Systems are easier to
understand than to explain.
paperboy is a small collection of interactive three.js / WebGPU field guides — built to turn systems that are usually just diagrams and manpages into something you can orbit, zoom into, and click apart.
Field guides
Interactive 3D explainers for systems that are usually just diagrams and manpages.
GNU / Hurd →
An interactive tour of the Hurd's multiserver microkernel: its servers and translators, its boot sequence, and how it compares to a monolithic kernel. Drag to orbit, click any module for detail.
Orchestra →
A council of agents estimates a battery's health and remaining life, disagrees, reweighs itself, and converges on one number. Watch the consensus form.
Cortex →
Follow a sentence through tokenization, a transformer block, multi-head self-attention, and decoding — the exact Q/K/V to W^O pipeline, in 3D.
About
I joined the GNU Hurd project back in 2021, and the learning curve was brutal — a multiserver microkernel, translators, capability-passing ports, decades of mailing-list history. This repo is the field guide I wish I'd had: an interactive explainer of the Hurd's microkernel core, built so the next person doesn't bounce off the learning curve the way I did.
It's also a small experiment about AI, authorship, and what "free software" means once you compare it to how "open" software gets built today. Read the full story on GitHub ↗