Why these notes are public

This is where I keep my working notes — the pages I write for myself while learning physics, machine learning, and the computing that holds an analysis together. Derivations I had to redo three times before they stuck, the non-obvious flag in a firmware toolchain, the picture that finally made a trigger algorithm make sense.

I am keeping them public for a simple reason: the notes that helped me most as a student were the ones somebody else forgot to hide. If you are a student walking a similar road — into CMS, into hardware-aware ML, into the strange plumbing between the two — these are for you as much as for me.

Some of these pages are written with help from Claude, and are marked as such. All of them are working documents: expect rough edges, and check the date before trusting a number.