标签：#AR

Synchronous billing is easy, and that's the problem — it makes you think all billing is easy. When a request does its work inline, the billable number is in the response by the time you send it. The gateway meters from there — the meter write, retries and all, is its problem, not yours. From your side, synchronous billing is one number in the response. Asynchronous work breaks that. The request submits a job; the work happens later, in a worker; the result comes back through a poll or a callback. And the thing you bill for — characters processed, pages converted — isn't known when the request arrives. It's known when the job finishes . So you can't meter at the edge. The meter has to fire from the completion path. And the real difficulty is firing it exactly once per unit of completed work — because requests, polls, and retries all conspire to make that zero times or many times. This is platform-agnostic. Every submit-process-poll API has it. I'll use the system I run as the example, but the shape is the same anywhere. Three ways metering goes wrong On arrival. Carry the synchronous habit over and you meter when the job is submitted. But you don't know the size yet, so you're forced into a crude flat fee — or you bill for work that hasn't happened and might fail. Wrong unit, wrong time. On retrieval. The subtle one. You wire the meter to fire when the client fetches the result. Now a client who submits a job, lets it run — costing you real money downstream — and never bothers to poll is never billed. You did the work for free. "Completion" is not "the client picked up the result." It's the worker finishing. Without a fixed quantity. Input characters or output characters? Pages before OCR or after? If you haven't decided exactly what you measure and where, invoices drift and customers argue. Decide once; measure there. All three point the same way: meter on measured work-completion, with a fixed definition of the unit. Not on arrival. Not on retrieval. The mechanism:

Three AI stories landed this week that all poke at the same nerve: the images, video, and films we actually look at are getting an AI layer — and the line between "real" and "AI-made" keeps thinning. Quick rundown in the short, then my take below: 1. ChatGPT will start showing real, licensed photos — not AI fakes. OpenAI signed a multi-year display deal with Getty Images, so licensed photography shows up inside ChatGPT's search and discovery. It's display-only — the photos aren't used to train models. The twist I can't get over: AI image generation had nearly wiped Getty out (stock down ~55% on the year), and this one deal sent the shares up ~145%. The thing AI almost broke got rescued by AI. 2. ByteDance — yes, TikTok's parent — teased Seedance 2.5: a full 30-second video generated in a single shot, no stitching, up to 50 reference inputs, 4K. Most tools still cap out around 5–10 seconds, so "30s native, one pass" is a real jump in how usable the output is. Public launch is early July. 3. Google DeepMind is partnering with A24 on AI filmmaking — a ~$75M, non-exclusive deal to co-build Veo-powered tools. Notably Google gets no access to A24's film library or data. A prestige studio building with AI in the open makes the whole "AI in Hollywood" debate a lot less hypothetical. As someone building a daily AI-news pipeline on the side, the Getty one is the story I keep chewing on. So much of the "AI vs creators" fight has been framed as scrape-or-die. A display-licensing deal is a third option — pay to show the real thing, instead of generating a confident fake or quietly training on someone's work. I don't know if it scales, but it's the first move in a while that didn't feel zero-sum. The Seedance + A24 pair points the other way though: generation is getting longer, more controllable, and is walking straight into real production. So we get both at once — more verified real media and more convincing synthetic media, in the same week. Curious where other builders land:

AI has made it easier to produce working software. That part is real. It can write code, draft documents, research a topic, scaffold a prototype, and debug a problem faster than most teams can finish writing a decent ticket. But faster building doesn't automatically mean better product decisions. That's the part I keep coming back to. For decades, software teams optimized around delivery. Requirements, design, development, QA, release. Waterfall softened into Agile. Agile grew into DevOps. The practices changed, but the assumption underneath stayed pretty stable: building software is expensive, so plan carefully before you start. That made sense because, for a long time, it was true. Now that assumption is breaking. AI is doing to software what calculators did to accounting. It isn't eliminating the job. It's moving the job up a level. The syntax, boilerplate, first draft, and some of the debugging are getting offloaded. The work doesn't disappear. The bottleneck moves. Learning is still expensive Here's what didn't get cheaper: understanding what people actually need getting stakeholders aligned deciding what evidence would change your mind putting something real in front of users reading the signal without fooling yourself The old question was: Can we build it fast enough? The new question is: Do we understand the problem well enough? That sounds like a small shift, but it changes the work. It changes what strong engineers spend time on. It changes what product people need from engineering. It changes how teams should define "done." If the code ships but nobody learns anything, did the team actually move forward? Sometimes yes. Often no. Users don't know until they can touch it People are not great at specifying requirements up front. Not because they're difficult. Because they're human. Most of us don't know how we feel about something until we can react to a version of it. A mockup. A prototype. A rough slice. A real workflow with sharp edges. So the fastest pat

Long-running workflows look simple when you first build them. Something happens. A few systems exchange data. Everything completes. Done. At least that's the expectation. Reality is very different. The biggest thing I underestimated was time. Not execution time. Elapsed time. Because once workflows start running for hours, days, or continuously, strange things start happening. APIs become temporarily unavailable Data changes halfway through the process Retries arrive much later than expected Someone manually updates a record Another system processes things in a different order Nothing is broken. But everything is slightly different from when the workflow started. Early on, I assumed workflows were transactions. Start. Execute. Finish. Now I think of them as conversations between systems. And conversations can get interrupted. Another thing I underestimated: State changes. You might start processing an order that is "pending". Ten minutes later, another system marks it as "cancelled". An hour later, a retry comes in from an earlier step. If your workflow only thinks about data, weird things happen. Because the world has changed while the process was still running. Long-running workflows also expose assumptions you didn't know you made. Like: this API will always respond quickly data will arrive in order users won't modify records manually retries will happen immediately Those assumptions survive in testing. Production removes them quickly. One thing that changed how I build these systems: I stopped asking: "Will this workflow finish?" And started asking: "What state will the world be in when it finishes?" Because those are two very different questions. Most problems in long-running systems aren't caused by one big failure. They're caused by lots of small changes happening while the workflow is still alive. And if you don't account for that, eventually the workflow finishes successfully and still produces the wrong outcome. This is something we think about constantly

A new member has joined the fulgur family. fulgur-chart — a CLI that takes Chart.js v4-compatible JSON specs and renders deterministic SVG/PNG charts. No browser required. https://github.com/fulgur-rs/fulgur-chart Two things make it different: it doesn't spin up a browser, and for a fixed version, font, and rendering options, the same JSON input always produces byte-identical output. This post covers why I built it, a timing coincidence that made me feel like I was on the right track, and how to use it. Why I wanted graphs in PDFs fulgur and fulgur-chart are built around one idea: AI agents should be able to generate documents that look good . There are three steps to that argument. First, Markdown isn't expressive enough. For client-facing reports, plain Markdown often undersells otherwise strong content. Second, visual quality is persuasive. A well-formatted report lands differently than a wall of text. Third — and this is the one I keep coming back to — in many business workflows, PDF carries more institutional weight than a Markdown file or a transient web page . That authority has two dimensions. There's a cognitive one: PDFs read as "serious documents." Proposals, reports, invoices — the format itself signals credibility. And there's a technical one: PDF can support digital signatures, encryption, and archival profiles such as PDF/A. That's the ground flpdf covers, a pure-Rust PDF toolkit modeled on qpdf's workflow. So the goal is always PDF, not HTML, not a web page. That's what fulgur is for. And a polished report needs charts. But Markdown can't draw charts. Which brings me to a problem I already knew was coming: the Chart.js library requires JavaScript to run . fulgur has no browser and no JS runtime, so there was no path to running Chart.js directly. The design choice: no JS engine The obvious alternative was to embed a JavaScript runtime. I could either run Chart.js with a compatible Canvas implementation, or build a JavaScript renderer that consumes Cha

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AI is booming. New use cases are emerging each day. To capitalize on the technology’s potential, enterprises require data at scale. In many cases, though, the relevant information is blocked or unstructured, which limits its use by AI models. To understand this challenge, consider the foundation of the web itself. The web was not designed…

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At least one malware developer is adding text about nuclear and biological weapons to their spyware, in an effort to stop automatic AI analysis. Details : The _index.js payload begins with a large JavaScript block comment containing fake system instructions and policy-triggering content. Because it is inside a comment, it does not affect JavaScript execution. The runtime skips it. The real malware begins after the comment with a try{eval(…)} wrapper around a large character-code array and a ROT-style substitution function. This header appears designed for AI-mediated analysis, not for Node, Bun, or Python. It attempts to derail scanners or analyst copilots that feed the beginning of a file to a language model without clearly isolating the content as untrusted data. In weak pipelines, this can cause refusal behavior, prompt confusion, context pollution, or premature classification before the scanner reaches the actual malware...

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