Links — #compsci

• 4-bit floating point FP4 (Apr 26, 2026)
  John D. Cook on what FP4 numbers actually represent and the variations on the theme — useful background for anyone running quantised models.
  #ai #compsci #math
• Category Theory Illustrated: Orders (Apr 26, 2026)
  Approachable, diagram-heavy walk through ordered sets as a stepping stone into category theory.
  #compsci #math
• Garbage collection without unsafe code (Apr 26, 2026)
  Nick Fitzgerald on building a tracing GC in Rust without touching unsafe, by leaning on safe interior-mutability primitives.
  #compsci
• How LLMs work: an interactive visual deep dive (Apr 26, 2026)
  An interactive walkthrough of LLM internals based on Karpathy's lecture — tokenisation, attention, sampling, all clickable. Good for non-experts.
  #ai #compsci #tools
• The seven programming ur-languages (Apr 26, 2026)
  An argument that essentially every programming language descends from one of seven foundational forms — and that knowing them clarifies what you're really learning when you pick up a new one.
  #compsci #essays
• Nanopass: a framework for clean compiler construction (Apr 26, 2026)
  A compiler-construction framework that breaks the work into many small, well-typed passes — the architecture R. Kent Dybvig has been refining for decades.
  #compsci #tools
• JSIR: a high-level IR for JavaScript (Apr 26, 2026)
  An LLVM RFC introducing a JavaScript-aware MLIR dialect — interesting hint at where the LLVM stack might go for dynamic languages.
  #compsci
• Some unusual trees (Apr 26, 2026)
  A tour of tree data structures you don't usually meet — finger trees, radix trees, kd-trees — and what each makes easy that a balanced binary tree doesn't.
  #compsci #essays #math
• The Quiet Colossus: on Ada (Apr 26, 2026)
  A long appreciation of Ada — its design, its safety culture, and the ideas modern languages keep rediscovering decades late.
  #compsci #essays
• Toffoli gates are all you need (Apr 26, 2026)
  John D. Cook on why the reversible Toffoli gate is computationally universal — and what it tells you about the thermodynamic floor of computation.
  #compsci #math
• USB cheat sheet (2022) (Apr 26, 2026)
  Fabien Sanglard's compact reference for USB — descriptors, transfer types, packet structure, all on one page.
  #compsci #systems
• Want to write a compiler? Just read these two papers. (Apr 26, 2026)
  James Hague's case for skipping the dragon book entirely and reading two short papers that get you to a working compiler faster than any textbook.
  #compsci #essays
• Optimal strategy for Connect 4 (Apr 26, 2026)
  An interactive site that plays optimal Connect 4 against you, with a written explanation of the search strategy that makes it work.
  #compsci #fun #math
• Zero-copy GPU inference from WebAssembly on Apple Silicon (Apr 26, 2026)
  Sharing a WebAssembly module's linear memory directly with the Apple Silicon GPU — no copies, no serialisation, real measurements for stateful inference.
  #ai #compsci #web
• Pushing and Pulling: Three Reactivity Algorithms (Apr 4, 2026)
  A clear comparison of push, pull, and push-pull approaches to reactive programming.
  #compsci
• Decision Trees (Mar 1, 2026)
  Interactive visual explainer of how decision trees work, from MLU Explain.
  #math #compsci #ai
• How to allocate memory (Mar 1, 2026)
  Short, sharp essay on memory allocation strategies and tradeoffs.
  #systems #compsci
• microGPT (Mar 1, 2026)
  Karpathy walks through building a GPT from scratch in a single file.
  #ai #compsci
• Now I Get It! (Mar 1, 2026)
  Visual, interactive explanations of math and CS concepts.
  #math #compsci
• Om (Mar 1, 2026)
  A concatenative programming language where programs are their own parse trees.
  #compsci
• The Memory Allocator (Mar 1, 2026)
  Deep dive into Go's memory allocator internals, from the Internals for Interns series.
  #systems #compsci
• The Missing Semester of Your CS Education (Mar 1, 2026)
  MIT course teaching the practical command-line and tooling skills CS programs skip.
  #compsci #tools
• Introducing LACE - A New Kind of Cellular Automata (Oct 16, 2025)
  Simple local rules on a grid that produce emergent artificial life behavior.
  #compsci

< all links