Just under 7 years ago, I wrote Slow Data. In it, we explored how XMPP on ridiculously slow links had been, and in some cases could be, improved.
This is the follow-up. It's taken 7 years for me to get around to this.
Fitting, I thought.
Baseline XMPP - which, as we'll show, hardly anyone...
An icon can look clear in a component preview and become difficult to see when the background changes.
In our test, the same download icon went from a minimum sampled contrast of 4.42:1 on a light background to 1.04:1 on a dark background. Its SVG, color and size stayed the same.
The difference came from the translucent card behind it.
We tested five bac...
A hiring rubric is not a safety policy, and treating it like one is how a useful classifier becomes an unreviewable gate. For a healthtech team scoring candidate materials, I would use chat completions with a small, explicit JSON label contract, then keep the model's decision separate from the hiring score and route uncertainty to review. The important design choice is the six-tier label set: i...
Ownership is how Rust frees memory without a garbage collector and without you calling free. The compiler works out, at compile time, exactly where each heap value is freed. Every rule in this lesson exists to make that analysis possible.
Stack vs heap, quickly. Values with a size known at compile time (i32<...
In today’s tech landscape, everyone discusses the sheer scale of artificial intelligence, infinite cloud elasticity, and petabytes processed in fractions of a second. Elegant system topologies are sketched on whiteboards, embedded into polished slide decks, and theoretically appear flawlessly resilient.
Yet the moment you step onto the data center floor and enter the cold aisles, theore...
