标签：#load

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. PsiQuantum has a plan to make a massive quantum computer out of light The machine that could change the world will be housed in a room that looks like a data…

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. What Anthropic’s latest AI discovery does—and doesn’t—show —James O’Donnell When Anthropic announced last week that it had found a new window into its models’ “internal thoughts” as they reason through answers,…

I keep coming back to java.util.ServiceLoader . I have used it to put a JSON layer behind a contract, so the core code carries no direct dependency on any particular JSON library and I can swap the implementation without touching callers. The same shape works for JWT handling, where the concrete library might be jose4j or another JOSE implementation, and you can easily find other decoupling use-cases. The motivation is always the same: the application should depend on a capability, not on a vendor. A while back I wrote about exactly that idea in Rediscovering Java ServiceLoader: Beyond Plugins and Into Capabilities , where the argument was to treat ServiceLoader as capability discovery rather than a plugin system. That piece hit the limitation everyone hits — the no-argument constructor — and worked around it with a default constructor plus a dynamic proxy that built the real object through a factory on each call. It works, but it is indirection bolted on after the fact, not a design. This post is the part I never pinned down back then: turning that workaround into a small, explicit pattern. The running example below is a mock payments system, with Stripe and PayPal specializations, because it is compact enough to show end to end. The JSON and JWT cases cited can be built with the same structure. The two limits ServiceLoader leaves you The first is the no-argument constructor. Whatever ServiceLoader instantiates must have a public, parameterless constructor. My StripePaymentService takes an API key, so it cannot be the class ServiceLoader loads — not unless I bolt on some init-after-construction step, which I would rather avoid. The second is selection, or rather the lack of it. ServiceLoader gives you every implementation it finds, in roughly classpath order. There is no id, nothing to prioritise on, and no way to ask whether a given one even applies in the current environment. With two backends on the classpath and only one configured, working out which to use is

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Sperm donors need limits, says a European fertility group Ties van der Meer doesn’t know how many siblings he has. The 47-year-old was conceived at a private fertility clinic using sperm…

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Anthropic found a hidden space where Claude puzzles over concepts The AI firm Anthropic has got the clearest glimpse yet at what’s really going on inside large language models as they…

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Four nuclear reactors hit a big milestone in the US —Casey Crownhart I was really looking forward to July 4, and not just because I love a poolside barbecue. This year…

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Why worms (and microbes) are catching on as a manure pollution solution Anthony Agueda, a third-generation California dairy farmer, pulls a rake through a bed of dark, wet wood chips to…

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Your family’s $300 stake in OpenAI Sam Altman’s proposal that Americans should share in the wealth created by AI is back in the spotlight, with reports that he is discussing giving…

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. South Korea’s hottest new bachelors are chip workers Baek, a 35-year-old manager at the South Korean semiconductor titan SK Hynix, was enrolled in a matchmaking company a year ago. In a…

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. The UK’s generational tobacco ban might not work. I’m supporting it anyway. —Jessica Hamzelou As the parent of two little girls, I often think about how their childhood is different from…

The product drop had been planned for months. The direct-to-consumer subscription business had run three separate load tests, provisioned extra capacity for the launch window, and staffed a warroom across two time zones. The drop itself went cleanly. Two hours in, an unrelated video from a creator with a large following mentioned the product without warning, and the sign-up flow collapsed under a rush of new members for twenty-eight minutes. Customers were told the site was busy and to try again later. Some did. Most did not. The refund exposure was manageable. The customer acquisition exposure was not. What went wrong is not the interesting question. The system was under-provisioned for a specific traffic shape it had not seen before, and the team fixed it. The interesting question is what happened seven weeks later. A weather event redirected a wave of app traffic in an entirely different sector, at midnight on a Tuesday, without any warning. That system held, because a small group of engineers had spent those seven weeks quietly rebuilding assumptions about when peak load happens and what it looks like. The lesson from the product drop was not "provision more capacity for product drops." The lesson was that the mental model of peak load as a scheduled event had stopped being useful. This is another post in our series on the engineering layer underneath enterprise strategy. The previous post ( Sovereignty Versus Efficiency ) argued that sovereignty has become an architectural property that procurement cannot solve on its own. This post makes an analogous argument about load. Across banking, media, retail, travel, restaurant chains, and sport, the architectures built to survive named events are increasingly the wrong architectures for the traffic these businesses now routinely encounter. The discipline required has moved closer to what telecommunications engineers have always done, while the cost models have not caught up. What peak load used to mean For most of th

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. LLMs are stuck in a groupthink groove. This startup is trying to get them out. Open up your chatbot of choice—Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini—and type “Give me a random number between 1…

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Claude Science is Anthropic’s newest flagship product At an event for pharmaceutical executives, biotech founders, and researchers yesterday, Anthropic announced Claude Science, a major new product intended to support scientific research…

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. AI agents are not your “coworkers” Imagine coming in to work to learn that a new underling will report to you. The worker is not a person but an AI tool—one…

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. The inevitable weakness of metrics There are plenty of useful things a metric can reveal. There are even more that it can obscure or corrupt. Like a lot of people bitten…

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Heat waves mess with your brain. Scientists are trying to figure out why. —Jessica Hamzelou It’s been hot in London this week. Really hot. A dangerous heat wave has hit Western…

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Europe’s extreme heat is shutting down power plants Europe is in the middle of a record-breaking heat wave, and the grid is being pushed to its limits as people turn to…

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Introducing: the Engineering issue We can’t fix everything, but we can be ambitious. We can take on the challenge of making the world better through human ingenuity. That’s what the new…

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. The $400 million machine powering the future of chipmaking It’s a bit of a schlep to get to the top of ASML’s newest machine. It’s about the size of a double-decker…

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Inside the world’s deepest and longest subsea road tunnel —Niall Firth I’m currently around 1,000 feet beneath the North Sea, in a dark, dank cave. It smells weird. And I’m increasingly…