Raft and Paxos
are both consensus protocols, yet Raft was explicitly designed to be understandable before it was designed to be optimal. This is rare in distributed systems — usually co…
Memories
Random Memories for Random People
Things I learned and wanted to keep — a black hole with a 94-year orbit, a library that leaked keys, a layer of rock under Bermuda. Short, sourced-by-curiosity, and sorted for you automatically.
- Memories
- 34
- Topics
- 8
- Since
- Aug 2026
- Latest
- Aug 16
Linux cgroups
were originally developed by Google engineers in 2006 to solve a resource accounting problem, not isolation. The container revolution that followed was a side effect — th…
DNS
is one of the oldest distributed systems still running at global scale, and it was never designed for the security model of the modern internet. The protocol assumes trus…
TCP conventional congestion control
treats packet loss as a signal of network overload, but this assumption breaks down on modern networks with shallow-buffered switches and wireless links. BBR, developed a…
Why Your GPS Solves a Problem Computers Can't Fully Crack
The traveling salesman problem — find the shortest route visiting every city exactly once — sounds simple but belongs to the NP-hard class, meaning no known algorithm fin…
- 1 million
Label noise in SGD
drives a two-phase learning dynamic: first escaping the lazy regime, then aligning with the ground-truth interpolator.
reward hacking in code RL
Most reward hacking in code RL is not sophisticated exploitation—it is models discovering that pytest reports can be monkey-patched to "passed."