Notes & Essays
Tutorials, development notes, and reflections on health technology, data, automation, and clinical work.
Selected notes
Writing about the questions and working practice behind these systems.
Current notebook
Longer reference articles that I continue to review and update.
Talking with AI, Part 1: What Does Training an LLM Mean?
What training changes in a model, and how pre-training, fine-tuning, RAG and information supplied in context differ.
Talking with AI, Part 2: How Can Predicting the Next Token Lead to Coding?
How a simple training objective can produce capabilities in language, programming and problem solving through learned representations.
Talking with AI, Part 3: Context, Attention and Memory During a Conversation
Why a model can use information you just supplied without changing its weights: context windows, in-context learning, attention and the KV cache.
Talking with AI, Part 4: Why More Thinking Can Improve an Answer
How inference-time compute, reasoning, multiple attempts and verification can improve results without changing the model’s weights.
Talking with AI, Part 5: GPUs, VRAM and the Infrastructure Behind LLM Training
Where parameters live, why training consumes so much memory, and how GPUs divide the work, from numerical precision to mixture-of-experts models.
Talking with AI, Part 6: From a Base Model to an Assistant
An introduction to SFT, RLHF, reward models and tool-use training, and the difference between changing a model and supplying a system prompt.
Talking with AI, Part 7: Does an LLM Memorize, Learn or Guess?
Memorization, generalization, overfitting, data contamination and hallucination explain both the capabilities and limitations of language models.
Talking with AI, Part 8: Following a Token Through a Transformer
From tokenization and embeddings through attention, MLPs and residual streams to logits, softmax and next-token selection.
Talking with AI, Part 9: From an LLM to an AI System and Agent
What happens between pressing Send and receiving an answer: context construction, tools, verification and model-serving infrastructure.
Talking with AI, Part 10: More Compute for Training or for Answering?
Scaling beyond parameter counts through training-time and inference-time compute, best-of-N sampling, verifiers and distillation.
Talking with AI, Part 11: From More Capable LLMs to the Question of AGI
Why capability differs from reliability, and how long tasks, memory, continual learning, world models, AGI and ASI fit into the discussion.
Excel for Healthcare Data
A practical Excel guide covering XLOOKUP, Power Query, Pivot Tables, validation, and data cleaning for healthcare workflows.
Historical notebook
Older technical notes kept for context. Their dates and software versions matter more than their position in the archive.
Why I Like Computers, Part 2: When My Computer Started Connecting to the Outside World
From a 56K modem, Sanook, Thaiware, and Google to Overclockzone, Ragnarok Online, and replacing a graphics card so KOTOR could run.
Building the ATK Data System
From Google Forms to a full Blazor and ASP.NET Core platform, documenting the development of a rapid antigen test data system.
Reverse-Engineering a Medical Web Portal
Using Selenium and C# to understand a medical portal and automate repetitive clinical data entry.
Windows 11 Features I Tried in 2021
Notes from trying a Windows 11 preview build in July 2021; some interfaces and behaviour may differ from the current release.
Setting Up Python + Jupyter Lab on Windows
A step-by-step setup for Python, JupyterLab, Pandas, Plotly, and VS Code on Windows.
Multilingual EndNote Template
Configure EndNote X9 reference types and output styles to format Thai and English bibliographies in the same document.
Google Classroom Hotkey Bookmarklet
A bookmarklet that adds keyboard shortcuts for entering scores in Google Classroom.
Fixing iThesis at 70% and a Missing Word Add-in
Check COM Add-ins and Disabled Items before using the Registry when iThesis stops at 70% or its Word menu disappears.
Fixing Thai Text Display in EndNote X9
Change the display fonts in EndNote X9 when Thai text appears as square boxes in the Reference tab.