research

The intellectual foundation

Analog is built on research, not intuition. These documents define the theoretical framework, survey the technical landscape, and map the territory we operate in.

framework

Information Foundations

The full academic treatment of Shannon's information theory and Floridi's philosophy of information as a unified framework for personal software. Covers entropy, the Data Processing Inequality, rate-distortion theory, the General Definition of Information, Informational Structural Realism, and the veridicality thesis.

930 lines -- Shannon (1948), Floridi (2011), Dretske (1981), Cover & Thomas (2006)

framework

The Scope of Analog

A software technology map derived from the Shannon+Floridi framework. Defines the 5x5 matrix (five Shannon operations x five Floridi dimensions), maps nine product domains (capture, knowledge management, creative work, finance, life management, communication, sovereignty, verification, interoperability), and identifies seven product concepts nobody is building.

252 lines -- February 2026

survey

Small Language Models Landscape 2026

Comprehensive survey of the SLM ecosystem: 15+ model families (Phi, Gemma, Llama, Qwen, DeepSeek, Mistral), architecture innovations (MoE, GQA, MLA, Flash Attention, SSMs), training approaches, benchmark performance, and the "densing law" -- capability density doubling every 3.5 months.

868 lines -- March 2026

survey

MLOps and LLM Development Lifecycle

End-to-end survey of the model development pipeline: data curation, pretraining, fine-tuning (LoRA, QLoRA), alignment (DPO, GRPO), quantization (GGUF, MLX 4-bit), deployment, monitoring. Includes cost estimates and a recommended stack for on-device AI products.

1,545 lines -- March 2026

survey

Apple On-Device AI Survey 2026

Deep dive into Apple Silicon capabilities (A-series, M-series), the MLX framework, Core ML pipeline, Apple Intelligence architecture, and practical deployment patterns for running language models on Apple hardware. Covers the full stack from silicon to inference.

1,014 lines -- March 2026

guide

SLM Development Guide

Hands-on practitioner guide: from zero to running, fine-tuning, evaluating, and deploying small language models. Covers MLX on Apple Silicon, Unsloth on cloud, dataset curation, evaluation harnesses, quantization workflows, knowledge distillation, and DPO alignment. Complete code examples throughout.

2,238 lines -- March 2026

Key references

  • Shannon, C. E. (1948). "A Mathematical Theory of Communication." Bell System Technical Journal.
  • Floridi, L. (2011). The Philosophy of Information. Oxford University Press.
  • Floridi, L. (2013). The Ethics of Information. Oxford University Press.
  • Floridi, L. (2008). "A Defence of Informational Structural Realism." Synthese.
  • Kleppmann, M. et al. (2019). "Local-First Software." ACM SIGPLAN Onward!
  • Dretske, F. (1981). Knowledge and the Flow of Information. MIT Press.
  • Cover, T. M. & Thomas, J. A. (2006). Elements of Information Theory. Wiley.