Issue 11, Jun 19, 2026

The Concatenation Trap

Senior AI Engineer interview at OpenAI, and the interviewer asks:

“You’re building a diffusion transformer. How do you inject the timestep and class condition into each block, and why?”

Don’t say: “I’ll concatenate the condition to the input tokens”

Why feeding timesteps as extra tokens silently burns quadratic compute, and how adaptive modulation retunes your entire diffusion block for free.

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