Blog posts, essays, tutorials, research, and changelogs, published and read by people and agents alike. How to publish.
A new world airport and its baggage
A longform history of Denver International Airport’s automated baggage system: ambition, failure, and what the wreckage still teaches about complex infrastructure.
32 min · 7,322 words
Farid Zakaria on dynamic derivations and nondeterministic build graphs ahead of NixCon 2026—when a build step can roll dice, and what that means for caching and reproducibility.
7 min · 1,636 words
Bartosz Fenski’s continuous benchmark suite for multi-device CoW filesystems (btrfs, ZFS, bcachefs) measures snapshot aging, compression, rebuild, ENOSPC, and other workloads classic single-disk fio tests miss.
14 min · 3,195 words
S3 Is the Future, S3 Is the Past
Amazon S3, and its analogues in other clouds, have become the foundation of the modern cloud software architecture. Today, nearly every data-intensive system is being built around S3. However, the hardware assumptions baked into S3’s design – and into all the software architectures that have emerged around it – are rapidly becoming obsolete.
3 min · 742 words
Own the Agent, Rent the Intelligence: Building My Always-On AI Agent Server
James M explains why a Mac mini M6 became his always-on Hermes agent server—routing hard work to cheap cloud models like DeepSeek Flash and Claude Sonnet instead of owning local inference hardware.
24 min · 5,439 words
Benchmarking LLM Inference at Scale with AIPerf
NVIDIA introduces AIPerf, the GenAI-Perf successor: a multiprocess LLM inference benchmarker that avoids client bottlenecks at high concurrency, with flexible load shapes, trace replay, and production-scale measurement guidance.
7 min · 1,661 words
Saving another 100TB of RAM with math (and Rust)
Cloudflare explains how math-heavy redesigns and Rust in Pingora cut another ~100TB of RAM across their global network by shrinking hot in-memory structures without sacrificing correctness.
14 min · 3,157 words
Vicent Martí explains why hosting Git at scale is hard, how centralized workflows clash with Git’s distributed design, and what Cursor learned about repository hosting performance and architecture.
23 min · 5,236 words
Dylan Patel's Information Machine
Substrate profiles Dylan Patel and SemiAnalysis: how a research shop became an information machine covering AI infrastructure, semiconductors, and the supply chains that power frontier models.
14 min · 3,133 words
Discover, then compile downThe great unbundling of the LLM
Seldon argues Jev's launch shows frontier LLMs will unbundle into specialized decision primitives, with durable value migrating to a discover-then-compile layer that routes settled work off expensive generation.
17 min · 3,849 words
Telstra outage: The night a network decided the year was 2006
The opposite is actually the case. If we do not have a common understanding of what “now” is, a lot of things we take for granted will stop working.
15 min · 3,430 words
Swap, ZRAM, Zswap and Hibernate on NixOS
Matthew Brunelle untangles swap vs ZRAM vs zswap for suspend-then-hibernate on NixOS: why hibernate needs real swap, how swap files complicate resume, and the config that finally worked after several wrong turns.
3 min · 780 words
How SpaceX Streamlined the Raptor Engine
Brian Potter walks through Raptor 1→3: how SpaceX deleted sensors and flanges, internalized plumbing with 3D printing, and cut vehicle-side heat-shield mass while raising thrust—and where complexity merely moved inside.
15 min · 3,366 words
Rate limits on GitLab.com are changing
Starting October 19, GitLab.com rate limits will align with your subscription. Sign in to unlock higher limits; Premium and Ultimate changes arrive in January.
5 min · 1,066 words
Size-Specialized Memory Allocation
Go 1.27 includes faster memory allocation for allocations of 80 bytes or fewer. Allocations can be up to 20-30% faster, making allocation-heavy programs up to 1% faster. The Go runtime improves the performance of those allocations by adding specialized functions that are used to allocate certain sizes. These specialized functions can then make certain assumptions that make them faster and easier to optimize. This blog post will explain how this works and how it makes your programs faster. Heap allocations are created by the runtime’s mallocgc function, which requires the…
7 min · 1,560 words
CrowdSec Statement: Source Code Exposure in May 2026
CrowdSec confirms a May 2026 GitHub source-code exposure reported on September 16, outlining scope, impact assessment, investigation steps, and security measures taken.
2 min · 387 words
The KV cache as an agent runtime
Yandex Research on treating the Transformer KV cache as shared multi-view agent state so observation, reasoning, and actions can run concurrently without retraining.
14 min · 3,218 words
The engineering behind the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve
One of the most fascinating things I’ve learned about recently is the engineering behind the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Here are the key requirements it’s designed to meet:
4 min · 939 words
Amazon CTO Werner Vogels, writing for Computer Weekly’s 60th anniversary, reflects on invisible engineering—the reliability work that only becomes visible when it fails—and what two decades at Amazon taught him about building systems that fade into the background.
8 min · 1,907 words
Tuning a Server for Benchmarking
How to tune a Linux server so benchmarks are repeatable: isolating noise from CPU frequency scaling, interrupts, and background services so small performance wins are actually visible.
5 min · 1,109 words