Recent content on mbrt blog
I wrestled current 1 LLMs into behaving like my childhood AI hero: here’s what worked, what didn’t, and why. Uno is my favorite character from my favorite Italian childhood comic PKNA . He’s the friendly and sarcastic AI helping Donald Duck in adventures spanning 56 issues in the mid ’90s. My first attempt at re-creating him was a complicated Excel spreadsheet in my early…
I processed a large fraction of the Internet on a single machine, trying to find some valuable but forgotten domain names to buy (probably 25 years too late). Here’s the story of what I found and how I did it, and not the story of why I decided to try, because I don’t know myself. Spoiler alert : If you just want to know whether there is indeed something, and you should scramble to…
I was frustrated by the gap between stateless and stateful applications in the cloud. While I could easily spin up a stateless application as a “serverless” function in any major cloud provider and pretty much forget about it, persisting data between requests was a game of pick two among three: cheap, strongly consistent, portable. Could I solve portability and lack of transactions…
What is a design document? When is it useful to have one? How to make it useful? These are the questions I’m going to address in this post. The goal is to provide some bite sized, easy to remember guidelines. My promise to you is that after this post, you’ll be faster and more effective in making and reviewing designs. This is a written version of a talk I gave at my current employer.…
Running a Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) organization correctly is difficult and expensive. Spare the frustration, perhaps what you need is Sysadmins. Since the term was coined by Ben Treynor in 2003 at Google, lots of ink was spent on praising SRE practices. Not enough on when it is appropriate to have SREs. This post is a take on that angle. Disclaimer: I was an SRE at Google and this piece…
This is the story of me trying to win a game of chess against my brother. A single freaking game. What’s so special about it? Am I good at chess? Not at all. Did I improve at my game in the process? Also no. Is it a story about “the journey rather than the destination”? Not really. Did I at least have fun in the process? Not so sure. This is the story of me trying to be…
Over the last year, at work I had multiple chances to debug how containers work. Recently we had to solve some networking problems a customer had with Kubernetes , and I decided I wanted to know more. Once the problem was solved, I spent more time on investigating what is actually going on under the hood. After seeing the wonderful Eric Chiang and Laurent Bernaille talks, and reading through the…
Introduction In February 2014 I had a very unpleasant surprise after coming back home from a weekend in Berlin. Me and my girlfriend found out our apartment upside down because of burglars. We suffered the loss not only of many of our belongings, but worse, of our safety. We didn’t feel safe in our home and we didn’t feel safe to leave it - not even for half an hour - for the fear to…
I’ve been playing around with Rust for a year and a half, and the best part of it, like many others say, has been the very helpful community. There are a lot of online resources that help you to get started: the Rust book , the Rustonomicon and many blog posts and stack overflow questions . After I learned the basics I felt a bit lost though. I couldn’t find enough resources for…
This was published in the Diary of a reverse-engineer as a guest post: Keygenning with KLEE