Thomas Vu

Articles

Garden

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Shorter notes and working definitions.

  • A* pathfinding in tactics games

    A* is the algorithm that makes units move intelligently around obstacles—and it's the backbone of nearly every tactics game.

  • What is WebGPU? (and WebGPU vs. WebGL)

    WebGPU is the modern graphics API for browsers—giving web apps direct access to GPU compute and better performance than aging WebGL.

  • What are shaders?

    Shaders are small programs that run on the GPU to control how pixels and vertices look—essentially the paintbrushes of real-time graphics.

  • What is BuildKit in Docker?

    BuildKit is Docker's modern builder that compiles images faster through parallelization, caching, and smarter layer management.

  • What is reinforcement learning?

    Reinforcement learning trains agents through trial and error, learning from rewards and penalties rather than labeled examples.

  • What are state machines?

    State machines model systems that can only be in one state at a time, transitioning based on inputs.

  • What are TEE verified servers?

    TEEs let you run code in a secure enclave that even the server owner can't peek into—useful for private AI inference and verifiable randomness.

  • What is model quantization (INT4/INT8/FP8/FP16/FP32)?

    Quantization shrinks model weights from 32-bit floats to smaller formats to save memory and run faster—with a small trade-off in accuracy.