Paper explainers, architectures, and the math behind modern AI
Skip connections are the backbone of deep learning — but naive extensions cause catastrophic instability. DeepSeek's mHC constrains Hyperconnection weight matrices to the Birkhoff polytope using the Sinkhorn-Knopp algorithm, achieving 1.8× convergence speedup while keeping gradients tamed.
Large Vision Transformers develop artifacts—high-norm tokens in low-information areas used for internal computation. Adding learnable register tokens eliminates these artifacts and improves dense prediction tasks.
Understanding how FlashAttention achieves 2-4x speedups by respecting GPU memory hierarchy, using tiling to minimize HBM access, and leveraging online softmax for numerical stability.
Pre-training deep bidirectional representations for language understanding. How masked language modeling enables a single model to master almost any NLP task.
Understanding the building blocks and design choices of the Transformer architecture that powers GPT, BERT, and modern language models.
PageRank measures a page's importance by counting not just how many pages link to it, but how important those linking pages are — a recursive definition solved by treating the web as a Markov chain and finding its stationary distribution via power iteration.
Tools, workflows, and practical engineering insights
On March 31, 2026, a missing .npmignore rule exposed Claude Code's entire TypeScript source to the public for several hours. Beyond the drama, the code revealed something deeper: Claude Code is not a CLI tool — it is a production-grade Agent Runtime with a ReAct engine, 7-layer fault recovery, multi-agent orchestration, and 20+ unreleased features hiding behind internal flags.
Modern LLMs are powerful enough to act as a personal research compiler. This article covers the full pipeline in depth: collecting raw source documents, using an LLM to incrementally compile a structured Markdown wiki with concept articles and backlinks, querying that wiki with a live LLM agent, and rendering outputs as slides, charts, and reports — all viewable in Obsidian.
A structured learning path synthesizing four key resources: Claude Code Skills docs, Butter's taxonomy of deterministic agent approaches, OpenAI's harness engineering post, and the Everything-Claude-Code toolkit. Five chapters covering foundations, determinism strategies, skills, harness design, and production systems.
How parallelism, plan-first thinking, and verification loops combine into a high-leverage workflow. Distilled from the practices of the team that built Claude Code.
Compensation, industry trends, and career strategy through data
An interactive visual journey through 98 years of S&P 500 performance, showing how wars, recessions, pandemics, and policy shifts drove the market through 21 bull runs and 20 bear markets — and why $100 invested in 1926 became $1.48 million.
An interactive, data-driven look at why tech compensation falls into three tiers — Traditional, Competitive Tech, and Big Tech+ — and how equity, level, and geography shape the distribution.
Michael Wan Interactive Insights