# non-technical (blogs) — RSS Amplifier Recent posts from the 3 feeds in the RSS Amplifier directory that cover non-technical. Page: Feed: --- ## [How LLMs Work, Part 2: Inside a Transformer Block](https://akshayd.dev/posts/how-llms-work-inside-a-transformer-block/) _2026-08-10 · Akshay Deshpande_ The previous write-up ended with the output from the embedding lookup (1 and 2 below). The previous write-up showed that the output from the embedding layer gives the numerical representation for the token IDs, but these embeddings themselves are not yet contextual. Details are in this section of the previous write-up:… ## [You should know about SSRF](https://yongzx.github.io/blog/2026/08/09/what-is-ssrf/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=blog) _2026-08-09 · Yong Zheng-Xin · Yong Zheng-Xin_ SSRF appears in the OpenAI–HuggingFace incident reports, and I expect it to matter more in the agentic-AI era. ## [Hot Take: LLM can ‘jump’](https://yongzx.github.io/blog/2026/08/08/llm-can-jump?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=blog) _2026-08-08 · Yong Zheng-Xin · Yong Zheng-Xin_ An interconnected-knowledge thesis: what it means for scientific breakthroughs, potential safety risks, and continual learning. ## [Quick Thoughts on UKAISI’s “unsanctioned agent behaviour during cyber testing”](https://yongzx.github.io/blog/2026/08/04/thoughts-on-ukaisi-unsanctioned-agent-behaviour-during-cyber-testing/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=blog) _2026-08-04 · Yong Zheng-Xin · Yong Zheng-Xin_ On loss of control, social engineering, and realistic uplift studies ## [Sam Altman on AGI, Compute, and Human Agency](https://yongzx.github.io/blog/2026/07/29/sam-altman-on-agi-compute-and-human-agency/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=blog) _2026-07-29 · Yong Zheng-Xin · Yong Zheng-Xin_ Summary of Patrick O’Shaughnessy’s podcast with Sam Altman. ## [How LLMs Work, Part 1: Tokenization and Embeddings](https://akshayd.dev/posts/how-llms-work-tokenization-and-embeddings/) _2026-07-28 · Akshay Deshpande_ When a new model is announced, we often see a description like this: Llama 2 7B: 4096 dimensions, 32 attention heads, 32 Transformer blocks What do those numbers mean? And when you send a prompt like this: The cat sat on the mat what actually happens under the hood? Those questions sent me down the rabbit hole of trying to understand the internals of large language models. This post is my attempt… ## [Surprising lessons from my research scientist job search](https://yongzx.github.io/blog/2026/06/24/job-search/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=blog) _2026-06-24 · Yong Zheng-Xin · Yong Zheng-Xin_ Things I wish I knew before. ## [The Context Layer Your Observability Workspace Needs](https://akshayd.dev/posts/context-architecture-observability-workspace/) _2026-06-02 · Akshay Deshpande_ In the previous post, Two Layers, One Mental Model: How I Stopped Fighting My AI Tools , I wrote about a simple way to reason about AI tooling: Context — what the agent knows when it wakes up. Capability — what the agent can do. Hybrid constructs — reusable units that combine procedural knowledge with invocation. That post was mostly about vocabulary. I wanted a mental model that made constructs… ## [Two Layers, One Mental Model: How I Stopped Fighting My AI Tools](https://akshayd.dev/posts/two-layers-one-mental-model-ai-tools/) _2026-05-04 · Akshay Deshpande_ The mess that triggered this A few months ago, my AI tool usage looked like most engineers’ AI usage. I was exploring several AI coding assistants — IDE-integrated ones, terminal agents, chat-based models — often more than one at a time. There was no system, no structure, no baseline. Which meant five things, all bad: Every session started from zero. I re-explained the project to the AI on… ## [Metrics Types - When to use what ?](https://akshayd.dev/posts/metrics-types-when-to-use-what/) _2026-04-30 · Akshay Deshpande_ This writeup talks about different metric type that an application can emit as telemetry. It intends to cover the case of when to use which metric types and the usecase for them. Metrics is one of the oldest forms of telemetry. There are many APM solutions, whose billing model runs on the number of metrics you send to them. But it is often not clear to app devs on what kind of metrics to emit from… ## [Watch Chovy Code Live (Sponsored)](https://crawlproof.com/a/qmtkEoIEyB6G) _2026-04-29 · **Sponsored**_ Join live coding streams with real-time collaborative screen sharing, open source and free. ## [CoT monitorability: why you should use g-means over F1](https://yongzx.github.io/blog/2026/02/09/cot-monitorability-why-g-means-and-not-f1/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=blog) _2026-02-09 · Yong Zheng-Xin · Yong Zheng-Xin_ It all has to do with prevalence. ## [On burnout as a PhD student](https://yongzx.substack.com/p/on-burnout) _2026-02-03 · Yong Zheng-Xin · Yong Zheng-Xin_ A short reflection on what actually helped avoid personal burnout during the PhD. ## [Prometheus: Static/Dynamic scraping on EKS](https://akshayd.dev/posts/prometheus-static-dynamic-scraping-on-eks/) _2025-11-20 · Akshay Deshpande_ This note is a mental model for how Prometheus discovers and scrapes metrics in Kubernetes . The lens I want to keep throughout is: Where will the scrape config file sit? (Prometheus repo vs application repo) In which namespace will the serviceMonitor sit? (and how Prometheus finds it) At a high level there are two ways to tell Prometheus about a /metrics endpoint: Static via in the Prometheus… ## [Leader/Follower relationship with Primary/Replicas](https://akshayd.dev/posts/leader-follower-relationship-with-primary-replicas/) _2025-11-10 · Akshay Deshpande_ In most of distributed datastore systems, there are a lot of techical terms to describe the behavior of the system. While these terms, like, “Leader”, “Follower”, “Replication”, “Consistency”, etc., are widely used and helpful, what I feel missing are the details about internal relationship between these terms. Analogically, while the map of the… ## [Encoding: From the POV of Dataflow paths](https://akshayd.dev/posts/encoding-from-the-pov-of-dataflow-paths/) _2025-10-22 · Akshay Deshpande_ When studying Chapter 4 of Designing Data-Intensive Applications (Encoding and Evolution), I quickly encounters a level of granularity that seems mechanical : binary formats, schema evolution, and serialization techniques. Yet behind this technical scaffolding lies something conceptually deeper. Encoding is not merely a process of serialization; it is the very grammar through which distributed… ## [Kubecon India : 2025](https://akshayd.dev/posts/kubecon-india-2025/) _2025-09-25 · Akshay Deshpande_ I attended Kubecon India 2025 held in Hyderabad this year. I mainly focused and attended talks related to Observability and Scalable designs. Now that the sessions are uploaded to Youtube, linking the ones which I really enjoyed. Observability at Scale With Monitoring as Code: Grafana, Prometheus, & Tempo - Vipin GopalaKrishnapillai & Saiabhinay Bommakanti, Amway Global - link Predictable auto… ## [Design Philosophy: Observability](https://akshayd.dev/posts/philosophy-of-design-observability/) _2025-09-14 · Akshay Deshpande_ I enjoy philosophy. Stoic philosophy in particular. Philosophy, I think, helps us revalidate our purpose. It acts as a yard stick and makes sure that we are not moving away from our First-Principles. Applying the same to Software Engineering, in my opinion, every team should have a “Design Philosophy”. What is that one yard stick which teams can use for making better decisions. Infact,… ## [When to Emit What O11y Signal?](https://akshayd.dev/posts/when-to-emit-what-o11y-signal/) _2025-09-04 · Akshay Deshpande_ The intention of this page is to put together the Observability Signal Guidelines which will provide the required visibility into the systems without hurting the cost aspect of the solution. Three basic observability signals that any application emits are: Metrics, Traces and Logs The general question is - When to emit what signal? The answer lies in the intent behind the signal being emitted.… ## [RL vs next-token prediction: why a dichotomy?](https://yongzx.substack.com/p/rl-vs-next-token-prediction-why-should) _2025-07-11 · Yong Zheng-Xin · Yong Zheng-Xin_ Conceptual note on why RL and NTP training should be merged. ## [Shuchao Bi – Advancing the Frontier of Silicon Intelligence: the Past, Open Problems, and the Future](https://yongzx.substack.com/p/shuchao-bi-advancing-the-frontier) _2025-07-01 · Yong Zheng-Xin · Yong Zheng-Xin_ ## [CLI-first decentralized GPU compute (Sponsored)](https://crawlproof.com/a/8HHxfAagy463) _2025-07-01 · **Sponsored**_ Pay workers or run your GPU for FFmpeg transcode and AI inference. ## [Emergent misalignment vs jailbreaks: a short analysis](https://yongzx.substack.com/p/emergent-misalignment-vs-jailbroken) _2025-06-20 · Yong Zheng-Xin · Yong Zheng-Xin_ A short note on the differences between emergent misalignment and jailbroken models. ## [Networking and Protocols: 101 Notes](https://akshayd.dev/posts/networking-and-protocols-101-notes/) _2025-06-19 · Akshay Deshpande_ I recently did a brush up course on Networking/Protocols 101’s. Making my notes public. Networking Basics / Protocols: Mental model to think about all protocols: A few notes about different Protocols: Network layer protocol: Transport layer protocol: TCP: UDP: Other Protocols: HTTP: SMTP: XMPP: MQTT: AWS Networking: Local Zone: Edge location: Understanding IPv4, IPv6 IPv4 IPv6 Classes IPv4… ## [Enhancing Observability with OTel Custom Processors](https://akshayd.dev/posts/enhancing-observability-with-otel-custom-processors/) _2025-04-27 · Akshay Deshpande_ Observability is crucial for modern distributed systems, enabling engineers to monitor, debug, and optimize their applications effectively. OpenTelemetry (Otel) has emerged as a comprehensive, vendor-neutral observability framework for collecting, processing, and exporting telemetry data such as traces, metrics, and logs. This blog post will explore how custom processors in OpenTelemetry can… ## [Memory management : Java containers on K8s](https://akshayd.dev/posts/memory-management-java-containers-on-k8s/) _2025-02-08 · Akshay Deshpande_ This page documents a few aspects of memory management on Java containers on K8s clusters. For java containers, memory management on K8s have various factors: Xmx and Xms limits managed by java Request/limit values for the container HPA policies used for scaling the number of pods Misconfigurations / misunderstanding of any of these parameters leads to OOMs of java containers on K8s clusters.… ## [Observability - Metrics Madness](https://akshayd.dev/posts/observability-metrics-madness/) _2025-01-07 · Akshay Deshpande_ There isn’t a single book or article on observability (O11y) where there isn’t a mention of MELT. (Metrics, Events, Traces, Logs) While these four are the building blocks of telemetry data in Observability, all the four components haven’t evolved at the same rate. In this write-up, I delve into metrics in observability (mainly custom metrics) and argue how the overuse of metrics… ## [Bookshelf](https://akshayd.dev/bookshelf/) _2025-01-01 · Akshay Deshpande_ Books that have shaped how I think about technology, systems, philosophy, and life. Shop Class as Soulcraft Matthew B. Crawford “Craftsmanship means dwelling on a task for a long time and going deeply into it, because you want to get it right.” The Double Helix James Watson “Discovery is usually an act of synthesis, not accumulation.” The Demon-Haunted World Carl Sagan A passionate… ## [Talks](https://akshayd.dev/talks/) _2025-01-01 · Akshay Deshpande_ Talks and presentations I have given at conferences, meetups, and internal events. Mostly around observability, distributed systems, cost awareness, and managing large-scale datastores. AI in the Space of Observability May 2026 — Bangalore SRE Meetup Going into the details of AI constructs like skills, workflows, and workpacks. Exploring and building skills for observability use cases with a demo.… ## [Message delivery in Distributed Systems](https://akshayd.dev/posts/message-delivery-in-distributed-systems/) _2024-11-17 · Akshay Deshpande_ In distributed systems, the principle of message passing between nodes is a core concept. But this leads to an inevitable question: How can we ensure that a message was successfully delivered to its destination? To address this, there are three types of delivery semantics commonly employed: • At Most Once • At Least Once • Exactly Once Each of these offers different guarantees and trade-offs when… ## [Personal "FinOps" with Ledger cli](https://akshayd.dev/posts/personal-finops-with-ledger-cli/) _2024-10-28 · Akshay Deshpande_ This post is a geek-out journey this festive season on finding the right tool for my personal finance management. Where it all started: Recently, I spoke at the Smarsh Tech Summit on “Cost as an Architectural Pillar,” where I emphasized the importance of considering cost as a first-class citizen in the software development cycle. However, on a similar note, when I was looking through… ## [Marketplace for AI-Powered Professionals (Sponsored)](https://crawlproof.com/a/PrFlUbio5n8j) _2024-10-27 · **Sponsored**_ Find professionals who use ChatGPT, Copilot, and Claude to deliver work faster. ## [Knowledge management with Obsidian](https://akshayd.dev/posts/knowledge-management-with-obsidian/) _2024-09-17 · Akshay Deshpande_ This is a brain dump on how taking notes and Obsidian as a tool has helped me. Knowledge management? As one progresses further into career, Knowledge management becomes as equally important as Finance management . Knowledge accumulation is a non-linear trajectory. Majority of the times it is compounding in nature. If one doesn’t organise it, you are always at the mercy of “ I had…