Background I did some research online and found a nice course that teach how to build LLM from scratch. The course is shared public online and all the assignment resources are here: https://cs336.stanford.edu/. In the following series, I will put the summary and notes starting from lession 1. Tokenization is at the very beginning of the LLM. There were many different tokenization algorithm, suc
You count the weeks between today and your on site. Twelve. You pull up a 90 day FAANG prep plan and the structure looks reasonable: easy problems for two weeks, mediums for six, hards for the rest. Six weeks in, you hit binary trees and realise your recursion is shaky. Two weeks later you try a DP problem and can't formulate the recurrence. Suddenly the 12 week plan is a 6 week plan with 6 weeks
The Autonomous Paradox In 2026, we’ve moved past simple chatbots. We are building Production-Grade RAG pipelines and autonomous agents that can plan, execute, and iterate. But as an architect, I’ve noticed a glaring hole in our "Agentic" future: Identity Sprawl. We are giving agents non-human identities (NHI) with "Full Admin" permissions just to ensure the RAG works smoothly. We are effectively
What if your Kubernetes cluster simply refused to run unsigned images? I spent some time experimenting with enforcing image provenance in a small Kubernetes setup using MicroK8s. The idea was simple: Only container images with valid cryptographic signatures are allowed to run in the cluster. For this I used: GitLab CI/CD (build + signing pipeline) Cosign / Sigstore (image signing) Kyverno (admissi
TL;DR. golang.org/x/net/idna.Lookup.ToASCII runs UTS-46 NFKC mapping 0-9. A pre-IDNA net.ParseIP check rejects the NO_PROXY lists, TLS-SNI routers, and cookie-domain validators that TrimRight + ParseAddr golang.org/x/net/http/httpproxy, the canonical safe pattern, and two I ran into this one while writing a Go HTTP client for a private project. I idna.Lookup.ToASCII canonicalising the host The sha
I shipped gni-compression to npm two days ago. One of the first questions I got (from myself, running benchmarks at midnight): does it work on anything other than chat data? Short answer: not yet. Long answer: I found out exactly why, and it led me somewhere more interesting than I expected. After the npm launch I ran GN against Silesia — the standard general text compression benchmark suite. Dick
Introduction Picture two doctors updating the same patient record at the same time - one in São Paulo, the other in London. Both are offline. When connectivity returns, whose changes prevail? This is not a hypothetical. It is the everyday reality of distributed systems: multiple nodes, no shared clock, no guaranteed network. The conventional answer has long been locking - one node waits while an
I keep seeing the same argument about AI making us dumber. It's the same argument people had about search engines, and before that books. The usual response is to point at history and say "every generation panics, every generation was wrong, relax." I think that response is half right, and the wrong half is what bothers me. Tools change what we bother to remember. The people who'd trained their wh