System Architecture

DeepSeek, a company associated with High-Flyer, an $8 billion Chinese hedge fund, changed the AI narrative when it claimed OpenAI-like capabilities for a mere $6 million. The company challenged con…

Fang-Pen Lin's blog about programming

Most people know that robots no longer sound like tinny trash cans. They sound like Siri, Alexa, and Gemini. They sound like the voices in labyrinthine customer support phone trees. And even those robot voices are being made obsolete by new AI-generated voices that can mimic every vocal nuance and tic of human speech, down to specific regional accents. And with just a few seconds of audio, AI can now clone someone’s specific voice. This technology will replace humans in many areas. Automated customer support will save money by cutting staffing at ...

Researchers at the University of Waterloo's Cheriton School of Computer Science in Canada found that modifying just 30 lines of code in the Linux kernel could cut data center energy consumption by 30% to 45%.

less net work for networks

Iroh connections are dumb pipes: easy, direct connections that punch through NATs & stay connected as network conditions change.

less net work for networks

Schema for CLIs

Our state-of-the-art JVM/JDK that runs completely in the browser thanks to WebAssembly, is now available!

Entering 2025, I decided to spend some time exploring the topic of agents. I started reading Anthropic’s Building effective agents, followed by Chip Huyen’s AI Engineering. I kicked off a major workstream at work on using agents, and I also decided to do a personal experiment of sorts. This is a general commentary on building that project. What I wanted to build was a simple chat interface where I could write prompts, select models, and have the model use tools as appropriate. My side goal was to build this using Cursor and generally avoid writing code directly as much as possible, but I found that generally slower than writing code in emacs while relying on 4o-mini to provide working examples to pull from.

Why the Indian streaming service took this unconventional path, including the trade-offs of the more obvious solutions.

When the thought first stuck obviously, I was just like you thinking “what?” why would I ever use MongoDB for an internet search engine in…

How I tracked myself down using leaked location data in the in-app ads, and what I found along the way.

Empowering humanitarian action with open source: A natural language search tool for UN Resolutions.

Since IPv6 is gaining momentum, and is generally operating alongside other protocols, it has become important to define the operating modes that may exist in any IPv6 environment. This allows for consistent communication and understanding of a fundamental part of operating a production network. Most of this hard work has been done by the IETF, and 99% of those definitions as can be referenced by engineers and architects when creating designs, proposals, and documentation, can be found in one really well crafted RFC.

Software architecture diagrams are important tools for anyone involved in building software. They help us understand how different parts of…

Instant live sports scores, play-by-play, and box scores

recfiles is a file format for human-editable, plain text databases.[1][2]

The Domain Name System (DNS) is a hierarchical and distributed name service that provides a naming system for computers, services, and other resources on the Internet or other Internet Protocol (IP) networks. It associates various information with domain names (identification strings) assigned to each of the associated entities. Most prominently, it translates readily memorized domain names to the numerical IP addresses needed for locating and identifying computer services and devices with the underlying network protocols.[1] The Domain Name System has been an essential component of the functionality of the Internet since 1985.

How hard could it be to know the time, anyway?

I occasionally receive emails asking me to look at the writer's new language/library/tool. Sometimes it's in an area I know well, like formal methods. Other...

Organizations must dedicate time and resources specifically to AI and vector database technology.

I grew up in the world of BBSes, Usenet, and, to some extent, UUCP before that. This was fun – a world wide network all built up by volunteers sharing. Since we are all carrying supercomputers around now with massive idle storage and bandwidth, let's think about how we can recreate some of that fun, independent data sharing with modern web technologies, specifically Websockets and WebRTC. All you need is the computer that you already have with you.

The Unix philosophy, originated by Ken Thompson, is a set of cultural norms and philosophical approaches to minimalist, modular software development. It is based on the experience of leading developers of the Unix operating system. Early Unix developers were important in bringing the concepts of modularity and reusability into software engineering practice, spawning a "software tools" movement. Over time, the leading developers of Unix established a set of cultural norms for developing software; these norms became as important and influential as the technology of Unix itself, and have been termed the "Unix philosophy."

As I study tech sector innovations, I see signs that the old traditions are fading. I'm not one to sanctify tradition for tradition's sake, but I see merit in maintaining a traditional approach to computing tasks that encourages shrewdness. To illustrate what I mean, these are some ways we are straying from the Unix way, and my view on why we should return to the path.

WebSockets are at the very core of Compose. Learn how we scaled them to support 1000s of concurrent users.