Index · 136 topics
Topics
Everything on the site, filed by subject. Each topic has a definition and its broader topics, so together they form the vocabulary of the map.
Domains
AI-assisted engineering 14
AI as an engineering tool: coding agents, AI-authored code, and what programming becomes when models write most of it.
AI for operations 1
AI applied to running systems: security triage, alert noise, incident work, and keeping a human in the loop.
AI platforms 4
The shared foundation an organisation builds AI on: model gateways, agent runtimes, governance, observability, and the operating model around them.
Applied security 6
Security under production pressure: adversarial input, signal versus noise, and controls that operators can live with.
Chess 3
The game that served as the benchmark of machine intelligence for seventy years, from Shannon's paper to Deep Blue and engines that learn.
within Games
Cryptocurrency 1
Bitcoin, blockchains and distributed ledgers: the attempt to formalise money and trust so completely that no institution is needed, and the institutions that grew back around it.
within Finance, Decentralisation, Money
Cybernetics 0
The science of control and feedback in machines, organisms, and organisations, and the attempts to run economies and societies with it.
within Complex systems, History of technology
Distributed systems 3
Replication, coordination, and consistency across machines that fail independently.
Edge systems 7
Reverse proxies, policy enforcement, CDNs, and logic that runs close to the user instead of in the backend.
Energy 3
Electricity as the input to everything else: the power behind compute, the grids and plants that supply it, and what it costs.
within Economics
Enterprise architecture 0
How a company's capabilities, applications, data and infrastructure fit together, who owns what, and how the landscape is changed on purpose.
Finance 1
Banks, insurers, money and credit: abstract businesses that sell kept promises, allocate a society's resources and turn trust into procedure.
within Economics
Game AI 2
Programs that play games: search, evaluation, learned networks, and how their strength is measured, from chess engines to Go and real-time strategy.
within Machine learning, Games
Games 2
Games made with care: tactics, fishing, and the engines and fantasy consoles they run on.
Geography 0
Places, terrain, borders, and spatial data, and how their relationships change over time.
Go 3
The board game whose positions resisted hand-written evaluation until AlphaGo, and the clearest case for learned intuition guiding search.
within Games
History 0
Events, institutions, and societies through time, with attention to sources, competing accounts, and uncertainty.
Insurance 1
Pooling risk across many so that misfortune does not ruin the few: predictions wrapped in promises, from Halley's life table to cars that price their own drivers.
Life sciences 0
Biology and medicine: how living systems work, and how we learn to measure, model, and treat them.
Literature 0
Fiction and writing about fiction: novels read for their own sake, and the forms they take.
Machine learning 1
How models learn from data: the mathematics, the training methods, and what the results can and cannot do.
Mathematics 0
The mathematics underneath the systems on this site: probability, linear algebra, optimisation, and proof.
The open web 3
The web as a commons: open protocols, small independent sites, and publishing outside the platforms.
Operating systems 3
Kernels, virtualisation, and the layer between hardware and everything else, from BSD to inference-native designs.
Philosophy 0
Questions about knowledge, mind, morality, and belief, from how science knows things to the novels that argue with God.
Physics 1
The laws of matter, energy, space and time, and the people who found them, from Newton to the bomb to cosmology.
Platform automation 2
Self-service, guardrails, deployment, and the tooling that keeps operating software sustainable.
Policy 3
Where engineering meets regulation, public institutions, procurement, and national strategy.
Programming languages 6
Languages, type systems, compilers, and how executable intent gets written down.
Reliability 2
Failure modes, operability, and keeping systems up when the inputs and the dependencies misbehave.
Semiconductors 3
Chips and the factories that make them: fabrication, the few companies and places that can do it, and why nations compete for them.
Shogi 2
Japanese chess, where captured pieces return to the board, and where the NNUE networks now inside every strong chess engine were invented.
within Games
Simulation 1
Interactive worlds that mimic real ones: societies, economies, neuron cultures, and agents left to evolve on their own.
within Complex systems
Sovereignty 4
Who controls compute, data, and infrastructure, and in which jurisdiction; Europe's position in particular.
StarCraft 2
The real-time strategy game, Brood War above all: hidden information, thousands of decisions a minute, and the next benchmark after board games.
Synthetic biology 0
Engineering living systems: designing molecules and organisms, growing neurons on chips, and the software that reads and writes biology.
within Life sciences
Concepts
Abstraction 5
Layers that let people stop thinking about the layer below, from assembly and programming languages to orchestrators and agents, and how each new layer becomes the ground for the next.
Abundance 1
Making what is scarce plentiful on purpose: building homes, energy, and compute until they are cheap, and the politics of supply that gets there.
Agent identity 0
Agents as principals of their own: identities, entitlements, credentials, budgets and audit trails provisioned like an employee's, with a human sponsor, instead of borrowed rights.
within Agents, Applied security
Agents 15
LLM agents as software: the loop, tools, context, memory, sandboxes, and the platform underneath them.
within AI platforms
AI alignment 1
Making AI systems pursue what their builders and users actually intend, and what happens when they do not.
within Machine learning, Existential risk
Attention economy 1
Platforms that sell attention and optimise for engagement, what that does to the web and to discourse, and the intention economy proposed in its place.
within Economics, The open web
Augmentation 8
Computers that extend what people can do instead of replacing them: Licklider's symbiosis, Kasparov's centaur chess, and working alongside coding agents.
within AI-assisted engineering, Intelligence
Chaos theory 1
How simple deterministic rules produce behaviour nobody can predict: sensitive dependence, strange attractors, and the limits of forecasting.
within Complex systems, Mathematics
China 2
China in history and in technology: the Silk Roads and Sun Tzu, its share of patents and research, its race with the United States, and its language.
within Geography, Geopolitics
Cities 1
How cities are planned and how they actually grow: Jerusalem over three thousand years, Brasilia drawn on paper, and the rational city the web was designed against.
within Geography
The commons 2
Resources held in common and the rules that keep them so: common land, open protocols, open data, and the web before the platforms.
within The open web, Economics
Compilers 5
Turning programs into other programs: parsers, interpreters, type checkers, and code generation.
within Programming languages
Complex systems 0
Emergence and collective dynamics: how simple agents, roles, and rules add up to markets, institutions, and societies.
Context engineering 4
Deciding what a model sees: pinned context, retrieval, memory, and the conventions that keep them honest.
within Agents
Data sovereignty 1
Control over one's own data: pods, portability, and the right to choose the software and the agent that reads it; the personal counterpart of national sovereignty.
within Sovereignty, Privacy
Decentralisation 1
Many small nodes and no central operator: the web's original shape, and the alternative to platforms that own the users and the data.
within The open web, Distributed systems
Democratisation 5
A capability that needed money, a team, or years of training becoming available to anyone: printing, the web, and now building software by describing it.
within Augmentation, The commons
Determinism 4
Machines and institutions that do the same thing every time, what that sameness is worth, and where it breaks against an open world.
within Reliability, Philosophy
Developer tooling 5
Package managers, build tools, CLIs, and the daily toolchain an engineer actually touches.
within Platform automation
Economics 11
Cost, pricing, budgets, and the money side of infrastructure, inference, and innovation.
Emergence 3
Order nobody designed: reefs, the early web, neuron cultures, and simulated worlds where simple rules add up to behaviour no single part has.
within Complex systems
Entrepreneurship 1
Finding something worth building and building it: ventures, side projects, and what changes when anyone can spot an opportunity and operate a business with AI.
within Economics
Ethics 1
Right and wrong under pressure: guilt and freedom in novels, the responsibility of scientists, and what we owe the systems we build and the people they affect.
within Philosophy
Europe 2
Europe's place in technology and history: where the web was invented, what it builds and gives away, and the data and capabilities it still holds.
within Sovereignty, Geography
Evaluation 0
Measuring whether an AI system does the right thing: golden sets, structural checks, LLM-as-judge, and regression suites.
Evolution 0
Change by variation and selection, in genes, brains, and populations, and the arguments over how much it explains.
within Life sciences
Existential risk 0
Technologies that could end or permanently cripple civilisation, from nuclear weapons to misaligned AI, and how people have tried to contain them.
External memory 3
Notes, links, and stores that remember for us: second brains, the web as a shared memory, and what agents write down for their next session.
Factories 2
Machines that make machines: the factory pattern in code, real plants, universal constructors, and purpose-built things made on demand.
within Platform automation, Complex systems
Forecasting 0
Saying what will happen and how sure you are: scenarios, predictions that fail, and the events nobody priced in.
within Risk
Formal methods 4
Proofs, verification, and types as specifications, especially once machines write the code.
within Programming languages
Fractals 2
Self-similar patterns that repeat at every scale, from rivers and coastlines to software, organisations and ideas; the lens behind much of this site.
within Complex systems, Mathematics, Chaos theory
Future of work 3
What AI does to jobs and livelihoods: the interval before any post-scarcity economy, basic income against basic access, and who gets through the middle.
within Economics, Social reform
Geopolitics 0
How geography, empires, and arms shape the balance of power between states and regions, as history.
High modernism 0
The confidence that society can be planned from above by experts: Le Corbusier's rational city, scientific forestry, and the schemes that failed when they met real life.
within Legibility, Social reform
History of science 0
How discoveries were actually made: the people, instruments, dead ends, and institutions behind them.
within History
History of technology 5
How tools, machines, and networks came to be built, and the choices that shaped them.
within History
Hubris 0
When builders overestimate their control: an island of cloned dinosaurs, cities planned on paper, the bomb, and systems more capable than their makers understand.
Hypertext 2
Links as the unit of the web: addresses that can point at anything, the read-write web that was intended, and what a graph of documents can do that a tree cannot.
within The open web
Inference 8
Running models in production: routing, cost, hardware, and inference as a metered utility.
within AI platforms
Intellectual property 3
Patents, copyright, and licences: who owns an invention or a text, from the web given to the public domain to books scraped for training data.
Intelligence 2
What intelligence is and how it arises, in brains, in neuron cultures, and in machines that learn.
within Machine learning, Neuroscience
Isolation 4
Sandboxes, process and failure-domain isolation, and running untrusted or fallible work safely.
within Applied security, Reliability
Knowledge management 2
Second brains, knowledge graphs, and how notes, links, and memory turn into understanding.
Languages and translation 1
Human languages and moving meaning between them: translated novels, learning to read Chinese, Japanese, and Hebrew, and Europe's multilingual text.
within Literature
Legibility 1
Making a complex system readable from above: what the measure captures, what it erases, and what breaks when the map replaces the territory.
within Complex systems, Metrics, Observability
Local-first 2
Software that keeps data on your devices and syncs through CRDTs, with the network as an optimisation.
within Distributed systems
Maximalist novels 0
Very long, encyclopedic novels that try to hold a whole world: Infinite Jest, The Books of Jacob, and the studies of the form.
within Literature
Medicine 0
How treatments are discovered, tested, and brought to patients, from antisepsis and sulfa drugs to modern drug design.
within Life sciences
Metrics 2
What to measure, leading versus lagging signals, and vanity numbers that look like insight.
Money 0
What money is and who creates it: debt and credit, banks that create money by lending, central banks, and attempts to do without them.
Mortality 0
That everyone dies: priced in life insurance, resisted by those who want to end death, and answered by keeping a person's voice and stories.
within Philosophy
Networking 0
How machines talk: packets, protocols, sockets, and the networks from ARPANET to the web that carry them.
within Distributed systems, The open web
Neural networks 0
Layers of weights that learn a function from examples: architectures, activations, quantisation, and running them where the data is.
within Machine learning
Neuroscience 1
Brains and nervous systems: connectomes, neural recording, and the attempt to model what neurons compute.
within Life sciences
Observability 3
Seeing what a running system does: traces, metering, glass-box infrastructure, and what not to log.
within Reliability
Open data 1
Data published for anyone to use: government records, archives, and the five-star ladder from a file on the web to linked data with addresses.
within The open web, Policy
Open standards 1
Protocols and formats agreed in the open and free to implement: HTTP, HTML, TCP/IP, RSS, and the consortia and working groups that keep them so.
within The open web
Open source 3
Open source as the point of the work, not just its licence.
within The open web
Philosophy of science 0
How science produces knowledge, what counts as evidence, and where its methods and claims reach their limits.
within Philosophy, History of science
Post-scarcity 3
What changes when making things costs next to nothing: copied software, AI labour, mission-built machines, and the economies and societies that might follow.
within Abundance, Future of work
Privacy 0
Tracking, profiling, and consent on the web, and designs that avoid collecting the data in the first place.
within Applied security, Sovereignty
Probability 0
Chance made countable: the law of large numbers behind insurance, error margins on a measurement, and tails that are fatter than they look.
within Mathematics
Provenance 2
Where something came from and who vouches for it: signed media, rights-clear training data, and artifacts that carry their own history.
within Training data, Applied security
Reinforcement learning 2
Learning from the outcomes of one's own actions: self-play, rewards, and feedback loops that turn experience into skill.
within Machine learning
Religion 0
Faith, doubt, and the institutions and cities built around belief, as history and as argument.
within Philosophy, History
Research labs 2
The institutions where discovery happens and how they are funded and run: CERN, Bell Labs, ARPA, Los Alamos, DeepMind, and the labs behind modern medicine.
Risk 1
Uncertainty, fragility, and systems that fail in ways nobody planned for, from markets to theme parks to production.
within Reliability, Economics
Science fiction 1
Fiction as a thought experiment: cloned dinosaurs and chaos theory, post-scarcity civilisations, singularities, and stories from the internet read in the same spirit.
within Literature
Scientific revolutions 0
Moments when a field's picture of the world changes: the invention of modern science, molecular biology, antisepsis, and the first antibiotics.
Self-hosting 3
Running your own infrastructure, from a single bare-metal box to community-operated compute.
within Platform automation, Sovereignty
Self-play 0
A program improving by playing itself: generating its own training data, learning from the outcomes, and testing each generation against the last.
within Reinforcement learning, Game AI
Social reform 2
Plans to redesign society or the economy, from nineteenth-century utopias to high-modernist states and basic income, and what happened when they met people.
Strategy 0
Winning against an opponent who adapts: in war, in business, and in games, from Sun Tzu to real-time strategy.
within Geopolitics
Surveillance 1
Watching people at scale, by states and by platforms: intelligence agencies, tracking for advertising, and what it costs those being watched.
within Privacy
Switzerland 2
The country this site is written from: CERN in Geneva, Basel, Swiss innovation as measured and as lived, and Swiss civic projects.
within Europe
Technology races 2
Powers racing to build a technology first, from the bomb and its deterrence to frontier AI and the data it needs.
within Geopolitics, Existential risk
Training data 2
What models learn from: web crawls, books, and licensed or unlicensed corpora; who holds what has not been scraped yet, and on what terms.
within Machine learning
Transhumanism 0
The hope of outgrowing the human body and mind through technology: the singularity, mind uploading, ending death, and the critics of all three.
within Augmentation, Philosophy
Tree search 0
Looking ahead by expanding a tree of moves: minimax and alpha-beta, Monte Carlo tree search, and the pruning and ordering that make them tractable.
within Game AI
Trust 3
Personal trust and system trust: why people rely on banks, procedures and software they cannot inspect, and how that reliance is earned.
Type systems 6
Types as a cheap, mechanical proof that code does what it says, and why they matter more once machines write the code.
within Programming languages, Formal methods
United States 2
America's place in technology and power: where the frontier labs and chips are, its founding ideas, and its race with China.
within Geography, Geopolitics
Utopias 0
Designs for a better society, imagined or attempted: colonies, planned economies, post-scarcity civilisations, and what became of them.
within Social reform, Philosophy
WAF and traffic inspection 3
Web application firewalls, rule tuning, traffic replay, and inspecting requests without drowning operators.
within Applied security, Edge systems
World history 1
History told at the scale of continents and millennia: why societies diverged, and how the world came to look the way it does.
Technologies
Durable execution 2
Workflow engines that keep long-running processes alive through crashes and deployments, with a journal of every step: Temporal, Restate and their kin.
Elixir 2
Elixir, Phoenix, and the BEAM for the long-running, fault-tolerant parts.
within Programming languages
GPUs 4
GPUs as the computer: memory shape, partitioning, and the hardware under inference.
within Inference, Semiconductors
Haskell 6
The language that shaped how I think about types, effects, and correctness.
within Programming languages
Kubernetes 1
Container orchestration, and the question of when you actually need it.
within Platform automation
Linux 2
Linux distributions and system administration, Void Linux in particular.
within Operating systems
OpenBSD 1
OpenBSD and the BSD approach to correctness and simplicity.
within Operating systems
OpenTelemetry 1
The vendor-neutral standard for traces, metrics, and logs, including the GenAI semantic conventions for model calls.
within Observability
Pingora 2
Cloudflare's Rust framework for building proxies, the base of Zentinel.
within Edge systems, Rust
Rust 10
The systems language most of the projects here are written in.
within Programming languages
TypeScript 8
TypeScript on Bun, the language of the Agent Platform Handbook code.
within Programming languages
WebAssembly 2
Portable, sandboxed bytecode for running native-speed code in the browser and beyond.
within The open web
Zola 2
The static site generator this site and several project sites are built with.
within The open web
This site
This site 3
Posts about raskell.io itself: why it exists, how it is built, and where it is going.