How We Taught Rocks to Think

Climbs the abstraction ladder from transistors and logic gates through CPUs to software, defining every term from electrons to computation.

Descends below the transistor into the physics of doped silicon and the industrial process of etching billions of switches onto crystal.

Explores CPU microarchitecture, pipelining, instruction-level parallelism, and the techniques that keep processor cores executing multiple instructions simultaneously to maximize throughput.

Explores the memory hierarchy, cache lines, locality, and how SRAM and DRAM reconcile speed and density to feed a fast processor with data.

Explores multicore parallelism, data parallelism, SIMD lanes, and GPUs, examining how chips escape single-core limits and the fundamental ceiling imposed by Amdahl's law on parallel speedup.

Explores how the operating system creates the illusion of infinite cores and private memory through processes, isolation, privilege modes, and system calls that mediate access to hardware.

Builds a live compiler that transforms high-level code through tokens, syntax trees, and intermediate representation into assembly instructions, bridging human intent to machine execution.

Explores the theoretical foundations of computation—what problems are tractable, hard, or provably impossible—through Turing machines, complexity theory, and the limits no hardware can overcome.

Explores how unreliable links, simple rules, and layered abstractions connect billions of machines into the internet, mapping the protocol stack from packets to global routing and the hard limits of distributed systems.