AI
Artificial intelligence, machine learning, and everything LLM
#5230: Why Your Research Agent Won't Stop Searching
Most agent search runs add no new evidence — and 66-85% of the context window is just search snippets. Here's what actually stops the loop.
#5220: Malware vs. Virus: What's Actually Attacking Your Machine
Every virus is malware, but not every malware is a virus — and that distinction explains why your antivirus keeps missing things.
#5208: Why Tech Consortia Keep the Stack From Flying Apart
From GSM to HDMI to LTO, why competitors form standards bodies — and what happens when the commitments break.
#5207: Hard Drives Are Having Their Biggest Boom in a Decade
Everyone assumes flash killed the spinning disk. Seagate's 52% margins and sold-out capacity through 2028 say otherwise.
#5206: Why IKEA Has No Replacement-Parts API
IKEA's catalog is community reverse-engineering. GS1 solved replacement semantics years ago. Neither reaches a purchasing manager's database.
#5205: Measuring Rooms From One Photo
One photo, one reference ruler, and a geometry trick from 1999 that measures objects without any AI at all.
#5203: Why LTO Tape Still Backs Up the Cloud
Magnetic tape isn't dead — it's holding up the cloud. How LTO-10 broke a 25-year compatibility promise, and why AI needs tape more than ever.
#5198: Counting the AI Models Nobody Releases
YOLO is free — the labeled data isn't. Why the custom image models that matter most are the ones you'll never see on Hugging Face.
#5188: DeepSeek's Point Release That Isn't
DeepSeek shipped a whole new architecture and called it a point release. Here's what actually changed inside the model.
#5187: Translation Is Not a Pipe: What Machines Miss
Rubrics rate machine translation above human work — until readers pick side-by-side. What translators know that metrics can't see.
#5184: AI Is a Number Factory, Not a Wordsmith
Under the prose, every AI model is just matrices of floating-point math. So where does the randomness actually come from?
#5183: Where AI Actually Sits on the Hype Cycle
AI has been doing real work for decades. So why do vendors still shout it from the rooftops?
#5182: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash: 1M Context, 437x Smaller KV Cache
DeepSeek V4.1 Flash landed with a 1M-token window and a KV cache 437x smaller than V1. Here's what actually changed — and why the middle of your co...
#5169: Fine-Tuning vs From-Scratch for Minor Languages
What 774 experiments and a new Armenian model reveal about the tradeoff between fluency and knowledge in low-resource languages.
#5167: The Stethoscope Isn't Dead, It's Getting AI Ears
Two centuries of the stethoscope — and why AI is now making it more useful than ever, not obsolete.
#5166: Why Your Baby Tracker Can't Log Oxygen Saturation
Baby apps have templates for everything — except the metrics you actually need. The custom tracking framework exists. It just never shipped.
#5165: Weighting Memory in a RAG Pipeline
Daniel's memory leg won't fire. Turns out system prompts have no inherent vector-space privilege — but retrieval does have a real knob.
#5160: Bluetooth Peripherals on One Android Phone
How many Bluetooth devices can one Android phone juggle? The seven-device limit is a stack artifact — profiles matter more.
#5158: A Pulse Oximeter Said 97%. That Was the Problem.
A reassuring oxygen reading can hide a child in respiratory distress. Here's what home devices actually tell you — and what they can't.
#5154: DeepSeek's Two-Endpoint Philosophy
DeepSeek quietly routed Pro traffic to Flash — and that routing change says everything about its two-endpoint strategy.