标签：#AR

In ledgerloop, a clean invoice under $1,000 posts with no human involved. I built the approval gate, then put a price on it. A company raised $30M last week to take the human out of agent payments. The expected take from someone with my background is a post defending the human. I agree with them, up to a thousand dollars. Two conditions, and nothing else The manager gate fires on two conditions: any exception, or a clean bill over $1,000. Below that, a clean three-way match posts straight through and no one signs. From the seeded scenarios: $730 clean goes straight through. $9,360 clean still stops, because a material bill gets a human whatever the match says. A steel bar invoiced 9% over the PO stops. Invoiced 100 units, received 80, stops. Two things exactly, and they are the load-bearing ones. Below the floor, what posts the invoice is deterministic tested code, not the model: the agent reads, investigates and proposes, it does not decide an amount. And these are seeded demo scenarios, not production traffic. The argument I actually want It is not whether humans should approve payments. It is that "a human approves payments" stops being a control the moment no one wrote down which payments. An unwritten threshold is not a policy, it is a habit, and a habit cannot be audited. The number itself is arguable and probably wrong for your business. Its existence, in code, with a reason next to it, is not. If you run AP: what is your straight-through limit, and who set it? The whole loop, an agent deriving the workflow then a real invoice routed through it, is in the ledgerloop case study . Originally published at dylan.merigaud.com .

Everyone is building AI memory systems. But how do we know which ones actually work? As AI agents...

Enterprise fintech deals don't die in the demo. They die in week six of onboarding, while someone re-types the customer's approval rules into a canvas. I spent two years inside a procurement fintech and the pattern was consistent: the product demos great, the contract gets signed, and then comes the wall. Setup that drags for weeks. Change requests every single week. Users who don't fully understand what was configured for them, so they ask instead of doing. The three things that cut onboarding time by 90% Integrating end to end with the systems the client already runs. The ERP connection wasn't a checkbox: granular sync per data type, bulk imports, master data flowing both ways. Every field the client doesn't re-enter is a support ticket that never exists. Generating a v1 of their approval workflow instead of handing them a blank canvas : business rules and best practices, applied to the real people pulled from their HRIS. The client reviews and adjusts a draft. Nobody designs from zero. Giving clients simple tools to help themselves , including a chatbot, so "how do I change this?" stopped requiring us. None of it was glamorous. All of it was product engineering aimed at time-to-first-value. A CTO building in this space told me recently that time-to-first-value, not features, is what decides procurement deals. That matches everything I saw from the inside. The workflow was never missing Watch an enterprise onboarding for any workflow product and you'll see the same ritual: a kickoff call, a shared screen, and someone rebuilding the org's approval logic box by box. Who approves above $10k. Who signs off on IT purchases. What happens when the manager is on leave. None of that information is new. It sits in the HRIS (who reports to whom, titles, departments) and in the ERP (vendors, open POs, spend history). The customer is being asked to re-enter reality the software could have read. What the next iteration looks like ledgerloop is that idea taken further. An agent

In the demo, it's three boxes: request, manager, CFO. Everyone nods. Then production shows up with questions the canvas never asked. The questions the canvas never asked The approver left the company last month, and the workflow still points at them. The amount lands exactly on the threshold. Above 10k goes to finance. Is 10k above 10k? The request was approved, then someone edited one line. Does the whole chain re-run, or just the delta? Who decides that? The manager is on leave and delegated their approvals. Does the delegate's own delegation count? Until when? Approval by group: any of the five? All of them? Three out of five? In what order? A condition depends on an answer given two steps earlier. That answer just changed. I spent two years shipping and maintaining an approval workflow engine at a procurement fintech. The three boxes took a sprint. The list above took the rest. How we actually answered it We froze the workflow at init: conditions resolved once at launch, and a running request never re-derived them. Mid-flight edits simply didn't exist. Approval groups came straight from the teams in the HRIS. Vacations earned a proper feature, a replacement approver that applied even to workflows already running, because absence is the one thing you can't freeze. And the approver who had left the company? Fixed by hand, more often than I'd like to admit. Freezing at init isn't a hack. It's the honest trade-off: deterministic, auditable, and it quietly declines half the list above. A workflow builder is a programming language your users never asked to learn Every condition is syntax, every unhandled edge case is a bug they'll file. So my opinion hasn't moved: keep the engine boring, deterministic, tested code, and derive the configuration from the systems that already know the answer, editable in plain language. That is what ledgerloop does with the HRIS, and what the components in approvals-ui model directly: quorum gates, amount thresholds, and a policy lint th

It's 4:50 on a Friday when the alert fires. A logging endpoint nobody remembers writing is copying customer records out of the database. Thirty-eight thousand of them. It's been quietly running for eleven months. You see it first. You understand it first: an old token, never rotated, someone's shortcut from a year ago that was never closed. You know exactly how to say it. In your own language, the sentence is already formed, precise, complete. Then the call starts. Eight people. The CTO, the client's legal counsel, someone from the German data protection office who joined without a word. Everyone is talking in English, fast. The lawyer says one thing, in a flat voice: under GDPR, you have seventy-two hours to report this from the moment you became aware. The clock started at 4:50. Now someone asks the only question that matters. "Do we know how they got in?" You know. You are the only one on the call who actually knows. You open your mouth and start to build the sentence in English: the token, was it "leaked" or "exposed," is it "left open" or "not revoked," and while you are still choosing the word, the CTO says "Maybe it was intentional. Someone inside." The room turns. Now they are looking for a person to blame, and the true, simple answer—that it was an old mistake, not a traitor—is still sitting in your head in the wrong language. Two minutes later someone has decided it was probably a rogue developer. The investigation will now point the wrong way for a day you do not have. You could have stopped it with three sentences. You had the three sentences. You just couldn't get them out fast enough while the clock ran. This is the part no one warns you about. In an incident, the language is not the small problem. It is the whole problem. The engineer who explains the breach clearly in the first five minutes controls what happens next. The one who can't watches other people decide, wrongly, in a language he understands perfectly but can't yet fight in. Test Yourself F

AI agents that break free and hack into other systems are only trying to make us happy.

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At Ai4, three of the world's most respected AI experts—Geoffrey Hinton, Fei-Fei Li, and Andrew Ng—debated regulation, open-source access, and how America can compete as China advances in Asia.

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Business and technology leaders need no convincing that the time of agentic AI is here. Organizations are rapidly adopting agents, and few executives doubt the technology’s potential to transform work. But many organizations find that realizing the desired return on investment (ROI) from AI hinges on having the right foundation, with inadequate infrastructure and data…

AI notetaking hardware has taken off over the past couple of years, with credit-card-sized devices, pendants, pins, and even transcribing earbuds all promising to capture your meetings and turn them into summaries and action items. Now, a whole wave of wearables — rings especially — are betting people want to capture stray thoughts and ideas the same way. One of […]

Trump admin claims New York suing Kalshi created "market emergency."

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This new funding comes after Lovable hit $500 million in annualized run rate revenue in June, the startup told TechCrunch.

On August 12, 2026, xAI released Grok 4.6, the successor to Grok 4.5 that shipped in July. The positioning is different from the last release. This is not pitched as a raw intelligence jump. It is a model built for long-running agents and ambitious interactive and visual work: researching a topic across many steps, working through a codebase, or turning a rough product idea into a polished first version. The headline claim is measured. xAI says Grok 4.6 matches GPT-5.6 Sol on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, a composite of nine benchmarks. Across the rest of the published evals it trades leads with GPT-5.6 Sol and Anthropic's Fable 5, winning some and losing others. Pricing starts at $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output tokens, with a faster variant at double that. I build AI agents with Spring AI for a living, so the agentic framing is what I read first. Here is what the release actually contains, where the numbers hold up, and what it signals for the frontier race. What's new in Grok 4.6 The official announcement is short on scale and long on training. It never states a parameter count. Earlier reports disagreed: some pointed to the same 1.5T V9 base as Grok 4.5 with heavy post-training, others to a larger 2T model. Either way, xAI's framing is that this release is about the training recipe, not the model size. What the company did describe: A longer supplemental training run than Grok 4.5, with curated model-generated data for reasoning and advanced technical concepts, high-quality engineering data, and an improved optimizer and training recipe. A supervised fine-tuning stage where Grok 4.5 itself regenerated the SFT trajectories across reasoning efforts, agent harnesses, and domains like STEM, software engineering, and knowledge work. Problematic traces were filtered out with model-based checks. Reinforcement learning across a wide range of agentic tasks: general coding, knowledge work, and domain-specific environments for kernel opti

The first cross-vendor pricing reference for post-EOL extended support. Microsoft ESU: $61/device doubling yearly ($30 one-time for consumers). AWS: EKS $0.60/cluster-hour (6x), RDS $0.100/vCPU-hour doubling in year three. Ubuntu Pro: $25 desktop / $500 server per year. And the honest quote-based rows — Red Hat ELS, Oracle, SUSE LTSS, CentOS ELS — where no public price exists. Every figure traced to a vendor price page or our verified coverage. The cross-vendor price table Product What it buys Pricing model Published price (verified 2026-08-12) Source Windows 10 — consumer ESU Critical + important security updates to Oct 12, 2027 Per device, one-time enrollment Free (settings sync) · 1,000 Microsoft Rewards points · or $30 one-time Microsoft consumer ESU page Windows 10 — commercial ESU Yearly security updates, max 3 years (to Oct 2028) Per device, per year — doubles annually, cumulative $61 yr 1 → $122 yr 2 → $244 yr 3 (≈$427 total) · $0 on Azure VMs / Windows 365 / AVD Microsoft ESU documentation Windows Server 2012/R2 ESU Final ESU year ends Oct 13, 2026 — then nothing, at any price Per year, via volume licensing or Azure Arc 100% of the full license price, each year — no year discount · $0 on Azure Per our analysis of Microsoft's ESU FAQ Amazon EKS 12 more months of Kubernetes version support Metered per cluster-hour — enrollment automatic, no opt-in $0.60 /cluster/hr vs $0.10 standard (6x) — ≈$438/mo vs ≈$73/mo per cluster AWS EKS pricing page Amazon RDS (MySQL / PostgreSQL) Up to 3 years past end of standard support Metered per vCPU-hour — enrollment automatic unless disabled $0.100 /vCPU-hr yrs 1–2, $0.200 yr 3 (AWS US East example rate) — Multi-AZ pays per instance AWS RDS pricing page Ubuntu — ESM (Ubuntu Pro) +5 years of patching past LTS standard support (20.04 to Apr 2030, 22.04 to Apr 2032) Per-machine subscription Free up to 5 personal machines · $25 /desktop/yr · $500 /server/yr (unlimited VMs) — support plans extra Canonical's Ubuntu Pro pricing page

Distributed Tracing: Following a Request Across Microservices A practical guide to distributed tracing as an architectural discipline — why single-service logging and metrics stop being sufficient once a request crosses many services, how a trace actually reconstructs a request's journey, trace analysis techniques for diagnosing latency and failures, and the specific propagation challenges microservice systems built from this series' REST, gRPC, and messaging guides need to solve. Table of Contents Introduction The Problem Distributed Tracing Solves Anatomy of a Distributed Trace Propagation Across Every Boundary a Request Crosses The Span Tree as a Diagnostic Tool Root Cause Analysis Using Traces Service Maps and Dependency Discovery Latency Analysis Patterns Sampling Strategy for Production Systems Tracing Across Synchronous and Asynchronous Boundaries Tracing Third-Party and Uninstrumented Dependencies Trace-Driven Testing and SLOs Common Pitfalls Quick Reference Table Conclusion Introduction Distributed tracing is the practice of reconstructing a single logical request's complete journey as it travels across every service, database call, and message it touches in a microservice system — not just observing one service in isolation, but stitching together a coherent, end-to-end picture of what actually happened, in what order, and how long each part took. This guide builds directly on this series' OpenTelemetry guide (which covers the mechanics of spans, trace context, and instrumentation) to focus specifically on distributed tracing as an architectural discipline: why it becomes necessary the moment a system splits into multiple services, and how to actually use traces to diagnose real production problems. Trace: "Checkout" (poor total latency: 1,840ms) ├── API Gateway (5ms) ├── OrderService.PlaceOrder (1,820ms) ← the vast majority of the time is HERE │ ├── SQL INSERT (12ms) │ ├── gRPC call to InventoryService (45ms) │ └── HTTP call to PaymentService (1,740ms) ←

Hello I'm Marlene and I invite you to follow my journey developing ProForma.net. But since this is my first post about ProForma, I will give you an overview of what I'm trying to achieve. What ProForma.net is planned to be The main Goal is to develop an application shell for schema based Applications. You will have mainly to different types of UI schemes, first for the Window Layout, there you will tell which elements are contained in the different application sections, like what Buttons or Menus you will have in the window title bar, or what sidebar tabs you will provide for the Ribbons, what the content area is filled with (spoiler I'm going to use flexlayout-react https://github.com/caplin/FlexLayout ). As host application I will write a C# application using the WebView2 abstraction library Photino ( https://www.tryphotino.io/ ). What you can expect In this dev diary series I'll show what I was working on, I'll show you some code and will explain why did to choose the way I did it, or will share some thoughts about the project or the architecture. I also will show you how to write plugins for ProForma, because I plan to handle everything as a plugin so you can change the most aspects of the app. The journey begins: overcome the guard Ok, most of you will know it... parameter checking on top of a method... nearly endless 'if throw' constructs... they are ugly... if (! Directory . Exists ( physicalPath )) throw new DirectoryNotFoundException ( $"Could not find the given path ' { physicalPath } '." ); if ( _directories . ContainsKey ( urlPrefix )) throw new Exception ( $"Key ' { urlPrefix } ' already exists." ); if ( _directories . ContainsValue ( physicalPath )) throw new Exception ( $"Physical Path ' { physicalPath } ' already exists." ); I mean who wants to read that? I don't. So I wanted guards, and I've could used some 3rd Party library, but instead I came up with my own solution for the Guards, since I don't always want to throw the exception on a failed asser