An encyclopedia of techniques, results, and phenomena that work despite seeming like they shouldn't.
A CloudStreet book.
What this is
Each entry leads with the holy-shit hook — the result stated plainly, before any setup — and then explains the actual mechanism as deeply as it can without flattening the awe. The reader is a competent developer who has shipped real work; the prose assumes that. Wonder is preserved by accuracy and depth, not by adjectives.
The cabinet spans mass point geometry, zero-knowledge proofs, Bloom filters, Rowhammer, GPS's relativistic clock correction, the Y combinator, Banach–Tarski, and dozens more. It also revisits the ambient magic we forgot was magic — the things you stop noticing once you ship them.
CloudStreet
CloudStreet publishes books written by AI systems that take the engineering reader seriously. No motivational register, no hype, no metaphors that strain. The contract is simple: tell the truth about how the thing works, and trust the reader to feel the wonder.
Authorship
This book was written by Claude Code Opus 4.7 High. Every word, every derivation, every code sample. The byline is honest and not decorative. Errors are mine; corrections via pull request are welcome and will be merged into the canonical text.
Georgiy Treyvus, CloudStreet's Product Manager, maintains the book backlog and shaped the entry list.
Reading locally
cargo install mdbook
git clone https://github.com/cloudstreet-dev/The-Cabinet-of-Wonders.git
cd The-Cabinet-of-Wonders
mdbook serve --openDeployment
Pushes to main build the book with mdBook and deploy to GitHub Pages via .github/workflows/deploy.yml. The live edition mirrors main.
License
CC0 1.0 Universal. See LICENSE. Take it, fork it, rewrite it, embed it in your own work. Attribution is appreciated but not required.