Rethinking Kleppmann’s “Designing Data-Intensive Applications”

How Martin Kleppmann’s iconic book evolved for AI and cloud-native architectures Since its release in 2017, Designing Data-Intensive Applications (DDIA) has become known as the bible for anyone working on large-scale, data-driven systems. The book’s focus on fundamentals (like storage engines, replication, and partitioning) has helped it age well. Still, the world of distributed systems has evolved … Read more

How I Aligned Years of Time-Lapse Photos With OpenCV and Neural Matching

In the previous post, I described the Seasons project: a time-lapse of hundreds of pictures taken from nearly the same viewpoint over the years. The hardest challenge wasn’t taking the pictures or assembling them, but aligning them. You might have noticed the nearly part about viewpoint in the above paragraph. Indeed, it’s an approximation. I’m … Read more

Markets Don’t Move Linearly — They Transition Between Behavioral States

After eight years of trading EUR/USD, I kept running into the same frustration: a strategy that printed money for two years would suddenly stop working — not gradually, but almost overnight. No obvious reason. Same logic, same execution, same pair. It just… stopped. The usual explanation is “the edge decayed” or “the market adapted.” But … Read more

A Google employee allegedly used inside information to win $1.2 million on Polymarket 

Federal prosecutors charged a Google employee with fraud after he allegedly made $1.2 million on Polymarket bets related to Search-related trends in 2025, as reported earlier by ABC News. In their now-unsealed complaint, prosecutors allege that Michele Spagnuolo “knew the outcome of these wagers before the trading public did because he had accessed Google’s confidential, … Read more

Stop Calling Your LLM Once – Split the Call

Most LLM apps fire one giant prompt and pray. The ones that feel fast in production split the work into a planning call plus parallel per-item expansion. You get three wins for free: a much faster time-to-first-byte, real parallelism, and bug isolation when something breaks. The cost is one extra request. The math almost always … Read more

Facebook launches a ‘Plus’ subscription that gives you extra features

After announcing tests of premium subscriptions for Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp earlier this year, TechCrunch and Bloomberg report that Meta is launching a global rollout over the next few weeks and is also starting to test subscriptions for Meta AI. With the new offerings, Meta joins many other tech companies in changing up its subscription plans … Read more