Dependency cooldowns turn you into a free-rider
Against dependency cooldowns as a response to supply chain attacks
Cal Paterson
Cal Paterson's articles
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"Disregard that!" attacks
Why you shouldn't share your context window with others
Building LLMs is probably not going be a brilliant business
The Netscapes of AI
Is Tesla really more valuable than Toyota?
Why do some companies borrow and others sell shares?
S3 is files, but not a filesystem
"Deep" modules, mismatched interfaces - and why SAP is so painful
Take the tools out of 'Data', but don't take the data out of the tools
Using dataframes to write smaller, faster programs
There aren't that many uses for blockchains
Criteria for judging when a blockchain is applicable
Moat theory and it's discontents
Moats, mottes and baileys
An oral history of Bank Python
The strange world of Python, as used by big investment banks
It looks like a product but is secretly a subscription
The mental minefield of capex and opex
No general method to detect fraud
The parts of a convincing deception
We were promised Strong AI, but instead we got metadata analysis
How simple structured data trumps clever machine learning
Staying out of TTL hell
Cache strategies that don't trade-off correctness for speed
Where's the fastest place to put my server? How much does it matter?
Using my own web server accesslogs and public latency data to get a quantitative answer and why roundtrips are such a pain.
Firefox usage is down 85% despite Mozilla's top exec pay going up 400%
Mozilla is in an absolute state: high overheads, falling usage of Firefox, questionable sources of revenue and now making big cuts to engineering as their income falls.
Threat modelling case study: bicycles
How to avoid buying your bike again every 6-12 months and tips for how to apply the same reasoning to other things, like computers
Async Python is not faster
Async Python is slower than "sync" Python under a realistic benchmark. A bigger worry is that async frameworks go a bit wobbly under load.
The argument against clearing the database between tests
Some reasons why you might not want to remove data from the database between automated tests: speed, correctness, data growth issues and parallelism advantages
The troublesome "Active Record" pattern
How inappropriate data access patterns massively slow down programs and how the same problems arise with RESTful APIs.
Applying mypy to real world projects
Some hints and tips for getting started with Mypy and introducing it to existing projects
The Amazon premium
How the biggest cloud companies deliver the worst value
How a SQL database works
The details on how tables and indexes work. Rows, pages, the heap and indexes are all covered, both on-disk layout and querying.
Non-relational bear-traps
Problems people run into when they use a non-relational store (particularly when they don't have strong domain knowledge)
The Lycurgus cup
The Lycurgus Cup, an ancient relic from the late Roman Empire that changes colour depending on how it is lit.
Not wasting time with version control
Ways to reduce the amount of pain and suffering caused by having to develop code as a team
How to configure pip for fast installs of C code libraries
Some old tips for how to get pip to cache wheel files
My preferred agile heuristic
What agile should be about and how to judge that
Bookmarking
Long write-up of an old project I worked on for a while