Notes from the tail — long-form, interactive writing on transformers and computation by Rob Porter.https://ood.dev/https://ood.dev/posts/doom/https://ood.dev/posts/doom/No training anywhere: a compiler sets the weights of a stock Phi-3-architecture checkpoint so autoregressive generation executes Doom's classic renderer.Thu, 13 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://ood.dev/posts/calculator/https://ood.dev/posts/calculator/Setting a transformer's weights by hand -- no training -- to build four exact calculators and compare how they use layers, parameters, and generated tokens.Sun, 09 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://ood.dev/posts/torchwright-intro/https://ood.dev/posts/torchwright-intro/A compiler that turns computation graphs into the weights of a stock transformer -- no training anywhere. Where it came from and how it works.Thu, 23 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://ood.dev/posts/mnist-difficulty/https://ood.dev/posts/mnist-difficulty/The MNIST digits a simple convnet gets wrong, and what they suggest about how the state of the art compares to human performance.Thu, 02 Aug 2018 00:00:00 GMT