Microservices have become the default "serious system" architecture. If you want to sound mature, you talk about service meshes, event buses, distributed tracing, and "independent deployability". If you want to look enterprise-ready, you draw boxes until the…
HTTP didn't evolve. It was forced to change by physics, latency, and misuse. Every version exists because the previous one hit a hard constraint. If you understand those constraints, you understand why the web works the way it does - and why so many "best…
Small and local LLMs are often framed as the cheap alternative to frontier models. That framing is wrong. They are not a degraded version of the same thing. They are a different architectural choice, selected for control, predictability, and survivable failure…
I keep seeing the same failure mode in "AI-powered" systems: LLMs are being asked to do jobs we already solved decades ago - badly, probabilistically, and without guarantees. This isn't cutting edge. It's a regression. And this isn't a beginner mistake. The…
Here's an uncomfortable truth that nobody in the AI hype machine wants to discuss: We still don't know what intelligence actually is. Not in humans. Not in animals. And certainly not in machines. This isn't just academic hairsplitting. It's the foundational…
"We're building an AI-powered knowledge assistant that will revolutionise how our employees access information..." Every job advert, pitch deck, and consultancy proposal in 2024-2025 Introduction I've spent the past month or so properly immersing myself in the…