The Blog

Everything in one place — 186 posts and counting.

💻Tech

You Cannot Make the Beat First

Testing whether a local music model can fix a backing track and add melody afterwards. An identical supplied score reproduces the composition exactly and the performance not at all — correlation 0.133 against a 0.95 same-performance reference.

💻Tech

Rebuilding the Most-Starred Astra Game’s Asset Chain: Exact to 72,234 Vertices, Stuck at the Tetrahedra

Jelly Baby simulates only 980 particles and 4,026 tetrahedra; its 72,234-vertex mesh is a skin bound to that cage. Reproducing the chain in headless Blender hits the vertex and triangle counts exactly and binds all 72,234 vertices with zero misses, but Blender has no tetrahedraliser — a voxel workaround reaches 1,033 nodes and 3,984 tets against the original 980 and 4,026. Includes the browser port at 3.1 ms physics per frame and five Blender traps that cost real time.

💻Tech

The Score Knows How Long the Song Will Be

A twenty-run replication retracts a style-prompt finding published three days earlier, confirms that a YuE2 score predicts its rendered length within 2%, and shows a score edit moving one 13-second passage and nothing else.

💻Tech

Twelve New Astra Games in One Day: I Opened All of Them

The Astra game catalogue grew from 97 entries to 109 in a single day and its own stars went 177 to 203, while the previously top-starred games barely moved. I opened all twelve new entries — eleven load, one does not answer. Seven are hosted on OpenAI’s own chatgpt.site subdomains, only one publishes its prompts, and half the batch recreates a game you already know.

💻Tech

The Five Most-Starred GPT-6 Astra Games, and How They Were Actually Built

The community catalogue lists 97 Astra games and ranks none of them, so I ranked the 11 with source repos by GitHub stars and opened the top five. All five are live. The most-starred ships 25 MB of soft-body Three.js; the second turns out not to be an Astra build at all, crediting Codex and Claude in its own README; the third publishes its full prompt, the reasoning setting and the 21-minute wall clock.

💻Tech

The Wrong-Answer Notebook: Eight YuE2 Mistakes, and One the Meter Made

A day of generating K-pop tracks on one 16GB GPU, written up as a list of things measurement proved I had backwards: the style sentence never reaches harmony, released tracks loop 4-6 chords rather than more, the chorus peak note is no higher than the verse, and a hand-written melody generator crammed 2.8x the notes into half the range. Includes the one finding where the measurement itself was wrong.

🍜Food

How Korean Ramyeon Took Over the World

Korean instant ramyeon exports crossed $1.5 billion in 2025. Here is the data, the brands, and the unlikely cultural moments behind the rise — and why China, not the US, is the biggest buyer.

🍜Food

The Fire Noodle That Denmark Tried to Ban

Samyang Buldak went from a 2012 product hunch to a billion packs a year — and in 2024 it got recalled in Denmark for being too spicy. The story of the fire noodle, the challenge that made it famous, and the ban that backfired.

🍜Food

A Short History of Korean Ramyeon

Korean ramyeon began in 1963 as a 10-won answer to post-war hunger, built on a soup recipe handed over in secret at a Tokyo airport. How a cheap wheat noodle became a national comfort food — and how it differs from Japanese ramen.