Language models · 10 min read
What Are Word Embeddings, Anyway?
Meaning is not typed in by anyone. It falls out of a prediction game played over billions of sentences, and the leftover geometry is what we call an embedding.
0xKishan, the latest posts by Kishan Kumar
Also in this issue
- Language models · 12 min
What Are Tokens in an LLM, Anyway?
The algorithm behind GPT's tokenizer is called BPE, byte pair encoding.
- Language models · 6 min
Don't Let AI Make You Artificial
We use LLMs in almost every part of our life.
- Distributed systems · 25 min
Designing The Webhook Delivery System
A webhook is a lightweight, event-driven mechanism that allows one application to automatically send real-time data to another via HTTP (typically a POST request) immediately when a specific event occurs.
- Distributed systems · 30 min
Design a News Aggregator System
A news aggregator — like Google News, Apple News, or Flipboard — is a digital service that continuously collects news articles from thousands of publishers around the world, processes and organizes them, and presents them to users in a unified, scrollable feed.
By topic
All 64 posts →- Jul 31, 2026 · 10 min
What Are Word Embeddings, Anyway?
- Jul 25, 2026 · 12 min
What Are Tokens in an LLM, Anyway?
- Jul 4, 2026 · 6 min
Don't Let AI Make You Artificial
- Feb 23, 2026 · 25 min
Designing The Webhook Delivery System
- Feb 22, 2026 · 30 min
Design a News Aggregator System
- Oct 15, 2025 · 8 min
Before You Add Another Service for Caching, Read This.
- Mar 16, 2025 · 19 min
Build your own API Gateway from Scratch in Java
- Jul 27, 2024 · 20 min
Designing and Implementing a URL Shortener in Java
- Jul 11, 2024 · 17 min
Designing and Implementing an API Rate Limiter in Java
- Dec 21, 2023 · 6 min
Chainlink: Bridging the On-Chain and Off-Chain Worlds
- Nov 18, 2023 · 7 min
Introduction to Vert.x
- Sep 23, 2023 · 6 min
MEV Explained: How Miners and Validators Extract Extra Value from Blockchain Transactions
About the writer
Kishan Kumar
Senior Software Engineer · PhonePe
Senior software engineer at PhonePe. I write long explainers on distributed systems, language models, Java and blockchains.
I've spent over six years building systems at scale. At PhonePe I lead the logging charter, which handles around 65 TB of logs a day.
Read more →Currently reading
- 2017 · Vaswani et al.
Attention Is All You Need
- 2003 · Ghemawat, Gobioff, Leung
The Google File System
- 2007 · DeCandia et al.
Dynamo: Amazon's Highly Available Key-value Store
- 2011 · Yuval Noah Harari
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind