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TL;DR — A Kafka + Flink + OTel ingestion pipeline cost us ~$700–800/month at 10 MB/s. We rebuilt it as a single binary where the data, the write-ahead log, and the Iceberg catalog all live in S3 alone — no Kafka, no local disks, no coordination service — for ~$100/month . Here's the design. Self-hosted observability sooner or later runs into the problem of storing state. Query load, CPU, and data volume can all be handled by scaling out, but the stateful layer is something you have to operate by hand. At first it's almost unnoticeable: a disk degrades here, replication falls behind there, a recovery hangs somewhere else. As the data grows, incidents stop being one-offs and start to recur. At some point your observability stack - whether it's Grafana Loki, Elastic, or ClickHouse - starts demanding the same attention as a full-blown database that you're on the hook for. Kubernetes operators cover some of these cases, but operating the state is still on you. Managed solutions take that burden away and bring their own: rising costs, ingestion-pipeline constraints, and limits on retention and cardinality. But if you'd rather not sign up for the constant operational grind - or live with the constraints of managed solutions - it's worth asking: can we take the stateful part out of operations entirely? Storage and format The first candidate for offloading storage responsibility is Amazon S3. S3 gives you what local disks can't: fault tolerance and practically unlimited scale, with no storage to manage yourself. It isn't free, though: data-access latency goes up, and you pick up separate costs for API operations. For OLTP workloads that's a dealbreaker. For observability workloads - which are dominated by sequential writes and analytical reads - these trade-offs are often acceptable. At first glance, this problem is already solved. Loki , for example, uses S3 as its primary storage. But according to Loki's public documentation (v3.6.x) at the time of writing, Loki doesn't re

If you have ever opened a system design article, seen a diagram with twelve boxes, three databases, a message queue, and the words "eventually consistent," and quietly closed the tab, this post is for you. There is a myth that you need years of experience running large systems before you can learn system design. You don't. Plenty of engineers learn it before they have ever deployed anything bigger than a side project. What you actually need is the right starting point and a way to build intuition without access to production-scale traffic. That is exactly what this guide gives you. "But I've never built anything at scale" Good news: neither had most people the first time they learned this. System design is not a memory test about how Uber works. It is a thinking skill: given a vague problem and some constraints, make a sequence of reasonable trade-offs and explain them clearly. That skill does not require having operated a system serving millions of users. It requires understanding what the moving parts do and practicing the reasoning. The experience helps later, but it is not the price of entry. So drop the idea that you are "not ready." You are ready to start today. The honest minimum prerequisites You do not need much, but you do need these four things. If any feels shaky, spend a few days here first; it will save you weeks of confusion later. What happens when you load a web page. Client sends a request, DNS resolves a name to an address, a server responds. If you can sketch that, you're fine. The two kinds of databases. Relational (tables, rows, SQL) versus non-relational (documents, key-value). You don't need to be an expert, just know they exist and roughly when each fits. What an index is. A way to find data fast without scanning everything. That one sentence is enough to begin. Basic estimation. If something gets a million requests a day, roughly how many is that per second? (About 12, for the record.) The ability to do rough math out loud matters more than

I've been building on DynamoDB since around 2015, and these days I build tools for it: dynoxide , a DynamoDB engine, and Nubo , a native client. So I'm not neutral about it. It's the first database I reach for, and with reason - the operational overhead is close to nil, no connections to pool or instances to size, and it holds the same single-digit-millisecond reads whether the table has a thousand items or a billion. The data modelling is a craft, and a satisfying one. It's also one of the harder databases to learn, and that's the part I keep coming back to. DynamoDB punishes the instincts you bring from SQL. You don't normalise and join at read time; you work out the questions your app will ask first, and shape the data around those access patterns, until one table answers all of them. It's a real shift in how you think, and it's where a lot of people bounce off - it feels backwards right up until it clicks. The people who teach it best all teach it the same way. Alex DeBrie's The DynamoDB Book , the arc.codes team's examples, Rick Houlihan's re:Invent talks - the legendary ones, where he models half a dozen access patterns onto a single table at a hundred miles an hour - none of them hand you rules to memorise. They show you patterns and make you run them. I learned a lot of my DynamoDB from all three, and it stuck because I was building as I went. That last part is the bit that's hard to come by on your own. Reading about an access pattern and having it in your fingers are different things, and to run one - build the table, write the items, fire the query and see what comes back - you need an AWS account, or a local emulator installed and seeded. Enough friction that plenty of people read about single-table design without ever building one. There was a second thing pulling the same way. dynoxide had learned to run in the browser only last month, compiled to WebAssembly with no server behind it, and it was a preview I didn't fully trust. What it needed was a real

The California-based startup enters a crowded headphone market with a $399 chiseled-aluminum gamble.

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EquiLibre Technologies, a Prague-based AI lab founded by three ex-DeepMind researchers, is now valued at more than $500 million.

“We can take power from a plasma,” Kieran Furlong, co-founder and CEO of Realta Fusion, told TechCrunch. The milestone shows “what’s possible,” he added.

Security Team: “I have a major Grype...with what I Syfted out of your provided image." Developer: “Well your Grype is slowing me down...let’s tone it down a notch.” While deploying bookstack into my local environment, this issue surfaced. It is true for many organizations today deploying images and packages in their environment. How can this noise fatigue in the software supply chain be remedied? Add a .gype.yaml file to the root directory of your project. This will allow grype to ignore certain CVE's that do not execute or pose a threat in your environment. The yaml config can be as simple as below: Linux Environment # grype.yaml ignore : - vulnerability : CVE-2026-32631 reason : " Platform-specific false positive. Git for Windows only; not applicable to this Linux-based image." - vulnerability : CVE-2016-2781 reason : " Chroot escape via ioctl. Containers rely on namespaces/cgroups, not chroot, so this path isn't exploitable here." OR # grype.yaml ignore : - vulnerability : CVE-2026-32631 - vulnerability : CVE-2016-2781 This will help developers and security engineers get along better. 😃 Grype config reference: https://oss.anchore.com/docs/reference/grype/configuration/

Originally published on PrepStack . Everyone's first RAG pipeline is the same four boxes: documents, chunk, vector DB, LLM. It demos in an afternoon and then quietly betrays you in production — stale answers, no relationships, no governance, and a model guessing from fragments. The fix is not a bigger vector index. It is to stop storing documents and start storing knowledge . That is Open Knowledge Format (OKF). To be clear up front, because the title is deliberately provocative: OKF does not kill embeddings. Vectors still do the recall. What OKF kills is blind chunking — slicing opaque documents into context-free fragments and hoping cosine similarity reassembles meaning. On Mattrx , a multi-tenant marketing-analytics SaaS (.NET 9 + Azure SQL + a Python FastAPI AI service), replacing blind chunking with OKF + a Context Engine took the assistant's hallucination rate from 18% to 3% and stale-answer rate from 11% to 1.5% . TL;DR Dimension Documents → chunk → vector DB (before) OKF + Context Engine (after) Unit of knowledge Opaque chunk of text Typed, governed knowledge unit Structure None — chunks are islands Metadata + relationships + schemas Freshness Snapshot, rots silently valid_until + live API refs Rules Buried in prose, ignorable First-class data the engine enforces Retrieval Top-k cosine Hybrid + vector + graph Multi-hop questions Unanswerable Answered via relationships Results after the rebuild: Knowledge base restructured into ~11,000 OKF units (Markdown + metadata + relationships + APIs + schemas + business rules). Hallucination 18% -> 3% ; faithfulness 0.96 ; answer-relevance 0.91 . Context tokens/call 14k -> 3.5k — structure lets the engine attach the right thing, not everything. Outdated-answer rate 11% -> 1.5% ( valid_until + metadata freshness). Multi-hop questions unanswerable -> answered via graph retrieval. Deprecated-plan recommendations recurring -> 0 (business rules enforced as data). The one mental shift: a chunk is a fragment of text with no id

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My learning so far I absolutely love learning to code. I gave it up to vibe code earlier last year and completely regret it. At first it felt like I was moving faster, but over time I realized I was skipping the part that actually made me better. My learning journey is fueled by passion and the hopes to move into a Go/SWE/Cloud type role. I do not know exactly how I will go about doing so, but I will work until I am noticed. Right now I am trying to focus on building real understanding. Not just getting something to work, but knowing why it works. I want to be able to read errors, debug my own code, understand the tools I am using, and slowly become the kind of developer that can solve problems without panicking. Learn to code! If anyone has any doubts on if coding is "worth it" still, I can account for how personally fulfilling it is. Solving a bug/problem in your own code gives me a personal high. There is something different about struggling with something, walking away, coming back, and finally seeing it click. It reminds you that you are actually learning. Every small fix feels like proof that you are getting better. I am not against using tools or AI. I still think they can be helpful. But I do think there is a big difference between using them to learn and using them to avoid learning. I had to learn that the hard way. So if you are new, or if you stopped for a while like I did, I really think you should keep going. Build small things. Break stuff. Fix it. Read docs even when they are boring. Ask questions. Take notes. Let yourself be bad at it for a while. I do not know where this journey will take me yet, but I know I want to keep showing up.

Nvidia AI chip competitor Etched says it has already booked $1 billion under contract for the inference systems powered by its chip.

Acti is betting the smartphone keyboard is the next home for AI assistants. The startup's new keyboard for iOS and Android works across apps and lets users create custom AI-powered shortcuts using natural language.

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You have seen this loop before. An agent starts a “simple” task, say scrape listings, refactor a repo, research a market, or whatever. It fails, it retries, it re-reads context, it apologizes and tries all over again. Twenty minutes in and the dashboard shows six figures of tokens and zero useful outputs or deliverables. The model did not misbehave on purpose. The orchestrator never had a hard budget gate with an ROI in mind. Skillware v0.4.0 ships a new skill for exactly that gap: monitoring/token_limiter . It lets you monitor and limit any agent’s token budget in real time — Gemini, Claude, OpenAI, DeepSeek, Ollama, custom Python loops, you name it. Same skill, same JSON, any runtime. What Skillware is in a nutshell Skillware is an open registry of installable agent capabilities . Each skill is a bundle: skill.py — deterministic Python ( execute() returns JSON) instructions.md — when the model should call the tool manifest.yaml — schema, constitution, issuer Tests and docs — shipped in the wheel You load by ID, adapt for your provider, call execute() on tool use. The model decides when , the skill decides how , predictably, every time. That split matters for budget control. You do not want the LLM guessing whether it is “allowed” to spend more tokens. You want a small, auditable function that answers: continue, warn, or stop. Meet the Token Limiter This skill is a budget gate , not a kill switch wired into OpenAI or Anthropic. After each model turn, your host loop passes cumulative usage. The skill returns one of three actions: Action Meaning CONTINUE Under the soft threshold — keep going WARN Approaching the limit (default 80%) — tighten scope FORCE_TERMINATE Hard ceiling hit — stop the loop Important nuance: the skill does not cancel API sessions or kill processes. It returns a structured decision. Your orchestrator must act on it. That is by design — Skillware skills stay portable and provider-neutral. No skill-specific API keys. No network calls. Pure Python m

When most people hear Bitcoin , the conversation usually starts with price. But for developers, Bitcoin is much more than a chart. Bitcoin is a distributed system operating without a central authority. It combines networking, cryptography, game theory, economics, and software engineering into a protocol that has remained operational for years while processing value globally. As a software developer, what fascinates me most is not speculation it’s the architecture. Some concepts every developer can appreciate: ⚡ Distributed Consensus Thousands of nodes independently verify the same rules without trusting each other. 🔐 Cryptography in Practice Digital signatures make ownership verifiable without revealing private keys. ⛏️ Proof of Work A mechanism that converts computation into security and coordination. 🌍 Open Source at Global Scale Anyone can inspect the code, run a node, contribute, or build on top of the ecosystem. 📦 Immutability Through Design Data integrity is achieved through incentives, validation rules, and chained blocks. Studying Bitcoin changes how you think about: System reliability Security models Network design Incentive structures Building software that survives failure Whether you plan to build in blockchain or not, Bitcoin is worth studying because it teaches principles that extend far beyond finance. Curious to hear from other developers: What concept in Bitcoin architecture changed the way you think about software systems?