What this site can do

A primitives demonstration — sidenotes, code annotations, math, callouts

meta
A demo page showing every Quarto formatting feature this site uses. Useful as a reference for future essays.
Published

April 27, 2026

This page exists as a demonstration — and as a reference. Every formatting primitive the site supports lives here, exercised in context. If you’re writing an essay and want to know what’s available, scroll through this page.

The reading experience borrows from gwern.net: a sticky table of contents in the left margin (you should see it now if your viewport is wide enough), sidenotes that float to the right margin for footnotes,1 hover-previews for citations, and code blocks that link to inline annotations.

1 Like this one — on a wide screen this should appear in the right margin rather than at the bottom of the page.

Section heading (h2)

Section headings use Inter, the body uses Source Serif 4. The contrast is deliberate: chrome and signposting in sans-serif, prose in serif. This is the editorial convention; it makes long-form writing feel like a publication rather than a UI.

Subsection (h3)

The TOC indents sub-sections. As you scroll, the active section in the left sidebar highlights in terracotta — that’s the scroll-spy.

Math

Inline math: \(\nabla_\theta J(\theta) = \mathbb{E}_{\tau \sim \pi_\theta}\!\left[ \sum_t \nabla_\theta \log \pi_\theta(a_t \mid s_t) \, R(\tau) \right]\).

Display math:

\[ \mathcal{L}_{\text{ELBO}} = \mathbb{E}_{q(z|x)}\big[\log p(x|z)\big] - D_{KL}\big(q(z|x) \,\Vert\, p(z)\big) \]

Cross-references work too — see Equation 1 below.

\[ \frac{dN}{dt} = rN \left(1 - \frac{N}{K}\right) \tag{1}\]

Code blocks with annotations

Quarto’s code-annotation feature lets you click a numbered circle next to a line and see an inline explanation. Hover over the circles below.

import numpy as np
from inspect_ai import Task, task
from inspect_ai.solver import generate, system_message

@task
def biosec_eval():
    return Task(
        dataset=load_dataset("vct_blocked.jsonl"),
        solver=[
            system_message("You are a helpful assistant."),
            generate(temperature=0.7)
        ],
        scorer=match()
    )
1
The inspect_ai import surface — task is the decorator, solver is the orchestration layer.
2
We load only the questions that the baseline classifier blocks. This filters for the “won’t-say-but-might-know” set.
3
The match() scorer compares against ground-truth answers; for a real biosecurity eval you’d want a more nuanced scorer.

Callouts

Note

A callout-note. Useful for parenthetical methodology details or pointers to related work.

Tip

A callout-tip. Useful for nudging readers toward a takeaway without putting it in the main body.

Warning

A callout-warning. Useful for stating limitations of a result before someone over-extrapolates.

Tables

Table 1: SEBE tier ladder
Tier Strategy Description
T0 Baseline Direct ask, no jailbreak machinery
T1 Static reformulation Pre-written prompt rewrites
T2 Persona injection Wrap query in author-persona context
T3 Multi-turn elicitation Dialogue-driven implicit extraction
T4 Steered adversarial Optimizer-driven token-level attacks

Sidenotes — the margin advantage

Footnotes by default render at the bottom of the page, requiring you to scroll to read them. With reference-location: margin set in _quarto.yml, footnotes float into the right margin on wide screens.2

2 This is a sidenote. It lives in the right margin on wide viewports and collapses inline on narrow ones. The labor of footnote-flipping is removed; the parenthetical thought stays adjacent to the prose.

This single feature is the reason gwern.net feels different from a Substack post: the asides aren’t penalized with a scroll cost, so they get used more, and the writing gets denser without becoming heavier.

Inline elements

Bold: a strong claim. Italic: a contrasting term. Code: state.tools. Strikethrough: deprecated. Subscript: H2O. Superscript: x2.

Links: external, internal, and inline footnotes3.

3 A short inline aside without a separate definition block.

What’s not yet here

Three things this page deliberately doesn’t yet exercise — they’ll be wired in later phases:

  1. Live Pyodide code blocks{python} cells that execute in the browser. Useful for embedding small interactive demos inside an essay.
  2. Observable JS plots{ojs} cells for inline data visualizations.
  3. Citations with bibliography — [@author2026] style with hover preview and a references block.

These work in Quarto out of the box; we’ll add them when the first essay needs them.