Computing
Non-AI computing: networks, servers, hardware, software engineering, and digital security and privacy.
#5654: Why Hand Driving Beats Power Tools on Tiny Screws
A precision screwdriver set, ESD tweezers, and a spudger — the case for the manual tool in a world that reaches for the motor.
#5643: Do Git Branches Actually Nest? AI Agents and Stacked PRs
Git branches don't nest — so what are we really doing when AI agents stack pull requests?
#5637: Lux Sensors for Home Assistant: The Feedback Loop Nobody Warns You About
Lux sensors sound simple until the lights you turn on trip the sensor that turned them on. Here's the full chain, from Aqara T1 to Matter's missing...
#5634: Battery Platform Lock-In: Innovation vs Stability
Cells change every three years. The battery interface barely moves. Buyers research the wrong one.
#5629: Keyloggers, Stingrays, and the Library Laptop Grab
Tor, Signal, full-disk encryption — and a chip on the motherboard that none of them can see.
#5624: One Forward Pass: Building a Bounded Classifier
No generation, no parsing — just label scores in a single pass. How to build a small encoder classifier that actually works.
#5623: When Your AI Cites Sources It Didn't Actually Use
Your RAG pipeline cites a source — but did the model actually use it? New interpretability research says you can't tell from the trace.
#5622: Why Talking to AI Feels Easier Than Using It
ChatGPT split into Chat and Work. A broken label printer shows why conversation beats menus — and what's hiding under the hood.
#5621: Constrained Decoding for AI-Generated Podcast Tags
A working AI podcast pipeline has one quiet failure: the tagging. Here's how constrained decoding and a stable taxonomy fix it.
#5611: Why Your Label Printer Quits After 10 Seconds
A label printer that charges for ten seconds then dies — and what that tiny failure reveals about building a diagnosis-first repair bench.
#5610: Magnetizing Screwdrivers: Do the Cycles Wear Out?
Can a screwdriver be magnetized forever, or does the magnetism wear out? A deep dive into magnetizer blocks, coils, and demagnetization.
#5609: IEC Cables: Terminate, Split, or Extend?
Rewireable C13 connectors, splitters, and the length ceiling — the practical answers to running power without daisy-chained plug strips.
#5607: BYO Modem, But Only If We Approve It
Bezeq lets you bring your own modem — if it's on the list and you hand over its serial number. Is that security, or provisioning in a costume?
#5606: Custom GPTs Retire: Skills, Plugins, and MCP Explained
Custom GPTs retire December 11. Here's how Skills, Plugins, and MCP servers actually replace them — and what doesn't migrate.
#5604: Fixing Typos Without Rewriting the Prompt
Three different jobs hide in one "clean up my prompt" pipeline — and only one of them should ever go to a generative model.
#5582: Who Invented the Internet? Actually, Seven People
The first message ever sent was "LO" — then the system crashed. The real story of the internet is a stack of seven layers, not one genius.
#5574: Ephemeral Containers and the ADE Label Nobody Owns
Claude Code's cloud sessions spin up a fresh VM every time. Here's what that breaks, and the new term for what Daniel actually wants.
#5573: Audio Post-Processing for AI Podcast Pipelines
Silence trimming, loudness normalization, EQ, and tempo fixes — the CLI tools that turn raw TTS output into a finished episode.
#5563: Your Fiber Is Dark: What You Can Actually Test
Your ONT is dark and there's no sync light to watch. Here's what a PON power meter can actually tell you before you call the ISP.
#5553: When 52 Volts Meets a 12-Volt Modem
A fried fiber modem raises the real question: where do you draw the line between preparedness and "done enough"?