Working notes on the papers I read, the systems I build, and the things that only became obvious after they broke.
One paper, read closely
Close readings of single papers, mine and other people's. What the paper claims, what it actually shows, and the part that only makes sense once you have tried to reimplement it.
3 notes
Many papers, one question
What a whole subarea agrees on, where it quietly contradicts itself, and which results stopped being true. Written as I read into a topic, so these grow in parts.
1 series·3 notes
Chapter by chapter
Study notes taken while working through a textbook, one note per chapter. Kept in order so a book can be followed start to finish or dipped into at the chapter I need.
2 series·4 notes
Notes from the machine
Engineering write-ups and working references. A bug that took three days, a benchmark that lied, a default that was wrong, and the cluster guides I keep open in a second tab. Written down so I stop rediscovering them.
4 notes
Technical Notes
Everything I actually run on George Mason's HPC cluster: partitions, GPU sharding, Slurm recipes, and storage rules. Checked against live cluster output, which in several places contradicts the official wiki.
Aug 20, 2026
Topic Surveys
What the DDP, FSDP, and parameter server literature actually agrees on, where it quietly contradicts itself, and which numbers stopped being true after 2023.
Aug 18, 2026
Technical Notes
Our throughput fell off a cliff at eight GPUs and it was not the network. It was the sharding boundary landing in the middle of a transformer block.
Aug 12, 2026
Paper Notes
A plain-language walkthrough of our NCAA 2026 paper. Why we expected FSDP to win everywhere, why it did not, and the one plot that changed how we set up every experiment afterwards.
Aug 4, 2026
Paper Notes
The paper is usually summarised as a fused kernel. That undersells it. The real contribution is choosing to recompute rather than store, and the arithmetic that makes it come out ahead.
Jul 21, 2026