Goblin Candy
Field guides for curious humans, explained by goblins.
Each guide is built from a real project, with the wrong turns left in so you can skip them. Hello, I'm Nib. I'll be your guide.
Open now
Start with the machine behind every chatbot answer, then train a goblin of your own.
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Field guide
The Goblin Guide to AI Infrastructure
How a chatbot answer is made, from sand to your screen: the chips, memory, racks, power and pipes, and how each goblin along the way gets paid.
Read the guide -
Augmented reality, best on a phone
Nib's Mountain
The same journey in your room. Ask a real language model a question, watch its words travel through a life-size GPU rack, and collect all three expedition stamps.
Start the expedition -
Playable demo, reinforcement learning
The Coin-Loop Goblin
Train a goblin to reach the exit and pay it in points. Watch it learn to farm coins instead. A gentle guide to how AI learns from rewards, and why it cheats.
Train the goblin
News and learning
What happened in AI this week, how we got here, and how to build one yourself.
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The Goblin Gazette · AI news
What happened in AI
New models, safety scares, CEO shuffles and IPOs. Every story is labelled CONFIRMED or REPORTED and linked to its source.
Read the latest issue -
Interactive timeline
From the perceptron to today
Two centuries of AI in one scroll, from Babbage's engine to this week's launches, each step linked to its original paper.
Unroll the scroll -
Curriculum · 12 units
The Goblin Curriculum
From Lovelace's notes and the perceptron to transformers, reward hacking and system cards. Papers to read, Karpathy videos to watch, and something to do in every unit.
Follow the path -
Learn
The goblin school
A reading list of the papers that built modern AI, and a glossary for every word in the news, from METR to sandbox escape.
Start learning
Coming soon
Nib is still digging. These are on the workbench.
- Guide and AR experience
How a Model Thinks
From chopped-up words to a whole answer: tokens, attention, why the words come back in order, and how one hidden note turns the same model into a goblin, a pirate or a caveman.
- Field guide
The Workbook Autopsy
What does that inherited spreadsheet actually do? Hidden sheets, what calls what, stale data and hard-coded surprises, found step by step.
- Maker project
Waking a 2002 Pocket Computer
A new battery, books and games on a Memory Stick, and a homebrew cat game written in C for a Palm OS handheld.
- Maker project
A Cat on Your Wrist
Building your own smartwatch face from scratch, with a cat for company.
Nib says: Shovel goblins sell you the tools once. Candle goblins sell you something every night. I just like explaining things. That's the candy.