My wife Kristin has probably learned that when I say, “I’m just going to look something up,” there’s a decent chance she won’t see me again for a few hours.

If I’m using a new technology, I eventually find myself wanting to understand how it works. Not just how to use it, but why it behaves the way it does.

Like many people, I started with ChatGPT and Claude. Before long, I found myself wondering how these models actually worked.

That led me to transformers.

Then neural networks.

Then the realization that my linear algebra and calculus were more than a little rusty.

So down the rabbit hole I went.

It started with refreshing concepts I hadn’t thought about in decades. Matrices. Vectors. Gradients. Partial derivatives.

You look up one topic, which leads to another, then another, and before you know it, what you thought would be a five-minute refresher has turned into several hours.

Every now and then I hit a wall. Mathematical notation can be pretty daunting, especially when you haven’t looked at it in decades. Sometimes I realize I’m spending more time deciphering the notation than understanding the underlying concept. At that point I try to be honest with myself. If I understand enough of the bigger picture, I’ll keep moving and come back to the details another day.

Sometimes I come back a day or two later, and it makes a lot more sense than it did the first time. It was probably the same way when I was in college.

This isn’t really unique to AI.

Years ago, while I was on the SQL Server team at Microsoft, I found myself wanting to understand how the storage engine worked, how data and index pages were organized on disk, and what actually happened under the covers. Back in college, I had written a very rudimentary SQL engine as an independent study project. Now I had the opportunity to learn how it was really done.

Experiences like that have also given me an appreciation for people who can explain difficult subjects well.

Along the way, I’ve found two YouTube channels that have become favorites: Welch Labs and 3Blue1Brown. Both have an incredible gift for making complex math and AI concepts approachable without oversimplifying them.

I only wish they’d existed when I was in college. I might have done a little better in freshman Calculus and Physics II.

I loved Linear Algebra, though. In fact, I enjoyed it enough that I became my professor’s grader the following year.

I’m also a sucker for technical and business books, especially hard copies. It makes very little sense. I already subscribe to both O’Reilly and Manning Press, giving me access to all their books in electronic form, more books than I’d ever be able to read. Yet I still find myself buying physical copies.

There’s just something about holding and paging through a well-made book in your hands. Every now and then I come across what I think of as a beautifully put together book. Not just a book with great content, but one where someone clearly cared about the illustrations, the layout, and the overall experience of learning from it.

Welch Labs recently published The Illustrated Guide to AI, and it quickly found its way onto my bookshelf. It’s almost the size of a coffee table book, but still practical enough to read cover to cover. The illustrations are outstanding, and many of the chapters point back to the corresponding YouTube videos if you want to explore a topic in more depth. I’ve found I understand something much better when I can approach it from a few different angles. A book, a video, another author’s perspective. Each one tends to fill in a few more pieces of the puzzle.

This appreciation for beautifully put together books probably explains why another favorite on my bookshelf is Pasta by Design. I picked it up years ago at a Big Data conference, which probably tells you roughly how long I’ve owned it (I don’t think people call it “Big Data” anymore). The book catalogs around a hundred different pasta shapes, includes a “family tree” showing how they’re related, and uses mathematical formulas to describe their geometry. It’s one of those books that just makes me smile.

They say curiosity killed the cat.

Mine has mostly resulted in too many books, too many browser tabs, and more than a few evenings that lasted much longer than I planned.