Deep Dive: Parameters aren't compute: the number on the box, taken apart

A 28.9-million-parameter model runs on an $8 microcontroller while a 26B model needs 57.7 GB to sit still — both reported in the same unit. This episode takes the parameter count apart into the three costs it used to bundle (bytes resident, bytes read per token, arithmetic per token), traces the split back to Kaplan's 2020 scaling laws (which excluded embeddings from N), and works through per-layer embeddings, mixture-of-experts, and the KV cache as the mechanisms that pried those costs apart.