Of all the things involved in turning a woman's life into a 60-second reel, I assumed that the writing would be the easy part. Surely telling a good story in 150 words is exactly what a large language model should be good at; yet it proved surprisingly difficult. Draft after draft suffered from common AI weaknesses: a tendency to use hyperbole and inspirational language, to generalize, follow generic founder arcs ("built in a basement"), and focus on morbid details. (For this effort, I was using Sonnet 4.6, which I found to be better — more grounded, more true to facts, less inventive — than Opus 4.7 at creating longer bios.) Getting to something publishable took a significant amount of work. That said, the human in this story also found writing good short story arcs surprisingly challenging, so the effort spent on getting the system to do it decently was well worth it. Here's some context, then what I did. I've been publishing short biographies of notable women for a while now, on a website called Tycoona . Why notable women? Because in each field there are so many women who contributed so much and are little known. I've never understood why Corita Kent , the pop-artist nun, isn't as famous as Andy Warhol, why Hetty Green , the Gilded Age value investor called both the "Witch of Wall Street" and the "Queen of Wall Street," disappears into history behind Benjamin Graham and his protege Warren Buffett. The problem I faced is that no one was seeing my bios, so I decided to make short videos or reels in hopes of increasing my reach. Creating the technical infrastructure for the reels on top of my existing system was fun and relatively straightforward. Each reel consists of a series of "beats," and Remotion turns those beats into a vertical reel, complete with on-screen text and royalty-free images & attributions pulled from Wikimedia, Flickr, or Library of Congress. For content, the beat generator relies on the knowledge base of validated facts that my system creates f

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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A customer texted me a screenshot last month. It was my own landing page, open on their Pixel. The headline — "Financial infrastructure to grow your revenue" — was clipped at "...grow your reven". The signup button below it was gray-on-slightly-lighter-gray, basically unreadable. And the hero image? A broken-image icon. Here's the part that stung: every check I had was green. Lighthouse: 98. My Playwright tests: passing. CI: all checkmarks. I had shipped that page an hour earlier feeling good about it. None of my tooling caught any of it. I want to walk through why , because I think a lot of us have this blind spot, and then I'll tell you what I did about it. CI tests the DOM. It does not test what a human sees. This is the core issue. My tests asserted things like "the signup button exists" and "the form has an email input." All true. The button was in the DOM . It just rendered unreadable on a 412px-wide screen with the system in light mode. Lighthouse runs one viewport (usually a throttled Moto G4 emulation) and scores performance/SEO/a11y heuristically . It does not look at your page across the actual range of devices your visitors use and say "this headline is physically clipped on a Pixel 8." And my "responsive testing"? I was dragging the Chrome devtools responsive bar to two breakpoints — 375 and 1440 — eyeballing it, and moving on. That's not testing. That's hoping. The three bugs that slipped through Let me get specific, because the category of each bug is instructive. 1. The clipped headline — a measurable, deterministic bug .hero-title { white-space : nowrap ; /* the culprit */ width : 100% ; overflow : hidden ; } On desktop, the headline fit. On a narrow viewport, white-space: nowrap refused to wrap, overflow: hidden clipped the overflow, and the last word vanished. The brutal thing: this is trivially detectable in code . The element's scrollWidth was greater than its clientWidth . That's a one-line check: const clipped = el . scrollWidth > el . clientW

Most teams still treat manual test cases as rows in a SaaS database. That worked when cases were written slowly, reviewed rarely, and automation lived in a separate silo. It works less well now. AI can draft cases from screenshots and user stories in minutes. Automation lives next to application code. QA and dev share the same PRs. Auditors ask where test data lives and who changed what. In that world, test cases are data — and the format you choose matters as much as the tool UI. The durable direction is tests as code : plain YAML files in version control, with a thin local layer for humans to browse, run, and review. Not because databases are evil, but because git + YAML matches how we already work with code, AI, and compliance. 1. AI is good at YAML — and YAML keeps your data yours LLMs are unusually good at structured text: YAML front matter plus a Markdown body is a sweet spot. Give the model a schema ( title , tags , priority , steps, expected result) and a screenshot or user story, and you get a draft case in one pass. That matters for more than speed: Boundary cases — ask the model what you might have missed; it can reason about the scenario, not just paraphrase the story. Consistency — the same format every time makes batch generation and review predictable. The deeper point is data ownership . Cases in a vendor DB are convenient until they are not: export limits, API friction, another system to secure, another place sensitive scenarios live. Local YAML in your repo is trivial for AI to read (including Cursor, Copilot, or whatever you use next), diff, and update — without shipping your test catalog to a third party. For many teams, that is a real security and efficiency win — not ideology. 2. Manual YAML beside automation makes coverage measurable When manual cases and automated tests sit in the same repository, a few things become boring in a good way: Tag a case automated: true and point params at a Playwright or Selenium path — one file, one id. Automati

A new video shows the final production version of the upcoming Clicks Communicator, a BlackBerry-like smartphone that runs modern apps.

Just hit this today and I'm furious. I installed the Cursor iOS app to see what it had. I've been on `Privacy Mode (Legacy)` for a long time, which is the "Do not store my code" setting. A year or so ago they marked this as "Legacy" and hid it under a "Extra options" menu. They added a new Privacy Mode which is significantly more wishy-washy about what it might store - it includes a clause of "Code may be stored for Background Agents or Other Features", so I've never touched it or wanted to enab

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The Quest Begins (The "Why") Honestly, I was tired of playing “guess the state” every time I spun up a new environment. One day I clicked “Apply” in the AWS console, watched a handful of EC2 instances, S3 buckets, and IAM roles appear, and then realized I had no idea how to recreate that exact setup six months later when the team needed a staging copy. It felt like trying to rebuild the Death Star from memory after a single glance at the blueprints—frustrating, error‑prone, and definitely not the heroic saga I signed up for. That moment was my “aha!”: I needed a repeatable, version‑controlled way to describe infrastructure. Enter Infrastructure as Code (IaC). I’d heard the buzz, but the real question was which tool to wield—Terraform or CloudFormation? Both promised declarative provisioning, but they spoke different dialects. I decided to embark on a quest to learn both, slay the configuration drift dragon, and come out with a reusable spellbook I could share with anyone on the team. The Revelation (The Insight) The breakthrough came when I stopped thinking of IaC as “just another config file” and started seeing it as a storytelling language . Every resource block is a character, every variable a plot twist, and the state file the ever‑growing script that remembers what happened in previous chapters. When I wrote my first Terraform module, it felt like Neo realizing he could bend the spoon—suddenly the impossible became trivial. I could define a VPC, subnets, security groups, and an RDS instance in a few dozen lines, run terraform init , terraform plan , and watch the plan show exactly what would change before any resources touched the cloud. No more surprise “you created a public‑facing DB!” moments. CloudFormation, on the other hand, felt like the loyal sidekick that already lives in the AWS universe. Its JSON/YAML templates are native to AWS, so there’s no extra provider to install, and drift detection is built‑in. The trade‑off? A bit more verbosity and a steepe

IO Interactive, the studio behind the Hitman series and 007 First Light, announced that it is laying off staff after a relationship with an "external partner" on its next big franchise, Project Fantasy, "has come to an end." IO has described Project Fantasy as an "online fantasy RPG", and Kotaku reports that Microsoft, which is […]

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.