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Posts derived from first principles: one invariant, every objection answered where it arises, the mechanism built from scratch, and the trade-offs priced. Browse by category above, or filter across all of them by tag.
- AI
How the models actually run: what the serving layer does with your request, what it costs, and which behaviour you can predict rather than measure.
1 topics · 1 post
- Systems
What a system promises, what it can promise given where its data lives, and what it quietly stops promising when the network misbehaves.
2 topics · 2 posts
systems · databases ·
Transactions, when everyone writes at onceAn isolation level is not a difficulty dial. Each one names exactly which interleavings of concurrent transactions a database refuses to produce.
- transactions
- isolation
- concurrency
- mvcc
- locking
- databases
- consistency
systems · distributed ·
Consistency, from one copy to manyEvery consistency model is an answer to one question: which interleavings of a replicated history are you willing to let a reader see?
- consistency
- linearizability
- isolation
- replication
- consensus
- databases
- cap
ai · llm ·
Prompt caching, from the causal mask outwardPrompt caching explained from the one fact it follows from: attention is causal, so the cacheable unit is a prefix, never a block.
- prompt-caching
- kv-cache
- inference
- claude-api
- cost
- latency
- agents