Cristi Vlad

Papers, rebuilt as things you can touch.

Some pages are close readings of a single document - a biology paper, an internet standard, a machine learning result - and others are syntheses assembled from many sources, tracing how a whole system works end to end. Every page says which kind it is, evidence tiers are marked, and nothing is smoothed over.

Bio Pharmacology, physiology, and the gap between mouse and human. 2
Pyke 2014
Willard 2020

Tirzepatide · Dual-Channel Receptor Atlas

Every human cell type known to carry GLP-1R or GIPR, what the drug does when it lands there, and which parts of the popular story rest on rodents.

Absorption · Clearance · Accumulation

Tirzepatide Accumulation · what stacks up between weekly injections

Move the half-life, the dosing interval, or the escalation ladder, skip an injection, and watch how long the level takes to settle and how far it swings between shots.

Cyber Security, protocols, and internet standards - what is actually mandated, and what implementations do instead. 2
RFC 9110

RFC 9110 · HTTP semantics read as attack surface

Walk one state-changing exchange field by field, then filter 33 header fields, 31 status codes, and all 16 named security considerations by whether the standard requires the behaviour or the folklore just assumes it.

RFC 9700

RFC 9700 · OAuth 2.0 and OIDC offensive security field guide

Walk the BCP's five-class attacker model against three OAuth flows, then filter a 16-entry exploit catalog and work two live checklists against a target implementation.

AI Architectures, results, and the systems that serve them. 2
Training · Serving · Cost

LLM Infrastructure Explorer · from a web crawl to a word on your screen

Interactive walkthrough of how a frontier LLM is built and served - corpus, training, routing, inference, and the physics underneath.

arXiv:1802.05365

ELMo · how NLP learned to pretrain

Mix the language model's three layers by hand to see which linguistic level each one carries, and check every headline number against the table it came from.