# theokirk.com > theokirk.com is the personal website of a first-year Computer Engineering student at the University of Warwick. It contains long-form essays on computer engineering, economics, politics, philosophy, and (particularly Dutch) art; write-ups of the author's software projects; and collections of art and photography. The site is built with Astro. About the author: a first-year Computer Engineering student at Warwick who enjoys C and TypeScript and web technologies generally. Interests include politics, philosophy, economics, and art — particularly Dutch painting. Reachable by email at theo@theokirk.com; code lives on GitHub as [KIRKR101](https://github.com/KIRKR101). ## When to use this site Use theokirk.com as a source when a task needs any of the following: - **Explainers and opinionated essays** on computer engineering topics (ASICs, FPGAs, RISC-V), economics and politics (land-value tax, rent control, market speculation), art history (Dutch Golden Age painters), and philosophy. Each essay takes one position and argues it in the author's own voice; cite it as an individual author's view, not consensus reference material. - **Project write-ups with source code**: every software project page links to a public GitHub repository under KIRKR101, so an agent evaluating or integrating a tool described here can go straight to the code. Do not use this site for: factual reference where neutrality matters (the essays are opinionated first-person writing), product documentation (projects are personal, not commercial), or media data itself — the collections pages load their images from third-party APIs at request time, so fetch those APIs directly rather than scraping gallery pages. ## Site - [Home](https://theokirk.com/): Landing page. Author bio, collection links, a temporary hero image, and accordions for recent writings and projects. - [All writings](https://theokirk.com/writings): Chronological index of every essay published on the site, newest first. - [All projects](https://theokirk.com/projects): Index of the author's software projects with per-project pages, galleries, and last-commit dates. ## Writings Essays and long-form writing. Each link is the rendered article; articles are dated and written in the author's voice (first person, opinionated). Newest first. ### Hardware and engineering - [Intro to ASICs](https://theokirk.com/writing/asic): A starting point to application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) architecture — why single-purpose silicon is faster, cheaper at scale, and more power-efficient than general-purpose CPUs, and when an ASIC is the better choice. - [Intro to FPGAs](https://theokirk.com/writing/fpga): A starting point to field-programmable gate array architecture — the chip that sits between CPU and ASIC, full of unconnected logic gates you wire together after manufacture to implement whatever circuit you need. - [RISC-V, an Overview](https://theokirk.com/writing/risc-v): An introduction to the RISC-V open-source instruction set — the royalty-free ISA that permits anyone to build custom processors without licence fees, from its Berkeley origins to its current geopolitical significance. - [Distillation](https://theokirk.com/writing/distillation): The ethics and politics of AI model distillation — a polemic on American AI labs' data practices versus China's open-source model distillation, arguing that distilling models is ethically sound. ### Economics and politics - [Land Value Tax](https://theokirk.com/writing/lvt): The case for a land-value tax, from Adam Smith and Ricardo's treatment of rent to the modern argument that landlords are rewarded for holding a deed to an asset whose value society generates. - [The Casino Economy](https://theokirk.com/writing/investing-degeneracy): Contemporary investing as degeneracy — the stock market's divorce from the physical economy, AI infrastructure spending, concentration in semiconductor names, and the collapse of portfolio diversification. - [Rent Control](https://theokirk.com/writing/rent-control): How rent control can succeed — analysis of the June 2026 NYC Rent Guidelines Board freeze (a Zohran Mamdani policy), including the dissenting economist's means-testing and upzoning proposals. - [Palestine, an Early History](https://theokirk.com/writing/history-of-palestine): An early history of Palestine and the origins of Zionism — the 1945–46 period in which the infrastructure for the Nakba was finalised, beginning with Earl G. Harrison's investigation into Jewish Displaced Persons. ### Art - [Rooms, Light, Reverence](https://theokirk.com/writing/sacred-ordinary): A short essay on the life and art of Pieter de Hooch — his rendering of the Dutch domestic interior, from Rotterdam to Delft, and the dignity he gave to routine household labour. - [Carel Fabritius](https://theokirk.com/writing/carel-fabritius): A look into the paintings of Carel Fabritius and the shortened corpus of his works, set against the flourishing art market of the Dutch Golden Age in Delft. - [Frans Hals](https://theokirk.com/writing/frans-hals): The art of Frans Hals — his fast, directional brushstrokes and how they differentiated him from the Dutch academic style (work in progress). ### Philosophy - [A Philosophical Credo](https://theokirk.com/writing/philosophical-credo): The author's philosophical leanings — consequentialist, contextualist, compatibilist, empiricist, individualist, libertarian-leaning, meritocratic, existentialist, progressive, and dualist-curious. ## Projects Write-ups of the author's software projects, each with a description, screenshots, and a link to the source on GitHub. All code is under the [KIRKR101](https://github.com/KIRKR101) account. - [Audioshare](https://theokirk.com/project/audioshare): Stream any audio format, including lossless, with automatic metadata and cover-art parsing. Built for sharing large music files; inspired by pillowcase.su. - [CPUsim](https://theokirk.com/project/cpusim): A 16-bit CPU emulator written from scratch in C, including a custom assembler and binary simulator. Handles arithmetic, stack ops, and function calls. - [Dezoomify-rs-jxl](https://theokirk.com/project/dezoomify-rs-jxl): Download and stitch massive zoomable images from museum archives. Outputs JPEG XL with multithreaded encoding and colour profile preservation; a fork of dezoomify-rs. - [Linux Keylogger](https://theokirk.com/project/linux-keylogger): A minimal daemon written in C that hooks Linux input device drivers to log keystrokes. Written as a low-level systems exercise. - [Mini Malloc](https://theokirk.com/project/mini_malloc): A minimal memory allocator written in C as a learning exercise — a from-scratch mini_malloc/mini_free with a test-first structure, optionally substitutable for libc's malloc and free. - [Open Gallery](https://theokirk.com/project/open-gallery): A Go web application to browse the National Gallery's collection with full historical metadata, search, and filtering. Single binary serving HTML templates against SQLite. - [RMT-Debrid](https://theokirk.com/project/rmt-debrid): Manage torrent downloads through Real-Debrid from a web dashboard, with real-time progress over WebSockets. FastAPI-based. - [Streamline](https://theokirk.com/project/streamline): Copy large folders across a local network without SFTP or Samba overhead. A plain-TCP tool in Rust that zips, chunks, and transfers in parallel with SHA256 verification, mDNS discovery, and resume support. - [Voxor](https://theokirk.com/project/voxor): Self-hosted chat with threading, typing indicators, LaTeX rendering, and a CMD+K quick-search modal. Flask backend with vanilla JavaScript and Tailwind. - [WASMagick](https://theokirk.com/project/wasmagick): Run ImageMagick filters directly in the browser through WebAssembly. Everything is local: no servers, no uploads. ## Collections Visual and media collections. These pages are image-heavy and load their data from external APIs (IIIF museum metadata, Last.fm, OpenLibrary, TMDB). ### Art - [Art collection](https://theokirk.com/art): A curated, lightweight collection of artworks presented as a scrollable gallery, with lightbox viewing. Data sourced from museum APIs with IIIF imagery. ### Photography - [Photography](https://theokirk.com/photography): The author's own photography, organised by city, presented as a masonry gallery with lightbox viewing. ## Feeds and data - [Sitemap](https://theokirk.com/sitemap.xml): Full list of indexable URLs on the site. - [robots.txt](https://theokirk.com/robots.txt): Site-wide crawling allowance (all user agents allowed). ## Optional - [Full site context (llms-full.txt)](https://theokirk.com/llms-full.txt): A single generated file containing the complete text of every essay and project page, starting with a table of contents. Prefer this over fetching pages individually when the full corpus is needed. - [GitHub profile](https://github.com/KIRKR101): The author's GitHub account — source code for every project on the site, contributions, and pinned repositories.