标签：#t

At re:Invent 2025, AWS announced Lambda Durable Functions . The feature introduces a checkpoint/replay mechanism that allows Lambda executions to run for up to one year, automatically recovering from interruptions by replaying from the last checkpoint. Lambda's 15-minute timeout is not a bug or a limitation to work around. It is a deliberate design choice that encourages keeping functions simple and focused, and in most cases it does its job well. When a function needs more time, the usual approach is fanout : split the work into smaller Lambdas, orchestrate them, move on. I have done it many times and it works perfectly fine. But a few days ago I was developing a new Lambda function for a pipeline orchestrated by Step Functions, and the execution time exceeded 15 minutes. I could have done the usual split, but durable functions had just come out and I wanted to try them. At first glance, durable functions can look like a replacement for Step Functions. Both services manage multi-step workflows , both offer checkpointing and automatic recovery , and both let you coordinate complex operations. For certain use cases, that might actually be the case: if your entire workflow lives inside a single Lambda, durable functions can handle everything on their own without an external orchestrator. But the AWS documentation actually suggests using them together. The "Hybrid architectures" section says it explicitly: many applications benefit from combining the two services, using durable functions for application-level logic within Lambda and Step Functions to coordinate the high-level workflow across multiple AWS services. My case fit that description, and more than a perfect architectural match, I wanted to learn how the two services actually work together and form my own opinion on when the hybrid approach makes sense. I figured integrating the two would be a small change. It was my first time working with the durable execution SDK, and since the code I write is mostly infras

Most "AI email" demos never think about deletion. The agent reads, replies, files things away, and the inbox just grows. That's fine in a demo. It is a problem the first time a real person emails your agent, because the moment that mailbox holds someone else's name, address, order history, or support complaint, you've taken on a data-protection obligation — and "we kept everything forever" is not a defensible retention policy. An Agent Account on Nylas accumulates personal data you have to be able to purge. It's a mailbox the agent owns — support@yourcompany.com answering to a model instead of a human — and every inbound message lands in it. Under GDPR that data needs two things you can prove: a retention window so it doesn't live forever, and an erasure path so you can delete a specific person's mail when they ask. This post builds both, with the curl and the CLI for each step. A quick, honest caveat before any of it: this is a docs-and-demo walkthrough, not legal advice. The Nylas primitives below cover the mail held in the mailbox . Any derived copy you made — rows in your own database, lines in your application logs, a vector store you embedded the message into — is yours to purge separately. The API can delete the message; it can't reach into your Postgres. Keep that in mind throughout. What the platform gives you Nothing new to learn on the data plane. An Agent Account is just a grant with a grant_id , so everything you already know about Messages and Threads applies directly — listing, reading, and deleting mail run against the same grant-scoped endpoints any other Nylas integration uses. Retention and erasure split cleanly into two layers: Retention is a control-plane setting. It lives on a policy — an application-scoped resource that bundles limits and spam settings — attached to the workspace your Agent Account belongs to. Two fields cap how long mail survives: limit_inbox_retention_period and limit_spam_retention_period . Set them once and Nylas deletes a

Spam traps are the failure mode nobody puts in the demo. A bounce is loud — you get a 5.x.x back, your code logs it, you move on. A complaint at least gives you a webhook. A spam trap gives you nothing . The message gets accepted, no error comes back, and somewhere a mailbox provider quietly writes your domain down as a spammer. By the time you notice, your inbox placement has already cratered and you have no single bounce to point at. That's the trap, literally. And it's the one that bites autonomous agents the hardest, because the whole appeal of an agent is that it acts without a human watching every send. Point a model at a list it scraped, let it loop, and it'll happily mail a recycled address that's been a trap for two years. The agent never sees a problem. You only see the aftermath in your deliverability dashboard a week later. I work on the Nylas CLI, so the terminal commands below are the exact ones I reach for when I'm wiring up an Agent Account to not do this. The good news is that an Agent Account is just a grant — a grant_id that works with every grant-scoped endpoint you already know — so there's nothing new to learn on the data plane. The defense is mostly discipline: validate before you send, honor every complaint, and age out the addresses that never wanted to hear from you. What a spam trap actually is, and why it's not a bounce It's worth being precise here, because the three things people lump together behave completely differently. A bounce is a rejected delivery. The receiving server tells you the address is bad, you get a message.bounced event, and you stop. Bounce handling is a solved problem — you listen, you suppress, you're done. A complaint is a recipient hitting "report spam." The mailbox provider relays that back as a feedback loop, and you get a message.complaint event. The address is real and reachable; the human just doesn't want your mail. If you keep mailing them, you're training the provider to filter you. A spam trap is neither.

The best developer tools share one quality: you forget you are using them. Think about it. Your IDE fades into the background when you are in flow. Your terminal becomes muscle memory. These tools are invisible because they match your mental model so perfectly that there is zero friction between thought and action. This is exactly what online developer utilities should aspire to. The Problem with Fragmented DevTools Most developers have a bookmarks folder full of single-purpose websites: One for JSON formatting One for timestamp conversion One for Base64 encoding One for URL decoding Every switch between these tabs is a context loss. Every tool has a slightly different UI, different copy-paste format, different quirks. The Invisible Toolkit Opennomos Json (opennomos.com/en/project/01KJ850Z7PNGXHXESBM68HE12Y) consolidates timestamp conversion, JSON formatting, and Base64 encoding into a single workspace. No install. No accounts. No pricing tiers. Just open a tab and work. This is the north star for developer tools: make them so simple that the user never has to think about the tool itself — they only think about their actual task. The Trend Is Clear We have seen this pattern across the dev ecosystem: GitHub Codespaces made local IDE setup invisible Vercel made deployment invisible Replit made runtime environment invisible The next frontier is utility tools. The sooner they become invisible, the better. Try it: opennomos.com/en/project/01KJ850Z7PNGXHXESBM68HE12Y Part of the Nomos Build-in-Public series.

Spotify's Release Radar can now deliver more personalized music recommendations.

It's unclear how the planet avoided its star's bloated red giant stage.

Is paying a reasonable price for colorful cardboard too much to ask?

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 135, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you're new here, welcome, crank the AC, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) This week, I've been reading about cold plunges and Colson Whitehead and the food truck mafia, […]

Roleplaying games are often defined by excess. Storylines that span dozens of hours, side quests so big they could be their own game, massive worlds that require complex maps to explore, and casts so big you start forgetting character names. That's part of what makes these games feel like epic adventures, but it can also […]

For the first time since 1995, the Bureau of Land Management is rewriting its grazing regulations.

The AquaSense X brings self-cleaning technology to pool robots for the first time, but is it worth nearly twice the price of Beatbot’s flagship cleaner?

The Skylight has become the informational and organizational hub of my household. My touchscreen-native kids have also gained more agency over our family activities.

There’s a new fleet of TVs using new mini and micro RBG display tech, and Samsung’s R95H model isn’t as impressive as it should be.

Plus: The Pentagon is training amateurs to become part of its hacker army, a Flock license plate reader error led to cops surrounding a car reviewer, and more.

More dog owners have begun cooking for their canine companions in recent years. When my own dog fell ill, I became part of this growing group.

Hello, I'm Maneshwar. I'm building git-lrc, a Micro AI code reviewer that runs on every commit. It is...

Cross-posted from the HTML to Image blog , where the original lives. Browsershot is the package most Laravel developers reach for when they need to turn HTML into an image. It wraps Puppeteer, drives real Chrome and produces pixel-accurate output. On your machine it works first time. Then you deploy, and the first render throws Failed to launch the browser process! . The problem is not Browsershot's code. The problem is what it demands from the machine it runs on. What Browsershot actually asks of your server Browsershot is a PHP package with a second runtime hiding inside it. To run it in production you need Node.js, the Puppeteer npm package, a Chrome or Chromium binary, the long tail of shared libraries Chrome links against ( libnss3 , libatk , libgbm and friends on a slim Debian image) and a font set wide enough to cover whatever your templates contain, emoji included. That is manageable on a full VPS you control. It falls apart in the places Laravel apps increasingly run: Laravel Vapor and serverless. The PHP Lambda runtime ships neither Node nor Chrome, and you cannot apt-get your way out of a Lambda. The Puppeteer on Lambda guide covers just how deep that particular hole goes. Shared and managed hosting. No root, no system packages, no browser binary. Browsershot is simply off the table. Slim Docker images. php:8.3-fpm-alpine carries none of Chrome's dependencies. Adding Chromium, its libraries and fonts costs a few hundred megabytes and a permanent maintenance line in your Dockerfile. CI pipelines , where every job downloads a browser before your test suite can touch a render. The dependency does not stay contained either. Even Spatie's newer packages inherit it: spatie/laravel-og-image renders through laravel-screenshot , which drives Browsershot underneath, so the Node and Chrome requirement follows the whole family wherever it goes. The usual workarounds The first workaround is the fat container: bake Chromium, the shared libraries and a font stack into y

In the previous post I argued that agents are great planners and DAGs are great executors . This one is the practical follow-up: when you actually sit down to wire several LLM calls together, what tool do you reach for? Because the moment one prompt's output feeds the next, you've built a workflow — whether you call it that or not. download transcript → summarize → translate (tool) (LLM) (LLM) That tiny pipeline is already the whole problem in miniature: a non-LLM step (fetch a YouTube transcript), then a model call, then another model call that depends on the first. Run it as one giant prompt and you lose visibility; split it into steps and you gain debuggability — at the cost of more calls and more state to manage. The naming trap Half the confusion is vocabulary. The same idea ships under a dozen labels: Name What it whispers Chain sequential, output → input Pipeline stages, data flowing through Flow branches and conditions Workflow general orchestration Agent workflow the model also decides The word sets expectations. "Chain" promises a straight line; "agent workflow" promises the thing might re-plan on you mid-run. Pick the label that matches how much autonomy you're actually handing over — calling a deterministic two-step pipeline an "agent" only invites disappointment. The real choice: library or orchestrator? There are two families of tools, and they solve different problems. LLM-native chaining libraries — LangChain , LlamaIndex Workflows , Azure Prompt Flow , or visual layers like Flowise . These understand LLM-specific concerns out of the box: prompt templating, passing context between steps, token budgets, streaming, retries on a flaky model. General orchestrators — Airflow , Prefect , AWS Step Functions , Azure Logic Apps . These treat each LLM call as just another task in a DAG, and give you the heavyweight reliability machinery: durable state, scheduling, checkpointing, audit trails, human approval. The rule of thumb that falls out of the last post: F

A container's writable layer feels like a filesystem, and that's exactly the trap. Write a database into it, remove the container, and the data is gone — no warning, no recovery. If you want anything to survive docker rm , it has to live outside the container, and Docker gives you three ways to do that: named volumes, bind mounts, and tmpfs. Knowing which one to reach for is most of the battle. Why the writable layer betrays you Every running container gets a thin read-write layer stacked on top of its image layers. It looks persistent because you can docker exec in and see your files. But that layer is bound to the container's lifecycle. docker run --name scratch alpine sh -c 'echo hello > /data.txt; cat /data.txt' # hello docker rm scratch # the layer — and /data.txt — no longer exists There's no "oops." The writable layer is discarded with the container. Persistence is not a default you get; it's a decision you make. That decision is a volume, a bind mount, or tmpfs. Named volumes: the default for state A named volume is storage that Docker creates and manages for you. You give it a name, Docker keeps the actual bytes under its own directory, and you never have to care where that is. docker volume create pgdata docker run -d --name db \ --mount type = volume,source = pgdata,target = /var/lib/postgresql/data \ postgres:16 The container writes to /var/lib/postgresql/data , but those bytes land in a Docker-managed location on the host. Remove and recreate the container against the same volume and the data is still there. docker rm -f db docker run -d --name db \ --mount type = volume,source = pgdata,target = /var/lib/postgresql/data \ postgres:16 # same data, new container Where do the bytes actually live? Under Docker's data root, typically /var/lib/docker/volumes/<name>/_data : docker volume inspect pgdata --format '{{ .Mountpoint }}' # /var/lib/docker/volumes/pgdata/_data The point is that you're not supposed to reach into that path directly — Docker owns it. You

From strenuous hikes and serious summits to weekend rambles in the park, these boots help you make the most of your time outdoors.