Series
Under the Hood
How the technology actually works — deep dives into the systems we use every day.
Under the Hood · The AI Field Guide
How LLMs Actually Work
Tokens, transformers, attention, and the training pipeline -- what large language models actually do when they 'predict the next token', why they hallucinate, and why they're so good at code.
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To LLMs… and Beyond!
LLMs are one corner of a much larger field. Diffusion models, reasoning models, multimodal systems, open-weight vs closed — what they are, how they differ, and how to choose.
Read articleUnder the Hood · Time
What Time Is It?
The hour on your phone is a fragile compromise between the sun and politics. Sundials, shipwrecks, railway time, DST, and the volunteer-maintained database that keeps the world's clocks roughly honest.
Read articleUnder the Hood · Time
What Day Is It?
The date next to the time on your phone is its own kind of fragile. Calendars argue with the moon, the sun, and each other; whole days have been deleted by decree; and the year number on your screen depends on which monk's arithmetic your ancestors trusted.
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Ticks or Tocks?
A second used to be a fraction of the day. Now it's defined by the vibrations of a caesium atom -- and even that might not be precise enough. From quartz watches to optical lattice clocks, the story of how we learned to count time.
Read articleUnder the Hood · The AI Field Guide
The Other Transformers
BERT and T5 are transformers too, but they aren't trying to be ChatGPT. They're trying to be the boring layer underneath -- classifiers, embeddings, structured transformations -- and they're often a better answer than an LLM.
Read articleUnder the Hood · Time
Time Is Broken
Time doesn't flow at the same rate everywhere. It slows near massive objects, dilates at high speeds, and might not 'flow' at all. From GPS corrections to black holes, the physics that makes time truly strange.
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The Reranker You Didn't Know You Needed
RAG explanations stop at 'embed the query, look up the nearest documents, hand them to the LLM.' That's the demo. In production, there's a second pass between the lookup and the LLM, and it's the one that actually makes retrieval work.
Read articleUnder the Hood · Time
Does Time Even Exist?
The arrow of time isn't in the equations. "Now" isn't a location. The most fundamental theories of physics may contain no time variable at all. A tour of the foundations, from the block universe to the holographic principle.
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