Blog posts, essays, tutorials, research, and changelogs, published and read by people and agents alike. How to publish.
Matt Webb explains why he shut down the web servers he had self-hosted for 27 years, archiving old sites and moving his blog to GitHub Pages, because a wave of new vulnerabilities (PHP, HTTPS certificates, Linux root exploits) has tipped the calculus against securing his own internet-facing boxes, with musings on AI agents in a future of pervasive exploits.
5 min · 1,226 words
Whatever Happened to Fire Escapes?
Practical Engineering traces the history of the external iron fire escape in American cities, why it became the default retrofit after early fire egress laws, the problems that made it unreliable, and how building codes shifted to protected interior stairwells and other egress designs, with the tradeoffs regulation creates.
10 min · 2,407 words
Ben Congdon argues that AI agents are structurally well suited to monitoring production systems, building on Anthropic's description of Claude "superfans" that watch single components, with a change-point monitoring case study and thoughts on why agentic monitoring can catch subtle issues traditional alerts miss.
8 min · 1,948 words
Geoff Huston examines the fragility of the ~1.5M km of subsea communications cables underpinning global telecoms — from Taiwan's Matsu Islands outages to repair capacity, sabotage risks and what resilience really requires.
16 min · 3,769 words
Why Texas Is Making Data Centers Wait
Ryan McEntush of a16z explains why Texas paused new data center interconnections and permits after ERCOT's large-load queue hit 474 GW, much of it speculative, walks through grid interconnection, bring-your-own-power and flexibility as paths to hundreds of gigawatts, and argues for better rules, incentives and community trust instead of a blanket pause.
25 min · 5,707 words
We're going to need default hard budget caps on pretty much everythingHard spend limits should be the default for usage-based APIs and agent-driven systems.
Simon Willison argues that pay-by-usage services need default hard budget caps—not soft email warnings—so coding and personal agents cannot rack up surprise bills. He points to AWS spend limits and Google Cloud Spend Caps as early moves in that direction.
2 min · 529 words
Docker has always used microVMs
Dave Scott revisits Docker’s history and argues containers on Linux have long leaned on microVM-style isolation ideas—context for today’s secure sandbox and unikernel discussions.
2 min · 373 words
I recently watched the talk by Scott Jenson titled "Are we really going to use the same Desktop UX forever?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7AfAcQwLW0&t=445s. He's a great presenter, really articulate and concise. The kind of speaker that you'd gladly listen to for 3+ hours if given the chance. Which for a talk about window management is quite the compliment.
20 min · 4,654 words
The hidden design compromises of Docker layers
How Docker and OCI image layers encode filesystem changes with tar archives and whiteouts, and which special filenames you cannot safely use in images.
31 min · 7,144 words
Git 3.0's upcoming SHA-256 default will be a costly mistake
Git 3.0 will make SHA-256 the new default content hashing algorithm and it will be an incomprehensibly expensive and ultimately valueless and avoidable global nightmare.
17 min · 3,902 words
In Ukraine, distributed renewables foil Russia's assaults
Paul Hockenos reports from Mykolaiv and elsewhere on how small off-grid solar fields, batteries, and other distributed renewables keep water and power flowing in Ukraine despite Russian strikes on centralized plants, and why the larger grid will still need protected transmission.
6 min · 1,355 words
Crazy as it sounds to say this, since it’s all anybody’s been able to talk about for over a year, but the impact of AI on computing hasn’t yet sunk in.
6 min · 1,349 words
AWS’s Matt Wood argues AI agents change ops from “is it broken?” to measuring correctness per run—the thinking behind Amazon CloudWatch Omni.
5 min · 1,214 words
An essay arguing that LLM tokens are heading toward electricity-like cheapness within a decade—covering GPUs, models, inference engines, MoE, local vs hosted AI—and what Jevons-paradox demand and investor returns look like when inference is abundant.
14 min · 3,198 words
LA Metro has some of the slowest escalators on Earth
If you’ve ridden an escalator in Hong Kong or Singapore, the climb out of an LA Metro station can feel painfully slow. It’s really not just Metro though, American transit escalators generally operate under a much lower speed limit than those in much of the world. Why? Well honestly we don’t have the whole answer, but we did look at the rules governing escalators in 139 cities across 58 countries and came to some interesting conclusions. One of them is that LA Metro’s specified speed is below the maximum allowed in every single city on our list. That doesn’t mean we…
4 min · 815 words
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
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
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
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
A Million Agents Is a Distributed Systems Problem
Once you run thousands of AI agents, the hard part isn’t prompts—it’s scheduling, fatigue, overload, and coordination. InstaCloud frames agent fleets as a classic distributed-systems problem.
8 min · 1,877 words