web

The TLS tunnel is open. Now your browser and server need to speak the same language. Here's what GET, POST, 404, and 200 actually mean — and what really travels across the wire.

#http #networking #protocols #api

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⚙️ Tech

May 23, 2026

Part 5 · How the Internet Works

How HTTP/2 Works — The Speed Upgrade

HTTP/1.1 can only send one request at a time. A modern page needs 50+ files. HTTP/2 loads everything at once over a single connection — here's how multiplexing actually works.

#http2 #networking #performance #web

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⚙️ Tech

May 23, 2026

Part 0 · How the Internet Works

What Happens When You Hit Enter?

You type a URL and press Enter. 200 milliseconds later, a page appears. Here's every single step that happened in between — from DNS lookup to browser paint.

#networking #web #dns #http

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⚙️ Tech

May 23, 2026

Part 7 · How the Internet Works

How SFTP Works — Secure File Transfers

Every time a developer deploys files to a server or downloads logs, SFTP is often involved. Here's how it differs from FTP, how the SSH tunnel works, and when to use it.

#sftp #ssh #networking #file-transfer

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How TCP Works — The Internet's Delivery Guarantee

⚙️ Tech

May 23, 2026

Part 2 · How the Internet Works

How TCP Works — The Internet's Delivery Guarantee

You have an IP address. Before a single byte of data flows, TCP performs a secret handshake and establishes a guarantee: nothing will be lost. Here's how it works.

#tcp #networking #protocols #internet

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How HTTPS Works — The Lock Icon Explained

⚙️ Tech

May 23, 2026

Part 3 · How the Internet Works

How HTTPS Works — The Lock Icon Explained

Your TCP connection is open. But right now, it's a naked wire — every router between you and the server can read everything. Here's what TLS does, how the handshake works, and what that padlock actually means.

#tls #https #security #networking

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How WebSockets Work — Real-Time, Both Ways

⚙️ Tech

May 23, 2026

Part 6 · How the Internet Works

How WebSockets Work — Real-Time, Both Ways

HTTP is always ask-then-answer. WebSockets open a permanent channel where server and client talk freely — no polling, no waiting. Here's how chat apps, live feeds, and multiplayer games actually work.

#websockets #networking #realtime #protocols

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🤖 AI / ML

May 22, 2026

Part 5 · AI Demystified

Why AI Forgets

Mid-conversation, AI suddenly doesn't remember what you said earlier. This isn't a bug — it's the context window. Here's how it works and how to work around it.

#ai #context-window #memory #llm

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🤖 AI / ML

May 21, 2026

Part 4 · AI Demystified

How AI Reads Your Words

AI doesn't read letters or words — it reads tokens. This small detail explains why AI costs money, why it stumbles on names, and why non-English is more expensive.

#ai #tokens #tokenization #llm

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🤖 AI / ML

May 20, 2026

Part 1 · AI Demystified

What Happens When You Ask AI Something?

You type a message. Half a second later, AI replies. Here's every single step that happens in between — from your first letter to the model's last word.

#llm #tokens #attention #transformers

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Transformers — The Architecture That Changed Everything

🤖 AI / ML

May 20, 2026

Part 2 · AI Demystified

Transformers — The Architecture That Changed Everything

Every major AI — GPT, Claude, Gemini, Llama — runs on the Transformer. Here's how it works, stage by stage, with live visualizations.

#ai #transformers #attention #architecture

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🤖 AI / ML

May 19, 2026

Part 3 · AI Demystified

How AI Learns, Thinks, and Decides

Training, inference, sampling, fine-tuning — these words are everywhere. Here's what they actually mean, with live visualizations and honest analogies.

#ai #machine-learning #training #sampling

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