Colophon
Acknowledgements & inspirations
This site is built on other people's good ideas and good code. Where something was borrowed, adapted, or learned from, it's named here — and, where it matters, in the piece that uses it.
gwern.net — Gwern Branwen (& Said Achmiz)
The largest influence by far. The reading experience here is an homage to gwern.net's:
- Sidenotes. The margin-note behaviour follows
gwern's
sidenotes.js(by Said Achmiz, MIT). gwern's file is coupled to its larger site engine, so this site reuses the pattern — a small self-contained reimplementation — rather than the file itself. Demonstrated in “Sidenotes, previews, and other quiet machinery”. - Link / document previews. The hover-preview cards are inspired by gwern's
popups (
popups.js/extracts.js): annotations compiled at build time, shown on hover. This implementation is custom. - The whole philosophy — static HTML rendered at build time, aggressive progressive enhancement (the site is fully readable with JavaScript off), speed, and a “semantic zoom” approach to links.
- gwtar — gwern's single-file self-extracting HTML archive format, on the roadmap here for link archiving.
Sidenotes lineage
- Tufte-CSS / Edward Tufte — sidenotes as a form originate here; gwern's version (and therefore this one) build on it.
Tools & libraries
- marked + marked-footnote — Markdown → HTML, and footnotes.
- esbuild — fast bundling of the browser glue.
- React — the interactive views.
- Hosting: GitHub Pages.
Type & assets
- Goudy Initialen dropcaps — ornamental initials by Frederic W. Goudy, digitized by Dieter Steffmann; free for commercial use via 1001fonts (used on the personal side).
- Metroid Prime logo — public domain, via Wikimedia Commons (Nintendo wordmark; used editorially).
- ak-design — this site's own shared design system.
- Lofi streams on the now-playing strip: Henriko Magnifico, Nestalgia, and Lofi Girl.
Per-asset licensing detail lives in ASSET_CREDITS.md in the repository. If you see
something of yours here that should be credited differently — or not at all — please get in touch.