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The $10 Chargeback That Cost $43.95: A SaaS Nightmare

2025-09-15

The $10 Chargeback That Cost $43.95: A SaaS Nightmare

A SaaS company shares its frustrating experience with chargebacks. Despite proactive measures like pre-subscription notifications and easy cancellation options, customers still initiate disputes. The problem isn't just the lost revenue; even winning a dispute incurs fees, making small chargebacks disproportionately costly. The author details a $10 charge that resulted in a $43.95 loss, highlighting the unfairness of the system where banks often side with cardholders regardless of evidence. The company's efforts to fight disputes are questioned due to the lack of responsiveness and effectiveness from both banks and payment processors.

(medium.com)

Startup chargebacks payment disputes

Conquering the 10K+ LOC Hurdle: A Structured Workflow for LLMs in Large Projects

2025-09-11

Conquering the 10K+ LOC Hurdle: A Structured Workflow for LLMs in Large Projects

This article details a successful workflow for using LLMs in large projects, exceeding 10,000 lines of code. The author discovered that directly generating an entire system with an LLM is chaotic and error-prone. Instead, a structured approach is presented: hand-write design and architecture documents first, then utilize the LLM as a code generation and transformation tool, iterating on small tasks, systematically reviewing and correcting code, and continuously updating documentation and coding guidelines. This method successfully prevents LLM limitations in large projects, maintaining maintainability and consistency.

(medium.com)

Development

Digital Propaganda: How Governments Weaponize Ads on Google and Facebook

2025-09-09

Digital Propaganda: How Governments Weaponize Ads on Google and Facebook

In late 2024, a disturbing discovery was made: a paid ad by the Israeli government, mimicking a UN website but linking to a page accusing UNRWA of supporting terrorists, topped Google search results for UNRWA. This highlights a troubling trend: digital advertising platforms have become battlegrounds for influence, with governments using paid ads to sway public opinion during wars and crises. The article examines how Google Ads and Facebook Ads are weaponized, focusing on Israel's extensive campaign during the 2023-2025 Gaza war, targeting UNRWA and other organizations. It explores the platforms' responses, policy gaps, and ethical dilemmas, including the lack of proactive fact-checking and inconsistent enforcement of rules against misinformation.

(medium.com)

Tech Digital Propaganda Advertising Platforms

Rethinking Event-Driven Programming: A Bidirectional Observer Pattern in PHP

2025-09-01

Rethinking Event-Driven Programming: A Bidirectional Observer Pattern in PHP

Traditional observer patterns are observer-centric: events trigger passive reactions. This PHP Observer package shifts the perspective to the emitter. Emitters dispatch signals (events, plans, inquiries, commands), and observers can return counter-signals, creating a bidirectional dialogue. This allows for dynamic handling of complex workflows, such as canceling orders based on inventory or dynamically configuring libraries. The package offers seven signal types, robust error handling, and observability features, making it ideal for building responsive, emitter-driven applications.

(medium.com)

Development Observer Pattern Bidirectional Communication

Static Linking Nightmares: An SDK Provider's Lament

2025-07-22

Static Linking Nightmares: An SDK Provider's Lament

As an SDK provider, we're expected to offer both dynamic and static linking options. Static archives (.a) seem simple, but are fraught with peril. The linker's default behavior atomizes the archive, picking and choosing object files, potentially leading to bloated binaries and runtime crashes due to constructor/destructor ordering issues. While -Wl,--whole-archive helps, it forces inclusion of all library files, regardless of need. Namespace clashes within static archives also pose significant problems. To overcome these challenges, the author proposes a new "Static Bundle Object" (.sbo) file format. This would offer the symbol visibility guarantees of a shared object, avoiding many linking issues, even if it means sacrificing some potential binary size optimization. The author argues that a stable linking ecosystem is worth the trade-off.

(medium.com)

Development

He Rewrote Everything in Rust – Then We Got Fired

2025-07-22

He Rewrote Everything in Rust – Then We Got Fired

A six-person team, using Node.js, Redis, AWS Lambdas, and MongoDB for microservices, was constantly firefighting due to performance bottlenecks. Kabir, the quietest member, proposed rewriting the image pipeline in Rust. Despite skepticism, he completed the rewrite solo. Post-launch, performance graphs soared, but a month later, the entire team was laid off. This story highlights that even significant technical improvements don't guarantee job security; company decisions often transcend technical merit.

(medium.com)

Development

Microtriangles: The Real Killer of Rendering Performance, Not Poly Count

2025-07-19

Microtriangles: The Real Killer of Rendering Performance, Not Poly Count

The old lore about polygon count determining rendering performance is outdated. Modern rendering is significantly impacted by microtriangles. This article argues that tiny triangles (under 10x10 pixels) become exponentially more expensive to render because GPUs compute a full 2x2 pixel block even if the triangle only covers one pixel. The author suggests focusing on "wireframe view density", switching to lower LODs when the view gets close to solid, or using a single LOD with imposters for distant objects. Epic's Nanite technology tackles this by using compute shaders and screen-space shaders to minimize the cost of rendering microtriangles.

(medium.com)

Development LOD optimization

Kimi Researcher's Journey to Anti-Bland Design: Iteration, Collaboration, and the Impossible Triangle

2025-07-19

Kimi Researcher's Journey to Anti-Bland Design: Iteration, Collaboration, and the Impossible Triangle

The Kimi researcher team's journey in designing the UI for their AI research reports wasn't a straightforward process. Their initial sleek UI was deemed 'bland,' leading them to define 'anti-bland' design standards. Through case studies, team collaboration, and countless iterations, they tackled the 'impossible triangle' of aesthetics, interactivity, and data fidelity. They employed elements like Bento layouts, Italian italics paired with bold type, and subtle JS animations to enhance the user experience. The team emphasizes the importance of collaboration and continuous iteration in achieving a design that's both aesthetically pleasing and functionally effective.

(medium.com)

Design

Reverse Proxy Deep Dive: Connection Management Challenges and Evolution

2025-07-12

Reverse Proxy Deep Dive: Connection Management Challenges and Evolution

This article delves into the inner workings of a reverse proxy and the complexities of connection management. From single-threaded to multi-threaded, multi-process, and event-driven architectures with socket sharding, reverse proxies have evolved significantly to handle high concurrency. The article details the advantages and disadvantages of various techniques, such as the efficiency of epoll in I/O multiplexing and the challenges of multi-threaded models with multi-core processors, and points out further complexities in supporting TLS and protocol diversity.

(medium.com)

Development connection management

Tududi: Task Management, Simplified

2025-07-10

Tududi: Task Management, Simplified

Most task apps are dashboards of endless controls and micro-options. Creating a new task often involves navigating a maze of color pickers, priority levels, and repeat settings. Tududi offers a different approach: streamlined workflow. It prioritizes getting the task written, focusing on flow over features. Instead of presenting a toolkit, tududi offers efficiency.

(medium.com)

Development

LLMs Struggle with Right-to-Left Code: The Case of q/kdb+

2025-07-09

LLMs Struggle with Right-to-Left Code: The Case of q/kdb+

Large language models (LLMs) face challenges when writing code in q/kdb+, a language with a right-to-left, no-operator-precedence evaluation order. The author demonstrates that LLMs struggle to generate correct code adhering to these rules, often mixing Python and q syntax. The article explores why LLMs find right-to-left coding difficult and proposes Qython as a solution. Qython is a Python-like language that compiles to q, leveraging LLMs' Python expertise to circumvent the difficulties of q's unique syntax. A practical example showcases Qython's effectiveness.

(medium.com)

Development

The Sisyphean Task: Convincing a Kubernetes Team to Embrace Serverless

2025-07-05

The author recounts their futile attempts to persuade their Kubernetes team to adopt an AWS serverless architecture. Kubernetes engineers raised concerns about runaway costs, vendor lock-in, and reliance on proprietary technology. The author details the arguments surrounding cost, scalability, and responsibility sharing, ultimately conceding that both technologies have strengths and can coexist. The humorous tone highlights the clash of perspectives within a tech team, reflecting the challenges of cloud-native technology adoption in enterprises.

(medium.com)

Development

Weekend Hack: Gaussian Sampling Saves the Day

2025-06-24

Weekend Hack: Gaussian Sampling Saves the Day

A SaaS application's pricing slider caused 15-second delays from the ML model. Full pre-computation would take nearly 7 days. The author cleverly used Gaussian distribution to strategically sample price points, prioritizing the middle range with higher precision, and reducing precision towards the ends. Pre-computation finished over the weekend, successfully avoiding a demo failure.

(medium.com)

Development Gaussian sampling pre-computation

Escaping AWS: How a Danish Firm Slashed Cloud Costs by 90% While Maintaining ISO 27001

2025-06-21

Escaping AWS: How a Danish Firm Slashed Cloud Costs by 90% While Maintaining ISO 27001

A Danish workforce management company successfully migrated away from AWS, reducing its cloud costs by 90%. Facing compliance concerns and high expenses with US cloud providers, they switched to European providers like Hetzner and OVHcloud. By leveraging infrastructure-as-code with Ansible, Prometheus/Grafana/Loki for monitoring, and a security-by-design approach, they not only cut costs but also enhanced data sovereignty and security compliance. They also used their European hosting as a sales tool, strengthening brand trust.

(medium.com)

Tech

Estimating Oil Storage Tank Occupancy Using Satellite Imagery: A Beginner's Guide

2025-06-17

Estimating Oil Storage Tank Occupancy Using Satellite Imagery: A Beginner's Guide

TankerTrackers.com uses satellite imagery and tanker tracking data to shed light on the opaque nature of the global oil market. This article details how to measure the diameter and height of oil storage tanks using satellite images and estimate occupancy based on shadow variations. By comparing images from different dates, changes in oil volume can be tracked, helping analyze market trends. This method cleverly leverages publicly available information and image analysis to provide a novel perspective on oil market analysis.

(medium.com)

Tech oil reserves satellite image analysis

How Many More UBI Trials Until We Get It?

2025-06-17

How Many More UBI Trials Until We Get It?

Universal Basic Income (UBI), the idea of regular, unconditional cash payments from the government, remains controversial. Fears abound that it would kill work ethic and cripple society. However, mounting evidence, including a recent large-scale German trial, suggests these fears may be misplaced. Results indicate UBI didn't cause widespread laziness, even showing some positive impacts. This begs the question: how many more UBI trials until its viability is widely accepted?

(medium.com)

Misc

The Three Temples of LLM Training: Pretraining, Fine-tuning, and RLHF

2025-06-10

The Three Temples of LLM Training: Pretraining, Fine-tuning, and RLHF

In the hidden mountain sanctuary of Lexiconia, ancient Scribes undergo training in a three-part temple: The Hall of Origins, The Chamber of Instructions, and The Arena of Reinforcement. The Hall of Origins involves pretraining, where Scribes read vast amounts of text to learn language patterns. The Chamber of Instructions is where fine-tuning occurs, using curated texts to guide Scribes towards better outputs. The Arena of Reinforcement utilizes Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF), with human judges ranking Scribe answers, rewarding good ones and punishing bad. Elite Scribes may also be subtly modified via LoRA scrolls and Adapters, tweaking responses without retraining the entire model. This three-winged temple represents the complete process of training large language models.

(medium.com)

AI Pretraining

Universal Basic Income: Not Free Money, But a Freer Life

2025-06-09

A German study shows Universal Basic Income (UBI) didn't create laziness, but improved mental health, autonomy, and generosity. Even with a €1200 monthly payment, employment rates remained unchanged; instead, it encouraged people to seek more fulfilling work. UBI also increased savings, donations, and sharing, boosting women's autonomy. With AI causing mass programmer layoffs, UBI is a concept the US should consider, as evidenced by Alaska's oil revenue sharing program.

(medium.com)

Tech

Database Consistency: Beyond the Basics

2025-06-02

Database Consistency: Beyond the Basics

This article delves into the challenges of maintaining database transactional consistency in high-concurrency environments. Using a Spring Boot example, the author demonstrates how default pagination and idempotency checks can lead to data inconsistencies (missing rows or duplicate updates) when processing a large volume of sales data. The article thoroughly explains database isolation levels (READ UNCOMMITED, READ COMMITED, REPEATABLE READ, SERIALIZABLE) and optimistic/pessimistic locking strategies. Ultimately, by employing the REPEATABLE READ isolation level and optimistic locking, the author effectively resolves data inconsistencies and significantly improves performance.

(medium.com)

Development database consistency

DIY Home Solar Installation: From Roof to Grid

2025-05-21

DIY Home Solar Installation: From Roof to Grid

This detailed account chronicles a homeowner's DIY journey installing a home solar power system. The process covered a new roof installation (~$20k), maneuvering 300-pound batteries (emphasizing safety and following instructions), connecting the inverter and solar panels (using Ironridge mounting and Tigo optimizers), and finally, grid interconnection (resolving voltage issues and obtaining PTO). The author encountered and documented several challenges, including material mishaps and wiring oversights, providing solutions and valuable lessons learned. The system ultimately went live, achieving net-zero energy consumption with excess energy exported to the grid, significantly reducing electricity bills.

(medium.com)

Hardware

Supercharge Your Java Projects with Rust: A Practical JNI Integration Guide

2025-05-18

Supercharge Your Java Projects with Rust: A Practical JNI Integration Guide

This article explores integrating Rust code into Java projects to boost performance and efficiency. It details using JNI (Java Native Interface), handling memory management, logging, and asynchronous calls. The open-source project rust-java-demo showcases packaging platform-specific Rust libraries into a single JAR, unifying logs, and mapping Rust errors to Java exceptions. It also explains using CompletableFuture to handle asynchronous Rust function calls, preventing Java thread blocking.

(medium.com)

Development

Mission Impossible: Taming AI Agents in the Wild

2025-04-30

Mission Impossible: Taming AI Agents in the Wild

This article tackles the challenges and strategies for effectively controlling AI agents in various fields, especially software development. The author shares hard-won lessons emphasizing meticulous planning and constraining the context of what AI agents can do. It delves into choosing tools, planning tasks, creating and revising plans, testing those plans, and identifying larger architectural problems. Key aspects like rules, performance payback, model selection, and cost control are also covered. The author details their experience using tools like Cursor to create reusable plans, iteratively refining and testing them for improved reliability, ultimately leading to efficient software development.

(medium.com)

Development plan management

Functional Logo Maker from a Single Prompt: LLM Potential and Limitations

2025-04-25

The author generated a fully functional logo maker, including export options, from a single prompt in Aider. Code snippets demonstrate the LLM's ability to generate font links, dependencies, and inline CSS styles, even including the latest SHA hash of a linked CDN library. However, expanding the code using Sonnet 3.7 significantly increased project complexity, resulting in uncompilable code. The author explores the differences in code generation and expansion capabilities between different LLMs (like Claude and GPT-4o), and the impact of context window size, output limits, and other factors on LLM applications. The limitations of context windows and output sizes in LLMs are highlighted as key challenges.

(medium.com)

Development AI-assisted Programming

Local LLM Inference: Potential is Huge, But Tooling Needs to Mature

2025-04-21

Local LLM Inference: Potential is Huge, But Tooling Needs to Mature

This article benchmarks the performance of local LLM inference frameworks such as llama.cpp, Ollama, and WebLLM. Results show llama.cpp and Ollama are blazing fast, but still slower than OpenAI's gpt-4.0-mini. A bigger challenge lies in model selection and deployment: the sheer number of model versions is overwhelming, and even a quantized 7B model is over 5GB, leading to slow downloads and loading, impacting user experience. The author argues that future local LLM inference needs easier model training and deployment tools, and tight integration with cloud LLMs, to become truly practical.

(medium.com)

Development model deployment inference performance

The Forgotten Syntax of Salt and Gold: How Ifriqiya's Merchants Coded Commerce Before Silicon

2025-04-19

The Forgotten Syntax of Salt and Gold: How Ifriqiya's Merchants Coded Commerce Before Silicon

This article unveils the story of the Sifraniyah, a merchant guild in Ifriqiya (modern-day southern Tunisia), who used a unique trade language, Al-Khatt al-Tujjari (The Commercial Line), centuries before the silicon age. Resembling an early programming language, this cryptic system employed conditional statements, looped inventory management, and error-checking mechanisms, executed through wax-sealed scrolls, knotted scripts, and rhythmic chants. Their decentralized autonomous protocol-like system operated across various trade nodes. However, with the rise of empires and more modern accounting, Al-Khatt al-Tujjari was eventually forgotten, leaving behind fragments that remind us logic isn't solely born of silicon, but can also grow from sand, salt, and stories.

(medium.com)

Misc commerce

Grid Computing Breaks World Record for Goldbach Conjecture Verification

2025-04-19

Grid Computing Breaks World Record for Goldbach Conjecture Verification

Japanese engineer @jay_gridbach has broken the world record for verifying the Goldbach Conjecture using his Gridbach distributed computing system. He extended the verification to 4×10¹⁸ + 7×10¹³, surpassing the previous record held by a Portuguese researcher. Gridbach is a cloud-based system leveraging WebAssembly, requiring no login and accessible from PCs and smartphones. The project aims to advance the verification of the Goldbach Conjecture and foster interest in mathematics and IT through open computational resources.

(medium.com)

Tech Goldbach Conjecture

A Rust Program That Runs for 10↑↑15 Steps

2025-04-16

A Rust Program That Runs for 10↑↑15 Steps

This article explores the creation of an exceptionally long-running Rust program. Starting with the fundamental operation of addition (increment), the author meticulously builds up to multiplication (multiply), exponentiation (exponentiate), and finally tetration, culminating in a program that calculates the gargantuan number 10↑↑15. The emphasis is on in-place operations, avoiding memory copies and temporary variables to ensure the program executes for the designed number of steps. The article clearly explains the implementation details with concise code examples, making it valuable for learning algorithm design and Rust programming.

(medium.com)

Development Large Number Computation

Testing Isn't a Sunk Cost: How It Accelerates Your Team

2025-04-05

Testing Isn't a Sunk Cost: How It Accelerates Your Team

This article explores why software engineers commonly resist writing tests and emphasizes the importance of testing for improving code quality and team efficiency. The author uses personal experiences to illustrate that abandoning testing, even in high-pressure startup environments, is a mistake. The article highlights that testing isn't just about the distinctions between unit tests, integration tests, etc., but rather about verifying chunks of code that validate the core functionality. Tests should be on-demand, rapidly repeatable, replicable elsewhere, and automatable. The author also points out that writing tests forces developers to write more test-friendly code, leading to better code quality, increased modularity, and ultimately, improved team efficiency. The author concludes by urging engineers to prioritize testing, viewing it as key to increasing productivity and reducing bugs, and leveraging AI to assist with testing, but not relying on it entirely.

(medium.com)

Development

Airbnb's Listing Lifetime Value Framework: A Deep Dive

2025-04-04

Airbnb's Listing Lifetime Value Framework: A Deep Dive

Airbnb developed a framework to estimate listing lifetime value (LTV) to enhance user experience. The framework calculates three types of LTV: baseline LTV, incremental LTV, and marketing-induced incremental LTV. Baseline LTV predicts the total bookings a listing will receive in the next 365 days using machine learning and listing data. Incremental LTV accounts for booking cannibalization between listings. Marketing-induced incremental LTV measures the additional value generated by internal marketing initiatives. The article discusses challenges like accurately measuring baseline LTV, handling incrementality, and dealing with uncertainties (e.g., the COVID-19 pandemic). Airbnb uses LTV to identify high-value listings, improve host recommendations, and evaluate marketing campaign effectiveness.

(medium.com)

Development Lifetime Value

AI's Blind Spot: Mirrors in Image and Video Generation

2025-04-03

AI's Blind Spot: Mirrors in Image and Video Generation

Recent advancements in AI image and video generation have yielded impressive photorealistic results, yet a significant hurdle remains: accurately rendering reflections in mirrors. Researchers tested several leading models, finding consistent struggles with generating correct reflections. Models frequently produced distorted, inconsistent, or entirely inaccurate images. For instance, Gemini faltered with reflections of cats and chairs, while Ideogram struggled with human reflections in group photos. This highlights a key limitation: while AI image generation is rapidly advancing, achieving physical accuracy—like realistic mirror reflections—remains a significant challenge.

(medium.com)

AI

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