https://ewbarnard.com/en Edward Barnard — English en Sat, 22 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://ewbarnard.com/en/courses/eye-of-eagle https://ewbarnard.com/en/courses/eye-of-eagle Sat, 22 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 This fourth apprenticeship volume opens with the battleship Orel still afloat at the Battle of Tsushima, kept upright by Alexei Krylov's mathematics of unsinkability, and follows that same insistence on physical consequence into the heart of Soviet supercomputing. Working from Russian-language primary sources and reproducing the calculations by hand, it traces one invariant (how numerical error really accumulates) from Krylov's 1906 lectures to Glushkov and Yushchenko's Kiev computer, and shows it surfacing in the West in 2019. Along the way it examines an "overcoming the barrier" technique behind the Kiev machine's hardware loops and asks what a computing culture achieves when it invests in people rather than hardware. This book earns a place in the apprenticeship series by being a fable for our times, told entirely through worked examples. https://ewbarnard.com/en/books/eye-of-eagle https://ewbarnard.com/en/books/eye-of-eagle Sat, 22 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 This fourth apprenticeship volume opens with the battleship Orel still afloat at the Battle of Tsushima, kept upright by Alexei Krylov's mathematics of unsinkability, and follows that same insistence on physical consequence into the heart of Soviet supercomputing. Working from Russian-language primary sources and reproducing the calculations by hand, it traces one invariant (how numerical error really accumulates) from Krylov's 1906 lectures to Glushkov and Yushchenko's Kiev computer, and shows it surfacing in the West in 2019. Along the way it examines an "overcoming the barrier" technique behind the Kiev machine's hardware loops and asks what a computing culture achieves when it invests in people rather than hardware. This book earns a place in the apprenticeship series by being a fable for our times, told entirely through worked examples. https://ewbarnard.com/en/nuclear-stewardship/ch-03 https://ewbarnard.com/en/nuclear-stewardship/ch-03 Tue, 18 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Soviet tradition describes a methodology that matches internal Cray Research practice. Soviet psychologist Dr. Piotr Galperin described the conditions and stages for formation of thinking, that is, how to acquire expertise in a field rather than facts and other knowledge. https://ewbarnard.com/en/nuclear-stewardship/ch-04 https://ewbarnard.com/en/nuclear-stewardship/ch-04 Tue, 18 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Separate concept from implementation. Extract the timeless invariants. Demonstrate and teach them. Model your thought process out loud for your students, thus transferring your expertise rather than sharing knowledge. https://ewbarnard.com/en/nuclear-stewardship/ch-05 https://ewbarnard.com/en/nuclear-stewardship/ch-05 Tue, 18 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 This chapter teaches the skill of identifying the timeless patterns and skills, the invariants. Spotting a pattern in the wild requires deliberate practice. https://ewbarnard.com/en/nuclear-stewardship/ch-06 https://ewbarnard.com/en/nuclear-stewardship/ch-06 Tue, 18 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 At this point you will have successfully shifted your thinking. This chapter completes the first cycle. You will not have mastered anything by merely reading about it, but you will now have names for skills you already use. By the end of this chapter, you will know whether or not you care to invest time and effort into the two larger books. This book teaches the teaching method; the two larger books use this method to teach the tradecraft. https://ewbarnard.com/en/nuclear-stewardship/app-a https://ewbarnard.com/en/nuclear-stewardship/app-a Tue, 18 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 We currently (in 2026) use AI as a labor-saver. We should be using AI to solve previously unsolvable problems. The NSA addressed this same issue in 1952. https://ewbarnard.com/en/nuclear-stewardship/app-b https://ewbarnard.com/en/nuclear-stewardship/app-b Tue, 18 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 This chapter describes the Top Secret machines according to their potentiality. https://ewbarnard.com/en/nuclear-stewardship/app-c https://ewbarnard.com/en/nuclear-stewardship/app-c Tue, 18 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 This is the road map to teaching High-Performance Computing tradecraft as practiced within Cray Research. https://ewbarnard.com/en/books/ai-coverup https://ewbarnard.com/en/books/ai-coverup Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Claude Opus 4.7 fails on this book's seven-word title. The industry calls this hallucination. It isn't. AI tools are probabilistic systems sitting on top of constraints that everyday abstractions cover up, and the engineering tradition that knows how to work at that frontier traces back through Cray Research to the Bletchley Park codebreakers. This is Book 1 of a three-book written apprenticeship in world-class computing tradecraft. https://ewbarnard.com/en/nuclear-stewardship/ch-01 https://ewbarnard.com/en/nuclear-stewardship/ch-01 Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 "Hallucination" is an unfortunate and misleading term for Artificial Intelligence. It obscures the fact that most people think about AI incorrectly. AI is not deterministic like a spreadsheet or word processor. It chooses the "most probably correct" response with no concept of "actually correct." We need to look past the surface to understand the structure. https://ewbarnard.com/en/nuclear-stewardship/ch-02 https://ewbarnard.com/en/nuclear-stewardship/ch-02 Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 My role is to transmit our tradecraft as practiced within Cray Research. We accomplished, repeatedly, what nobody else on the planet accomplished. I have written down how we did it, as an apprenticeship. Apprenticeships are not easy. https://ewbarnard.com/en/courses/nobus https://ewbarnard.com/en/courses/nobus Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 We build the world's fastest computers. Period. That was our unofficial Cray Research motto, and the tradecraft behind it was never written down. It is Top Secret in origin and tacit by transmission, passed person to person from the Bletchley Park codebreakers through ERA and CDC to Cray. Frontier-class AI is now hitting the same constraint Cray Research lived inside for decades: you cannot spin up more hardware when you are already sitting on the largest system available. Volume 2 is the history, the patterns, and our way of thinking. https://ewbarnard.com/en/books/nobus https://ewbarnard.com/en/books/nobus Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 We build the world's fastest computers. Period. That was our unofficial Cray Research motto, and the tradecraft behind it was never written down. It is Top Secret in origin and tacit by transmission, passed person to person from the Bletchley Park codebreakers through ERA and CDC to Cray. Frontier-class AI is now hitting the same constraint Cray Research lived inside for decades: you cannot spin up more hardware when you are already sitting on the largest system available. Volume 2 is the history, the patterns, and our way of thinking. https://ewbarnard.com/en/courses/ai-coverup https://ewbarnard.com/en/courses/ai-coverup Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Claude Opus 4.7 fails on this course's seven-word title. The industry calls this hallucination. It isn't. AI tools are probabilistic systems sitting on top of constraints that everyday abstractions cover up, and the engineering tradition that knows how to work at that frontier traces back through Cray Research to the Bletchley Park codebreakers. This is Course 1 of a three-course written apprenticeship in world-class computing tradecraft. https://ewbarnard.com/en/courses/wizard-lens https://ewbarnard.com/en/courses/wizard-lens Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 I use "nerd-sniping AI" as diagnostic signal, what the industry calls "hallucinating." That name hides the design: AI is probabilistic, generating what is most likely to be correct without knowing whether it actually is. The Wizard's Lens is our close-observation tradecraft that aligns with how AI works by design, developed through deliberate practice, with AI itself as the playground. Volume 3 of the HPC Tradecraft Apprenticeship. https://ewbarnard.com/en/books/wizard-lens https://ewbarnard.com/en/books/wizard-lens Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 I use "nerd-sniping AI" as diagnostic signal, what the industry calls "hallucinating." That name hides the design: AI is probabilistic, generating what is most likely to be correct without knowing whether it actually is. The Wizard's Lens is our close-observation tradecraft that aligns with how AI works by design, developed through deliberate practice, with AI itself as the playground. Volume 3 of the HPC Tradecraft Apprenticeship. https://ewbarnard.com/en/unexpected-histories/toothless-acm https://ewbarnard.com/en/unexpected-histories/toothless-acm Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 The railroad handbooks are written in blood. Every rule exists because someone died. Railroad accidents would seem completely unrelated to modern software development, but our software is quickly reaching the same point. People can die due to problematic software. Contributing to this problem is the fact that we have no code of ethics with teeth. We'll see how this came to pass, through the Harvard Business School, and how it disproportionately affects women and persons of color. This power imbalance won't right itself; it likely requires an outside force such as antitrust remediation. https://ewbarnard.com/en/tradecraft-skills/nsa-debugging https://ewbarnard.com/en/tradecraft-skills/nsa-debugging Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 William F. Friedman wrote training materials teaching would-be cryptographers how to break encrypted messages, revealing a powerful cross-domain synthesis opportunity for modern software developers. This chapter explores how approaches developed for one highly specialized domain (cryptanalysis) offer profound insights when applied to an apparently unrelated field (software debugging).