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A lid-off server node on a bright lab bench with a delidded processor package and HBM stacks near the camera, one DIMM caught half-seated in its slot, an NVMe riser further along and a JBOF shelf and top-of-rack switch receding across the room

Locality Is the Whole Game: The Memory Hierarchy and What a Kernel Does Not Read

Performance is decided by data movement, not arithmetic. The levels of the hierarchy, the locality that tiling manufactures, and the reason a fast kernel is fast because of what it never reads.

By Brecht Corbeel · August 8, 2026 · 17 min read

The long interior of a ropewalk seen down its length, with a wheeled traveller cart caught part-way along the walk and yarn still forming behind it

Foundation Models

From n-Grams to Reasoning Models: A Technical History of the Language Model

The line from Shannon's letter counts to trained deliberation is usually told as one long scaling curve. It was not. It was a sequence of specific bottlenecks, each named, each broken by a different idea.

By Brecht Corbeel · August 8, 2026 · 16 min read

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