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Writing on GPUs, LLMs, MLOps, Kubernetes — and mindset · 3517 posts
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Why Maps Lie — From Mercator to the Search Algorithm
Greenland is one fourteenth the size of Africa, yet on the world map on the classroom wall the two look alike. That is not an error but a design decision. Starting from the Gauss proof that a sphere mathematically cannot
2026-07-26 · 14 min read #humanities#history#cartography#geography#powerUsing the Three Kubernetes Probes Properly — The Exact Boundaries of liveness, readiness, and startup
Three incidents — a pod with nothing wrong with it restarting on a schedule, a flood of 502s only right after a deploy, and a slow-starting application that never reaches Ready — all come out of probe design. After separ
2026-07-26 · 17 min read #kubernetes#liveness-probe#readiness-probe#graceful-shutdown#sreA Fistful of Pepper Connected the World — The Spice Trade and the Original Globalisation
When Alaric besieged Rome in 408, the ransom he demanded listed gold, silver and 1,360 kilograms of pepper. This piece asks why a berry you can now buy at any supermarket was once worth that much, and why the familiar cl
2026-07-26 · 16 min read #humanities#history#trade#globalization#colonialismMoney Was Not Born from Barter — A World History of Money, from Lydian Coins to Credit
Chapter one of every economics textbook says money arose to cure the inconvenience of barter, yet anthropologists have never located a single society that worked that way. Follow the road money actually travelled: the el
2026-07-26 · 15 min read #humanities#history#money#economics#financeWhy Newton Rewrote the World — The Apple, the Principia, and Prediction as a Test
The apple did not fall on Newton's head. The source of that anecdote is the 1752 memoir of William Stukeley, and the story came from an eighty-three-year-old Newton himself. The miracle year of 1665, when plague closed C
2026-07-26 · 15 min read #humanities#science#history-of-science#newton#physicsUndoing things in git — picking restore, reset, revert and reflog by situation
Memorizing undo commands means searching for them again every time, but if you first classify what you are trying to undo, the command decides itself. This post splits the problem into six situations — the working direct
2026-07-26 · 12 min read #git#undo#reset#reflog#version-controlWhat Actually Differs Between a Container and a VM — namespace, cgroup, and the Bill for Sharing a Kernel
Starts with why the explanation that a container is a lightweight VM breeds misunderstanding. A container is an ordinary Linux process whose view is masked by namespaces and whose resources are limited by cgroups, and it
2026-07-26 · 13 min read #docker#container#linux-namespace#cgroup#virtualizationWhen git gets slow — structural prescriptions for a large repository
There is no single reason a repository gets slow. A long commit history, a huge number of files, and big binaries sitting in the tree are three different problems with three different prescriptions. This post starts with
2026-07-26 · 11 min read #git#performance#monorepo#git-lfs#version-controlWhen .gitignore is not working — the number one cause and a close reading of the pattern rules
You clearly wrote it in the ignore list, and yet the file keeps getting committed. The reason is almost always the same one: ignore rules do not apply to a file that is already tracked. This post covers the exact command
2026-07-26 · 12 min read #git#gitignore#troubleshooting#security#version-controlDocker Network Modes and Connection Problems — bridge, host, overlay, and the 127.0.0.1 Trap
Unpacks the situation where the container is up but nothing can connect, mode by mode. It covers why containers cannot find each other by name on the default bridge and how the embedded DNS on a user-defined network chan
2026-07-26 · 13 min read #docker#docker-network#iptables#networking#devopsTransaction Isolation Levels and the Anomalies You Actually Hit — Where the Standard Definition Diverges from the Implementation
A walkthrough of the four transaction isolation levels and of dirty read, non-repeatable read, and phantom read — but one that does not stop at the textbook table. Using real SQL sessions, it shows why the Read Committed
2026-07-26 · 14 min read #database#postgresql#transaction#isolation-level#mysqlShrinking Docker Images — The Truth About Layers, Multi-Stage Builds, and What a Base Image Really Costs
Start by pinpointing, layer by layer with dive, exactly where a Docker image balloons to 1.9GB. This piece covers why the union filesystem makes RUN rm incapable of removing a single byte from an image, exactly what a mu
2026-07-26 · 12 min read #docker#dockerfile#multi-stage-build#container#devopsDiagnosing and Preventing Deadlocks — How to Pin Down the Two Queries from the Log
A step-by-step guide to what you should look at when you hit a deadlock detected error. How to interpret the PostgreSQL deadlock report and the SHOW ENGINE INNODB STATUS output of MySQL line by line so you can pin down w
2026-07-26 · 16 min read #database#postgresql#deadlock#locking#mysqlMistakes That Keep Repeating in Dockerfiles — Running as root, PID 1, and Secrets Left in the Image
Works through the Dockerfile problems that pass the build and only blow up in production, starting from their causes. Containers running as root because no USER was set, the latest tag and reproducibility, why ADD should
2026-07-26 · 12 min read #docker#dockerfile#container-security#pid1#devopsWhy the Index You Created Is Not Being Used — The Cases Where the Optimizer Is Right and You Are Wrong
A cause-by-cause breakdown of why a Seq Scan stays in the query plan even after you create an index. Low selectivity making the optimizer ignore it on purpose, a function or arithmetic on the column making the condition
2026-07-26 · 14 min read #database#postgresql#index#query-optimization#mysqlWhy the Docker Build Cache Keeps Breaking — Layer Cache Keys, ARG, and BuildKit Cache Mounts
Explains, at the level of cache keys, why npm ci runs for five minutes again after you changed a single line of code. It covers the difference between a RUN cache key being the command string and a COPY cache key being a
2026-07-26 · 11 min read #docker#buildkit#build-cache#ci-cd#devopsHow to Read EXPLAIN ANALYZE — Finding the Real Bottleneck in a Query Plan
A walkthrough of how to read EXPLAIN ANALYZE output from beginning to end. Which order to read the nodes in, why cost is not a unit of time, what the gap between estimated and actual row counts tells you, and how to avoi
2026-07-26 · 13 min read #database#postgresql#explain#query-optimization#performanceWhy a Big Connection Pool Costs You — Deciding Where to Put the Queue
An explanation of the mechanism behind the phenomenon where enlarging a connection pool actually makes things slower. Why a connection is expensive under the process model of PostgreSQL, why it is better to put the queue
2026-07-26 · 15 min read #database#postgresql#connection-pool#pgbouncer#performanceWhy Being Scared Feels Good — The Psychology and Grammar of Horror
People pay money to be frightened. This piece starts with three accounts of that paradox — the excitation transfer described by Dolf Zillmann, threat simulation inside a safe environment, and a study that measured real h
2026-07-26 · 13 min read #storytelling#horror#psychology#film#cultureThe Dunning-Kruger Effect — That Famous Graph Is Not in the Original Paper
The Peak of Mount Stupid graph that circulates online appears nowhere in the 1999 paper by Dunning and Kruger. The original was four studies that gave Cornell undergraduates tasks in humor, logic and grammar and compared
2026-07-26 · 9 min read #psychology#paper-review#metacognition#self-assessment#statistics