Visualizers
Learn by moving things
Interactive explainers for the ideas behind retrieval, embeddings, and agents. A formula tells you what is true; dragging a vector shows you why. Each one also appears inside the article it belongs to, and runs entirely in your browser, so drag, poke, and break it.
Throughput: a live rate lane
From: Sizing a System on a Napkin →Requests per second, made physical. Beads stream past a one-second gate and the flow speed is the rate. Switch between creates (~40/s), clicks (~4,000/s), and the busy-hour peak (~8,000/s) to feel how far apart they are.
100M a month, over ~2.6M seconds
Storage: a disk filling over time
From: Sizing a System on a Napkin →Scrub the months and watch used space creep up in a straight line, links so far times 500 bytes. A 4 TB capacity frame shows the link shortener stays small for years.
Each month adds 100M links x 500 bytes. It grows in a straight line, and a single disk lasts years.
Bandwidth: a thin trickle in a fat pipe
From: Sizing a System on a Napkin →Bandwidth is reads times bytes. Two sliders set the flow in MB/s against a 1 Gbps pipe, showing how little the link shortener uses, and what it would take to fill it.
Bandwidth is just reads times bytes. At 4,000 reads a second of 500 bytes, that is about 2 MB/s, a thread through a fat pipe. Push the sliders to see what would actually fill it.