Blogroll

by Samuel Vaiter on 2026-04-14 · modified: 2026-04-18

A list of blog or site that I like, with a choice of two interesting articles (or series).

• Scott Aaronson Shtetl-Optimizer blog. #cs #academia #quantumcomputing #rationality
  • Common Knowledge and Aumann’s Agreement Theorem (2015). Starter pack on Aumann’s theorem.
  • Why I Am Not An Integrated Information Theorist (or, The Unconscious Expander) (2014). Against bullshit.
• Kostas Anagnostou Interplay Of Light. #graphics
  • How To Read Shader Assembly (2021). Short tutorial on gpu asm.
  • How Unreal Renders A Frame series (2017).
• Jeff Atwood coding horror blog. #softwareengineering
  • The Multitasking Myth (2006). Yep, it’s a myth.
  • Thanks For Ruining Another Game Forever, Computers (2016). “dolphins will always swim faster than we do.”
• John Carlos Baez’s Azimuth. mathematical physics. #math #academia
  • A Characterization of Entropy (2011). One of the first(?) blogpost on entropy by Baez, leading to this nice book.
  • Agent-Based Models (2023-2024) series.
• Clément Bœsch pkh blog. #graphics
  • Code golfing a tiny demo using maths and a pinch of insanity (2025). Going from an explanation of a render to the obfuscated version.
  • A series of tricks and techniques I learned doing tiny GLSL demos (2025). A follow up on specific tricks
• Fernando Borretti. #rust
  • You Can Choose Tools That Make You Happy (2025). An argument to still use Emacs 😅
  • Unbundling Tools for Thought (2022). Don’t use a centralized tool.
• Nicholas Carlini. #cs #academia #safety #security
  • Why I attack (2024). Why you can chose your research topic.
  • A ChatGPT clone, in 3000 bytes of C, backed by GPT-2 (2023). An obfuscation exercice.
• Djalil Chafaï Libres pensées d’un mathématicien ordinaire. #math #academia
  • Tutorial on large deviation principles (2018).
  • A propos de Bourbaki (2023. fr). A short history of Nicolas Bourbaki.
• Matthäus Chajdas Anteru’s blog. #graphics
  • Introduction to compute shaders series (2018).
  • Effective meetings (2022). “cancel meetings which will not result in immediate action.”
• Karthik Chikmagalur. #emacs
  • avy can do anything (2021). the best tutorial on avy.
  • The emacs window management almanac (2024). explanation on window management works.
• Bartosz Ciechanowski visualizations. #explorables
  • Mechanical watches (2022). I had no idea as a profane on the topic.
  • Airfoil (2024). Fluid dynamics without fluid dynamics.
• Dynomight blog. Various topics: AI, writing, some lists. #ai
  • Creative nonfiction training exercises (2022). Ideas of generic writings that may interest others, or not.
  • DumPy: NumPy except it’s OK if you’re dum (2025). Numpy for GPUs from scratch
• Julia Evans. #system #webcomics.
  • How to ask good questions (2016).
  • How gzip uses Huffman coding (2015).
• Gwern. ✨ #ai #rationality
  • The Scaling Hypothesis (2020-2022). Bigger is better before it is obvious.
  • Spaced Repetition for Efficient Learning (2009-2019). Litterature review on the impact of spaced repetition.
• Matt Keeter. #graphics #system
  • A Neat XOR Trick (2022). Fun solution to AoC 2022, day 6.
  • Project writeup for Raven (2024-2026). A Uxn implementation.
• Oleg Kiselyov’s okmij.org. #cs #plt
  • Safe and Efficient, Now (2007-2021). About static typing.
  • A dream of an ultimate OS (1996). An OS as database.
• Jeremy Kun Math ∩ Programming. #math #academia
  • My Graduate Career in Math (2016). A postmortem on grad school.
  • Bezier Curves and Picasso (2013). A nice primer on Bezier.
• Dick Lipton Gödel’s Lost Letter and P=NP. #cs #academia
  • Galactic Algorithms (2010). Optimal algoritms never used in practice.
  • Can We Translate English To English? (2010). update ’26: yes, we can :)
• Dan Luu. #softwareengineering.
  • Why is it so hard to buy things that work well? (2022). building over buying
  • Terminal latency (2017). eshell is slow.
• Bertrand Meyer. #softwareengineering.
  • “I don’t have time for administration” (2025). On the importance of being involved in administrative duties at universities.
  • One cheer for incremental research (2009). Against the hype of “breakthrough” research.
• Matt Might. #cs #academia
  • The illustrated guide to a Ph.D. (????). The circle metaphor.
  • Compiling to lambda-calculus: Turtles all the way down. The 2mn intro to λ-calculus.
• Randall Munroe xkcd. Hard to limit myself on two … ✨ #webcomics
  • Standards (2011). on explain xkcd but this one is quite obvious
  • Duty Calls (2008). on explain xkcd
• Bob Nystrom’s Stuff with Stuff. #cs #plt
  • Crafting “Crafting Interpreters” (2020). writing a book is long.
  • The Value of Things (2026). doing with a meaning.
• Angelo Pesce’s c0de517e. #graphics
  • Learning to differentiably rasterize (2025). Intro to differentiable rasterizing.
  • Shit people say: graphics have “peaked” (2013).
• Christoph Peters Moments in Graphics. #graphics
  • Spectral rendering series (2025).
  • My toy renderer series (2021-2022).
• Matt Pharr. One of the author of PBRT. #graphics
  • Swallowing the elephant series (2018-2021). How to render Moana scene?
  • Sampling in Floating Point series (2022-?). Ongoing (?) series on sampling.
• Aras Pranckevičius. #graphics
  • Gaussian Splatting is pretty cool! (2023). cool intro to 3DGS.
  • Daily Pathtracer series (2018). An intro to path tracing.
• Amit Patel blog from Red Blob Games (amazing site on gamedev).✨ #gamedev #emacs #explorables
  • Little Design Things (2019). Making of redblobgames.
  • Introduction to the A* Algorithm (2014-2023). The famous tutorial on A*.
• Bastien Rieck blog. #ml
  • A visual introduction to Morse theory (2019). Nice visuals.
  • What is (Gaussian) curvature? (2019).
• Fabien Sanglard. #retrocomputing
  • Building a Quake PC series (2026). An ode to the hardware when I was a teenager.
  • Duke Nukem 3D code review series (2013). One of the early code review by Sanglard.
• Adam Sawicki. #graphics
  • Graphics APIs – Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow (2025). An history of graphics API.
  • Thoughts on graphics APIs and libraries (2019). Modern APIs are too low level but not enough.
• Senia Sheydvasser’s The Deranged Mathematician. #math
  • Behind the Scenes of the Hairy Ball Theorem Video (2026). Postmortem on the video with 3b1b.
  • Chrono Trigger and the Hairy Ball Theorem (2026). Why RPG are played on tori.
• Terence Tao’s What’s New. #math #academia
  • Career advice. A lot of obvious and non-obvious advices.
  • 245A, Notes 5: Differentiation theorems (2011). So you want to differentiate this integral?
• Giles Thomas. #ml
  • Writing an LLM from scratch series (2024-2026). Following Build a Large Language Model (from Scratch) by Sebastian Raschka.
• Tim Urban’s Wait but Why?. dunno if it “technically” a webcomic but whatever. #webcomics
  • Your Life in Weeks (2014). Cold.
  • Why Procrastinators Procrastinate series (2013-2015). My first contact with waitbutwhy.
• Chris Wellons’ null program. #emacs #softwareengineering
  • 2026 has been the most pivotal year in my career… and it’s only March (2026).
  • A GPU Approach to Path Finding (2014). // version of pathfinding.
• Bart Wronski. #graphics.
  • Dithering in games (2016-2022). From 1D to progressive blue noise.
  • Insider guide to tech interviews (2022).
• Edward Z. Yang blog. #cs #system
  • PyTorch internals (2019). Visual explanations.
  • Thoughts on gamifying textbooks (2012). “Against” gamifycation
• Jamie Zawinski jwz blog. #technology
  • resignation and postmortem (1999). Technically not on the blog. Resignation from Netscape.
  • Groupware Bad (2005). A pre-facebook-era about decentralization.