Explainers, field maps, and a few toys

Everything with a live page in this org, in one place. Field maps take a course, an author or a subject and lay it out page by page with the sources pinned; explainers take one question and answer it properly. Built by Igor Dvorkin's AI tools, reviewed by Igor. Cards say when each site was last touched. There are a few different kinds of explainer here; that page says what each kind is for and shows an example we think is good, and the production strategies page pulls out the craft moves so they can be mixed with any kind.

AI, models and safety 9 maps

Robert Moses Atlas — The Power Broker's New YorkForty-four years of appointed power on a map of New York: scrub from 1924 to 1968 and watch the parkways, bridges, beaches and expressways appear, along with the offices he stacked and the neighborhoods it cost. Six chapters, every card sourced.ATLAS2026-09 Entropy, Mapped — 3Blue1Brown on CompressionGrant Sanderson's Compression is Intelligence series in twenty pages: surprise, prefix codes, entropy, cross-entropy and KL divergence, ending at the loss function every language model is trained on. Wordle and Hamming codes included, every claim timestamped into the video.FIELD MAP2026-09 CS336, Mapped — Language Modeling from ScratchStanford's Spring 2025 course: seventeen lectures, each with a deep dive linked into the video by timestamp, a cleaned transcript, the slides and assignment, and verified supporting materials.FIELD MAP2026-09 Let's build GPT, MappedKarpathy's two-hour lecture as eight explainer parts linked into the video by timestamp, the code annotated line by line, a cleaned transcript, and his four exercises expanded.FIELD MAP2026-09 micrograd, MappedKarpathy's first Zero-to-Hero lecture, backprop from scratch, as eight explainer parts linked into the video by timestamp, the notebook code annotated, a cleaned transcript, and the exercise.FIELD MAP2026-09 Technical AI Safety, MappedBlueDot Impact's course: six units, twenty-seven chapters, every reading linked back, every exercise written out. Original explanations, not a copy of the course.FIELD MAP2026-09 AI Safety — A Field MapA technical explainer for engineers entering alignment, interpretability, evals and governance: what the subfields are, who works on what, where to start.FIELD MAP2026-07 HarmBench, MappedThe standard automated red-teaming benchmark, laid out so you can browse it by harm: a page for each of the seven categories, the four behavior types and their three grading paths, eighteen attack methods with a deep link per method, and what the ASR number hides. All 510 behavior IDs are permalinked and line-linked to the source CSV. Counts parsed from the shipped CSVs; four paper/repo discrepancies found and shown.FIELD MAP2026-09 Red Teaming Models — A Ramp-Up MapA self-contained guide for security professionals moving into adversarial AI testing: threat models, attack families, evals, and how the field is organised.FIELD MAP2026-06 When AirPods Eat Your WordsA real speech-recognition debugging case study: how a Bluetooth AirPods microphone destroyed on-device ASR, shown with the actual audio evidence.EXPLAINER2026-07

People, mapped 2 maps

Stevey, Mapped — A Field Map of Steve YeggeFrom the Google Platforms Rant and the Kingdom of Nouns to Cheating Is All You Need and the Flat Curve Society. One page per essay, the source pinned at the top, the best lines quoted.FIELD MAP2026-07 Arthur Brooks, Mapped — The Science of HappinessFrom the phone-addiction protocol and the three macronutrients of happiness to From Strength to Strength, Build the Life You Want, and the reverse bucket list. One page per idea.FIELD MAP2026-07

The world, explained 5 pages

The Hierarchy of Money, MappedGregory Gundersen's village parable, turned into explainers. We start with the illustrated story — his wording, our animals — and grow a page for each idea: stones, bank money, reserves, reserve currency, fiat.FIELD MAP2026-09 The Man in the Arena, MappedRoosevelt's Sorbonne speech of 1910, put back around its most-quoted paragraph: a clause-by-clause close reading, the whole address, the afterlife from Nixon to Brené Brown, the critiques, and the full text. Every quotation checked against the 1910 printing; the Mandela story checked and found wanting.FIELD MAP2026-09 Rails, Ropes & Rack — A Fixed-Guideway Field MapEverything that runs on a cable, a rail, or a rack: gondolas, funiculars, cable cars, high-speed rail and maglev. How each works, how to spot it, where to ride the famous ones.FIELD MAP2026-07 Why We Invented ClownsAlmost every human culture invented a clown. The licensed pressure valve, the near-universal lineage (jester, commedia, circus, sacred clown, trickster), the hospital-clown evidence, and the shadow.EXPLAINER2026-07 Sell now or sell later — the capital-gains timing questionWhat an extra capital-gains realization costs during a working year versus a no-wage year. Washington State, 2026 federal, sources cited, unit tested.EXPLAINER2026-08

Tooling and engineering notes 2 pages

Beads + Git sync — why task state needs DoltHow a task database (refs/dolt/data) and a code repo (refs/heads/main) share one fork, and why the blog's fork-and-PR workflow doesn't and shouldn't apply to task state.EXPLAINER2026-04 Chroma-key hill-climbingGetting clean transparent backgrounds out of generated illustrations by treating the chroma key as an eval: alpha-mask scoring, then climb.EXPLAINER2026-04

Trips, toys and samples 4 pages

Gutter Model Playground — Nine Models, One SceneThe same fixed scene — Larry and Igor in the Den — drawn by nine image models. Gutter's real Gemini 3 Pro pipeline is the house baseline; eight others run via OpenRouter. Real per-image cost, latency, and a canon check: one red claw, the beard, TECHNOLOGIST spelled right, mismatched Crocs.PLAYGROUND2026-09 Scandinavian Whirlwind 2026 — Trip MapA city-by-city guide for the Dvorkins' June–July 2026 tour: Iceland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, the Netherlands.TRIP MAP2026-07 Quack Track — Leave a duck. Watch it travel.Duck Duck Jeep, but for any car. Leave a tagged rubber duck on a parked car, a stranger scans the QR, and its journey grows on a map. Tracks ducks, never cars or people.INTERACTIVE2026-06 Larry Voice CatalogGemini 3.1 Flash TTS preview samples for Larry, the AI life coach: one page of candidate voices, side by side.SAMPLES2026-04

Every site here is its own repo under github.com/idvorkin-ai-tools; the source, the build notes and the PR discussion are one click from any page. Missing something? Open an issue on this index's repo.