a reflection on the law of sowing and reaping, and why repentance — not effort — is what actually changes the harvest.

pretraining a 351m gpt from scratch, then reasoning-tuning it with sft and grpo (rlvr) on math — the pipeline that turns a fluent autocomplete model into one that gets rewarded for being correct, end to end on a single gpu for under $100.

training gpt-2 small from scratch on openwebtext, file by file — the architecture, the data pipeline trick that avoided a 54gb disk problem, and what the loss curves actually said.

a full walkthrough of the transformer machinery inside modern llms — tokens, embeddings, positional encoding, attention, feed-forward networks, the residual stream, and next-token prediction — with diagrams for each piece.

lora-finetuning qwen3.5-0.8b to strip its refusals on a free colab gpu, what it revealed about how fragile alignment really is, and why i published the result anyway.

a personal reflection on agape love, christian purpose, and what it means to live with faith at the centre — not just on sundays.