In this blog post I will give my personal view on the recent counterexamples to the unit distance conjecture and sum-product conjecture over the reals (see [90] and [52] respectively). My goal is to sketch the constructions and try and give some intuition as to where they came from and why they work. My main target audience is the me-of-a-month-ago, who did not know much algebraic number theory, and who needs the relevant parts of the basic theory in this area explained, but wants to know...