标签：#load

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. South Korea’s hottest new bachelors are chip workers Baek, a 35-year-old manager at the South Korean semiconductor titan SK Hynix, was enrolled in a matchmaking company a year ago. In a…

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. The UK’s generational tobacco ban might not work. I’m supporting it anyway. —Jessica Hamzelou As the parent of two little girls, I often think about how their childhood is different from…

The product drop had been planned for months. The direct-to-consumer subscription business had run three separate load tests, provisioned extra capacity for the launch window, and staffed a warroom across two time zones. The drop itself went cleanly. Two hours in, an unrelated video from a creator with a large following mentioned the product without warning, and the sign-up flow collapsed under a rush of new members for twenty-eight minutes. Customers were told the site was busy and to try again later. Some did. Most did not. The refund exposure was manageable. The customer acquisition exposure was not. What went wrong is not the interesting question. The system was under-provisioned for a specific traffic shape it had not seen before, and the team fixed it. The interesting question is what happened seven weeks later. A weather event redirected a wave of app traffic in an entirely different sector, at midnight on a Tuesday, without any warning. That system held, because a small group of engineers had spent those seven weeks quietly rebuilding assumptions about when peak load happens and what it looks like. The lesson from the product drop was not "provision more capacity for product drops." The lesson was that the mental model of peak load as a scheduled event had stopped being useful. This is another post in our series on the engineering layer underneath enterprise strategy. The previous post ( Sovereignty Versus Efficiency ) argued that sovereignty has become an architectural property that procurement cannot solve on its own. This post makes an analogous argument about load. Across banking, media, retail, travel, restaurant chains, and sport, the architectures built to survive named events are increasingly the wrong architectures for the traffic these businesses now routinely encounter. The discipline required has moved closer to what telecommunications engineers have always done, while the cost models have not caught up. What peak load used to mean For most of th

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. LLMs are stuck in a groupthink groove. This startup is trying to get them out. Open up your chatbot of choice—Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini—and type “Give me a random number between 1…

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Claude Science is Anthropic’s newest flagship product At an event for pharmaceutical executives, biotech founders, and researchers yesterday, Anthropic announced Claude Science, a major new product intended to support scientific research…

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. AI agents are not your “coworkers” Imagine coming in to work to learn that a new underling will report to you. The worker is not a person but an AI tool—one…

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. The inevitable weakness of metrics There are plenty of useful things a metric can reveal. There are even more that it can obscure or corrupt. Like a lot of people bitten…

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Heat waves mess with your brain. Scientists are trying to figure out why. —Jessica Hamzelou It’s been hot in London this week. Really hot. A dangerous heat wave has hit Western…

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Europe’s extreme heat is shutting down power plants Europe is in the middle of a record-breaking heat wave, and the grid is being pushed to its limits as people turn to…

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Introducing: the Engineering issue We can’t fix everything, but we can be ambitious. We can take on the challenge of making the world better through human ingenuity. That’s what the new…

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. The $400 million machine powering the future of chipmaking It’s a bit of a schlep to get to the top of ASML’s newest machine. It’s about the size of a double-decker…

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Inside the world’s deepest and longest subsea road tunnel —Niall Firth I’m currently around 1,000 feet beneath the North Sea, in a dark, dank cave. It smells weird. And I’m increasingly…

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. A startup claims it broke through a bottleneck that’s holding back LLMs AI startup Subquadratic came out of stealth last month with a huge claim: it had solved a mathematical bottleneck…

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. The search for dark matter has been blown wide open For decades, physicists have hunted for weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs), a leading candidate for dark matter. But their search has…

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Hacking the atmosphere: geoengineering gets a reality check Solar geoengineering, the controversial idea that we could deliberately intervene in the climate system to counteract global warming, is moving beyond computer simulations…

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. This man with ALS is the first “power user” of a brain implant that lets him speak Casey Harrell has had a set of electrodes embedded in his brain for almost…

Running 23 European e-commerce shops on Payload CMS v3 taught me that some things simply don't exist yet. So I built them. Background I maintain a multi-clone e-commerce infrastructure — 23 Next.js + Payload CMS v3 shops deployed across Europe, each on its own subdomain and language. Think fr.myshop.com , de.myshop.com , sk.myshop.com ... all running on the same codebase with country-specific patches. While building this, I kept running into two missing pieces that no one had published for Payload v3: A customer reviews system with admin moderation and Google star ratings Complete Schema.org JSON-LD for Google rich snippets (Product, BreadcrumbList, ItemList, AggregateRating) Both are now published on npm. Here's what I built, the bugs I hit, and how I solved them. Part 1 — The Reviews Plugin What didn't exist Search npm for payload reviews or payload ratings — you'll find nothing for v3. The official plugin ecosystem covers SEO, forms, redirects, Stripe... but not customer reviews. Building the collection The reviews collection itself is straightforward — relationship to products , rating (1-5), status select (pending/approved/rejected), author fields. The tricky parts came later. Access control gotcha: Payload v3 uses a roles array, not a role string. This breaks if you copy v2 patterns: // ❌ Wrong — always returns false update : ({ req }) => req . user ?. role === ' admin ' , // ✅ Correct for v3 update : ({ req }) => req . user ?. roles ?. includes ( ' admin ' ), Prevent self-verification: Users can POST any field on create: () => true collections. Lock verified in a beforeChange hook: hooks : { beforeChange : [ ({ data }) => { if ( ! data . status ) data . status = ' pending ' data . verified = false // admin-only, always reset on create return data }, ], }, Email protection: read: () => true on the collection exposes authorEmail in the public API. Add field-level access: { name : ' authorEmail ' , type : ' email ' , access : { read : ({ req }) => req . user ?.

Why I modeled a load balancer after Emperor Penguin huddles A few months ago I was reading about how emperor penguins survive Antarctic winters. Temperature drops to -40°C, wind hits 120km/h, and somehow these birds make it through. Not because they're individually tough. Because they rotate. Cold penguins on the outside push inward. Warm ones from the center move out to rest. Nobody coordinates this. No penguin is in charge. It emerges from one simple rule: if you're cold, push in. If you're warm, you'll get pushed out eventually. I couldn't stop thinking about this. I was working on a service mesh at the time and dealing with the usual problem — one slow server quietly dragging down the whole cluster. Round robin doesn't care. Least connections helps but not always. Weighted approaches need manual tuning that goes stale immediately. The penguin thing kept nagging at me. What if servers had a "temperature"? What if hot servers rotated out to rest? That's HuddleCluster. The basic structure Two rings: Inner ring (deque): Active servers. Requests go to them round-robin. Simple, fair, zero overhead for normal traffic. Outer ring (min-heap): Resting servers. Keyed by temperature — coolest server sits at the top, ready to rotate back in first. When a server in the inner ring runs hot past a threshold, it moves out. When an outer ring server cools down, it comes back in. That's the entire rotation logic. About 50 lines of Python. What is "temperature"? This took me a while to get right. My first attempt was just raw latency. That was bad. A server handling one slow database query looks terrible even when it's completely healthy. I needed something more composed. Current formula: pythontemperature = EMA( 0.7 * relative_latency_anomaly + 0.1 * cpu_score + 0.1 * memory_score + 0.1 * (error_rate + connection_score) ) Three decisions here worth explaining. EMA over simple moving average EMA weights recent measurements more heavily. If a server just had a bad spike but recovere

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. These new solid-state ACs promise a cool future. Scientists aren’t so sure. After three years of record-­breaking heat and another scorcher underway, air-conditioning isn’t going anywhere. That’s good for our health,…

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Why “reprogramming” is the buzziest approach to reversing aging right now Earlier this week, Life Biosciences, a biotech company focused on reversing age-related diseases, announced that it had dosed its first…