Hi!
Who I am, why I'm writing here instead of only in papers, and why the plots on this site have sliders.
Vilhelm ToivonenLab NotesI find I don't actually understand a paper until I've tried to explain it. This site is me trying.
The hero page already covers the main facts about me, so I won't repeat them here. The short version: I've ended up with duties in three worlds (academic, corporate, and startup), and I plan to write about whatever I find interesting in any of them. For now most of the weight will sit on my doctoral work, which is small-to-medium-sized language model inference and post-training. That's where I spend most of my working hours, so that's what I'll have something to say about first.
As a hobby, I also take part in hackathons, competitions, and similar low-stakes ways to ship something rough on a deadline. A few of those will probably leak in.
Why the blog format
In academia, everything revolves around writing papers. So how do these posts differ from manuscripts, and who are they for?
Research incentives are genuinely hard to get right, much harder than industry's. Industry has clearer targets (revenue, profit, maybe valuation). Those are at least measurable, they tie back to whether the company keeps existing, and maximizing them also maximizes the shareholders' personal gain. Academia's equivalent target is the research paper, and I think that's a meaningfully worse target than it looks.
In a perfect world, a paper would just be a well-written way to communicate finished research to other researchers. In practice, at least here in Finland, it's largely the driving force behind the research itself. Gaps in existing papers get identified and iterated on, not because they have important implications, but because they're easy starting points for the next submission. I'm in academia, so I'm guilty of this too, to a degree.
That's the point of a blog I fully control: it's where the things that don't fit in a paper go. Expect syntheses of papers I found interesting and what I think they imply, negative results and failed experiments from my own work, and the occasional idea from outside academia. I'm not measuring success by reader counts. My goal is 20 posts written in 2026, every one of them a post I'm proud of.
Blog technical details
Most of these posts are technical reflections on things I found prettier than I expected, or overviews of results. I'm a visual learner, so instead of static plots I built a system for small interactive simulations. You get to feel the shape of a curve and how sensitive it is to each parameter, instead of taking my word for it.
Mechanically, every interactive block on this site is a small schema-validated component keyed into a compute registry. The MDX file (the format I write these posts in) says what to plot; the registry decides how to compute it. I'll write about the site properly somewhere else; it doesn't belong in an intro.
Learn in public, with footnotes
I'm writing this blog mostly to force my own clarity. The side effect is that someone landing here from a link to a deeper post can get a sense of whose voice they're reading. If a slider on this site changes the shape of an argument for you, that's an additional, huge win.
Comments are open. I plan to read them. If something in a post is wrong, or you've seen the same thing from a better angle, I genuinely want to know.
That's it for the intro. The other posts carry the technical weight; this one was just to set the voice and the stakes. Go drag a slider.
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