What Ralph Wiggum Has to Do With How AI Agents Write Code

A playful take on what a Simpsons gag reveals about how AI coding agents actually work.

From the 4004 to Your Phone: Why CPU, GPU, TPU, and NPU Exist

Tracing how specialized chips evolved from the first microprocessor to the CPU, GPU, TPU, and NPU inside your phone.

Why XOR Is Everywhere in Computer Science

Digging into why XOR shows up everywhere from checksums to encryption, and what makes it the only bitwise operator that never loses information.

The Birthday Paradox Is Why Your Passwords Get Hacked

How a classic probability puzzle about shared birthdays explains why hash collisions happen way sooner than you'd expect.

Bloom Filters

A look at the strange data structure that powers Chrome's malicious site warnings by trading perfect accuracy for speed.

64 Bytes Walk Into a Cache

Why the order you loop through a matrix can make or break performance, and what it reveals about how CPU caches actually work.

What Ants Figured Out That We're Still Coding Around

What swarm intelligence and particle swarm optimization reveal about problems that get solved better without a single decision-maker.

A CPU Pipeline Is What Group Projects Think They Are

Using the chaos of group projects to explain how CPU pipelining, hazards, forwarding, and branch prediction actually work.