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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
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
Abandoning Scientific Linux Was a Mistake
Mohamed Elashri argues CERN and Fermilab undervalued Scientific Linux’s option value: after CentOS and RHEL source-access shifts, accelerator controls are now moving thousands of machines to Debian to keep old hardware alive.
9 min · 2,133 words
Sharding vs. Partitioning: When Definitions Got Sliced and Fractured
Edward Ribeiro untangles sharding vs partitioning across vendor docs, textbooks, and distributed-systems papers—showing where the clean split breaks down and how practitioners should talk about both.
19 min · 4,297 words
What happens to TLDs when their country stops existing?
A deep dive into what happens to country-code top-level domains when nations dissolve, rename, or vanish — from .su and .yu to the politics and technical inertia that keep dead TLDs online.
7 min · 1,497 words