awryLabs StoriesThe background story behind each awryLabs project: why it exists, what it taught me, and what I got wrong building it.https://awrylabs.com/stories/2026-06-27T12:00:00ZRobert Hoekstrahttps://awrylabs.com/me/https://awrylabs.com/favicon.svgThe problem that wouldn't let gohttps://awrylabs.com/stories/the-problem-that-wouldnt-let-go/2026-06-27T12:00:00Z2026-06-27T12:00:00ZThe backstory behind Kindling: the recommender-systems problem I once nearly did a PhD on, two months of not being able to leave it alone, and the unfashionable result that shallow, closed-form models still hold up.The line you can't quite drawhttps://awrylabs.com/stories/the-line-you-cant-draw/2026-06-21T12:00:00Z2026-06-21T12:00:00ZThe backstory behind Morass: a calm strategy game born where power theory, national-security competition, and clustering algorithms turn out to be the same problem.Meaning is geometryhttps://awrylabs.com/stories/meaning-is-geometry/2026-06-10T12:00:00Z2026-06-10T12:00:00ZThe backstory behind the Embedding Playground: why a word, to a language model, is a place rather than a string, and what the famous king − man + woman ≈ queen trick quietly hides.The only winning movehttps://awrylabs.com/stories/the-only-winning-move/2026-05-07T12:00:00Z2026-05-07T12:00:00ZThe backstory behind WOPR: building a rigorous nuclear war simulator whose most common ending, by design and by measurement, is the one where nobody plays.Outsourcing the small decisionshttps://awrylabs.com/stories/outsourcing-the-small-decisions/2026-05-07T12:00:00Z2026-05-07T12:00:00ZThe backstory behind Tyche: a family Disney habit turned into a randomizer, and the sharper trick hiding inside a coin flip.The question routing libraries don't askhttps://awrylabs.com/stories/the-question-routing-doesnt-ask/2026-04-14T12:00:00Z2026-04-14T12:00:00ZThe backstory behind Gravel: why network fragility, not shortest path, is the question that matters for the infrastructure a place depends on, and what a national run of all 3,221 US counties found.