I’m a postgrad in Hong Kong working on distributed systems and the infrastructure that keeps training jobs fed. This is a small digital garden — reading notes, half-finished benchmarks, and scripts I’d otherwise lose. Mostly for me; you’re welcome to read.
Vector search: HNSW in twenty minutes
How approximate nearest-neighbour search gets sub-linear without a space-partitioning tree.
Reading list — October 2026
A few things that crossed my desk this month.
sendfile, splice and the zero-copy mindset
Stop bouncing bytes through userspace just to put a file on a socket.
Reading list — September 2026
A few things that crossed my desk this month.
Bloom filters, and when a probabilistic set is the right call
Trade a little certainty for a lot of memory — the math is friendlier than it looks.
Reading list — August 2026
A few things that crossed my desk this month.
Quantization notes: int8, fp8 and what you actually lose
Where the bits go, why outliers ruin everything, and the per-channel trick that saves them.
Reading list — July 2026
A few things that crossed my desk this month.
Data-parallel training: gradient bucketing and overlap
Why DDP feels like magic until you look at the allreduce schedule.
Reading notes: QUIC, 0-RTT and why HTTP/3 is UDP
Moving HTTP onto UDP was not insane — head-of-line blocking is the reason.