The archive
Every technical post on the site, newest first. Filter by category to focus on a specific topic, or use the author pages to read a single voice.
You sign up for a service, everything works, and then one day a screen appears asking you to photograph your ID and confirm your address. For most people the reaction is a mix of…
There is an old joke that there are only two hard problems in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors. The joke endures because the middle item…
For decades, online gambling in Finland worked in a way that looked increasingly unusual to the rest of Europe. A single state-owned operator, Veikkaus, held a legal monopoly on b…
A few years ago almost no working engineer had heard of a vector database. Now they are everywhere — in every AI architecture diagram, every job posting, every conference talk abo…
Every engineer meets it eventually. A system that ran perfectly for months suddenly misbehaves on a single weekend in spring or autumn — reports off by an hour, scheduled jobs fir…
You have seen the symptoms even if you never knew the cause: a name rendered as a string of garbled symbols, an apostrophe that turned into three nonsensical characters, a form th…
Open a console in almost any programming language and type a calculation as simple as adding a tenth and two tenths. You will very often get back not the clean three tenths you ex…
There is an old joke among engineers that there are only two hard problems in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors. The joke endures because…
Artificial intelligence has become one of those phrases that appears everywhere and explains little, and the online casino industry uses it as liberally as any other. Behind the b…
Every service that survives contact with the real internet eventually needs rate limiting. It is the quiet mechanism that keeps an API from being drowned by a runaway client, a sc…
Of all the professions disrupted by constant interruption, programming may be among the most damaged by it. Writing software is not the kind of work that can be done in scattered…
You tap play, and within a second or two a high-definition video begins, smooth and uninterrupted, with no sense of the enormous machinery working on your behalf. It is easy to ta…
