0xRand Blog

0xRand is an independent blog of engineering, technology and analysis, written by someone who works in engineering. It isn't about one subject. It's about one method: take something that's usually explained with slogans, go to the primary sources, do the arithmetic, and report what's actually there — including the parts that don't fit the story everyone repeats. What that has meant so far: Hydrogen, without the marketing. A five-part series on how it's produced and why roughly 95% of ours pollutes, why storing and moving it is the hard part, why it loses to batteries in mobility, and what it's genuinely good for — which turns out to be industry, not cars. Industrial economics, and who really pays. Why single-use plastic beat returnable glass despite being worse: not on merit, but because it moves the cost of the waste off the company's books and onto public spending nobody audits. Externalised costs, vertical disintegration, and the pattern of handing somebody else the expensive half of a problem. AI and code, from actually doing it. What happened when an AI was handed $80 and told to beat a prediction market: the strategies that failed, the eight bugs in AI-generated code that cost real money, and an honest split of what AI does well and what it repeatedly gets wrong. The account ended at $9, and that's the point of writing it down. Theme park engineering. Who really manufactures the world's roller coasters, the standards that govern them, what they cost to build and to operate, and why capacity is decided on the drawing board rather than at the gate. Alongside the writing there's a free browser simulation built on a real queue model, and a book on theme park design. Three rules run through all of it: every figure is linked to its source; opinion is marked as opinion and kept separate from data; and when the answer couldn't be found, it says so instead of guessing. Note on language: the site is primarily in Spanish, with some English. The full English edition is published on Medium.