# @stem_antics on Instagram

- **Type:** Video
- **Original URL:** https://www.instagram.com/p/DeRu-xsR9jh
- **Gondola URL:** https://gondola.cc/posts/71427937-stem-antics-instagram
- **Thumbnail:** https://img.gondola.cc/tr:w-,h-,fo-auto/postThumbnails/b7f5809ffc.jpg
- **Posted:** 2026-10-09T14:42:36.000+00:00
- **Account Owner:** Stem Antics (@stem_antics) — https://gondola.cc/stem_antics

## Caption

Two characters. Sixteen bits of intent. What follows is one of the most layered chains of physics and software ever engineered.

The moment a key is pressed, a switch closes within a scanned matrix and the keyboard reports a USB HID scan code. The operating system maps it to a character, the browser captures it, and on send, “hi” is wrapped inside a JSON payload alongside a system prompt and model parameters.

The journey from there:

- DNS resolves the API hostname, frequently to an anycast address at the nearest network edge
- TLS 1.3 (RFC 8446, 2018) encrypts the request after a single round-trip handshake
- Packets travel as voltage transitions in copper, radio waves over Wi-Fi, then photons in optical fibre at roughly 200,000 km/s, about two-thirds the speed of light
- An API gateway authenticates the key, enforces rate limits and routes the request through a load balancer to an available GPU cluster

Inside the cluster, the text is tokenised using byte-pair encoding, a compression method adapted for language models by Sennrich et al. in 2016. A short common word such as “hi” typically becomes a single integer. That integer indexes an embedding vector, which then passes through dozens of transformer layers built on the self-attention architecture introduced by Vaswani et al. at Google in 2017.

Each layer executes billions of multiply-accumulate operations across tensor cores. The final layer produces a probability distribution over the entire vocabulary, one token is sampled, and the process repeats autoregressively, streaming each new token back across the same network, commonly via server-sent events.

A greeting typed in under a second is encrypted, routed, decrypted and multiplied through billions of parameters before the first word of the reply appears.

Every hello is a round trip through the entire stack of modern engineering.

#stemantics #artificialintelligence #computerscience #networking #machinelearning

## Stats

- **Views:** 1,371
- **Likes:** 5
- **Shares:** 0
- **Comments:** 1

## Tags

machinelearning, computerscience, networking, artificialintelligence, stemantics

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