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A few years ago I was the data engineer on a mobile game soft launch when Firebase Analytics quietly started dropping events past its 1M/day cap. We didn't catch it for days. That experience pushed me to build Rawbbit — an open-source, Apache 2.0, self-hosted analytics pipeline that lands raw events as Parquet in your own object storage. This is the story of why hosted analytics fails at scale, why I chose NATS + Parquet + BigQuery external tables, and what I deliberately left out.

AI-based coding assistants are making developers measurably faster. Those same assistants are also making products less reliable and more incident-prone. Of course, the "10x" in the title is not literal, but the trend is hard to ignore. The fix isn’t to put a band-aid on it or move slower. It’s to rebuild the quality layer that the old, pre-2024 workflow used to have.

Smart lighting company Philips Hue has launched its first wired wall modules. Installed behind existing wall switches, the new devices bring non-smart lights into the Hue ecosystem for the first time. Hue also announced new Play table and floor lamps that are more affordable versions of its Signe series, along with upgrades to its E14 […]

Relativity Space, the rocket company led by former Google executive Eric Schmidt, was picked to launch NASA's Aeolus payload to Mars in 2028, as reported earlier by TechCrunch. Under a new public-private partnership, Relativity Space will provide the "spacecraft, rocket, and cruise operations" to fly Aeolus to Mars, where the payload will "provide the first […]

Just as last week was ending, the US government forced Anthropic to pull its two newest models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, citing national security concerns after Amazon researchers allegedly found a way to bypass Fable 5’s guardrails.  Cybersecurity researchers have since signed an open letter calling the move dangerous, and Anthropic itself noted the same jailbreaks exist in other models. So is […]

Fusion startups have raised $7.1 billion to date, with the majority of it going to a handful of companies.

The Quest Begins (The “Why”) Picture this: you’re sitting across from a recruiter, the whiteboard glows like the Death Star’s trench, and your brain feels stuck in a loop— the dreaded infinite while of silence. You’ve got the solution in your head, but the moment you start typing, the interviewer’s eyes glaze over. I’ve been there. I spent an entire interview sweating over a simple array‑partition problem, only to realize later that I never told them why I chose that approach. The feedbac...

Originally published on lavkesh.com I've been watching robotics closely and I'm struck by the real progress being made, not the sci-fi stuff but practical machines that can actually get work done The combination of hardware and AI is what's driving this change, with better sensors, faster processors, and machine learning that can interpret sensor data, robots can now understand their environment and adapt Consider the role of computer vision in this stack - models like YOLOv8 run ...

Originally published on lavkesh.com Azure gets a lot of hype, and most of it is justified, but what actually matters is what you need to know to use it effectively. When I first started working with Azure, I was overwhelmed by the sheer number of services available. For example, App Service, Functions, and Cosmos DB are all great options, but they serve different purposes. App Service is great for hosting web apps and APIs, Functions lets you skip servers entirely, and Cosmos DB is u...

If you're building out a home lab and need shared storage, you'll eventually hit the SAN vs NAS question. Both solve "storage that multiple machines can reach," but they do it differently — and the wrong choice will haunt your weekend troubleshooting sessions for years. This guide focuses on used/refurbished enterprise gear , which is where the real value is. New prosumer NAS appliances are fine, but for $300–600 you can run production-grade hardware that Fortune 500 companies retired last y...

This is a submission for the June Solstice Game Jam What I Built I built a short browser based text adventure with wanderer-flow.de , the flow builder I created for interactive chat experiences. In the game, the solstice has stopped working and ancient writings declare that a chosen one must restore it. The player steps into that role, chooses a weapon, and enters a small absurd adventure full of strange dialogue and logic puzzles. A central part of the game is an encou...

LLM judge cost is the share of your eval bill spent grading agent output instead of producing it. To control it, run a 40-line offline pre-gate that triages every span with four deterministic rules and escalates only the uncertain tail to the expensive judge. On one trace this cut judge cost share from 50% to 16%. LLM judge cost is the line item nobody puts on the FinOps dashboard. You add an LLM-as-judge to grade every agent span, you sleep better, and three weeks later the eval layer is ...

If you copy all day between browser tabs, Slack, and your IDE, you know the pain: copy → switch app → forget what you copied → hunt history . Pluck is my answer: a Windows clipboard manager where every copy becomes a visible bubble on the edge of your screen. What makes it different Visual clipboard — recent clips stay on screen, not buried in a menu Drag-to-paste — drop a bubble onto any window (with - target highlight) Fast actions — left/right/middle click + modifiers, all...

Originally published on lavkesh.com As a team leader, you can't avoid conflicts forever. They'll arise eventually, whether it's about a project, approach, or personalities. Ignoring them only makes things worse, causing people to take sides and the conflict to spread. The moment you notice tension, address it directly, but not aggressively or publicly. Acknowledge the issue and express your desire to help resolve it. People respect directness more than avoidance. Before intervenin...

Originally published on lavkesh.com I've seen many engineers learn to code by building small projects, but real systems don't work that way. Once you're managing data from millions of users, responding to traffic spikes, ensuring your databases don't lose data during hardware failures, and coordinating across distributed servers, small-project thinking falls apart. System design is the art of thinking at scale, asking how to handle a thousand requests per second instead of ten, what hap...

This release brings Load Test Schedules — a long-requested feature that lets you run a load test automatically at specific times, so you no longer need to kick it off manually. We've also extended the Container Spec file, which now supports more standard Kubernetes settings and gives you the flexibility to pass secrets and other arguments via environment variables. Highlights: • ⏰ Scheduled load test execution • ☸️ Enhanced Kubernetes Container Spec support • 🔐 More flexible auth ...

Originally published on lavkesh.com When the clock is tight, code reviews slip off the list. I’ve watched teams spend months fixing bugs that a quick second look would have found in minutes. A review is more than a typo check. It pulls in the team's shared wisdom, uncovers hidden assumptions, and shows how others tackle problems. That insight outweighs a missing semicolon. Quality assurance is the core of a review. Does the code meet standards, survive load, and avoid security gap...

Mailgun is a popular transactional email API trusted by developers for reliable delivery. But how do you test that your Mailgun emails actually arrive, contain the right content, and work end-to-end in CI? This guide covers the full testing progression — from local development to automated Playwright tests in GitHub Actions. The app we're testing A Next.js API route that sends a verification email via Mailgun: // app/api/auth/signup/route.ts import Mailgun fr...

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We break down the current iPad lineup to help you figure out which of Apple’s tablets is best for you.

Years after initial tests, researchers are now racing to see if a vaccine developed in 2011 can help fight the current Bundibugyo outbreak in Congo.

We've lost something in the past 15 years. Netflix, Amazon, Disney, Apple; they've all convinced us that streaming is the best way to watch movies and shows at home. With everything at our fingertips, there's no need to run to Blockbuster for the weekend's entertainment, or wait for a DVD rental to arrive in the […]

When Colin Farrell was doing press for the first season of the detective series Sugar, he had to be very careful with how he spoke. Sugar is a story about a quirky private detective, but it's also secretly a work of science fiction, something that doesn't become clear until halfway through the season. "I knew […]

Where's the Trump phone? We're going to keep talking about it every week. We don't have the phones we preordered yet, but this week we received unexpected news from Trump Mobile's media relations manager. If you've been following my reporting on the Trump phone, you'll know that Trump Mobile doesn't exactly keep open lines of […]

This is Optimizer, a weekly newsletter sent from Verge senior reviewer Victoria Song that dissects and discusses the latest gizmos and potions that swear they're going to change your life. Opt in for Optimizer here. On TikTok, the tanned youths are explaining why they no longer wear sunscreen. In one video, a young man films […]

Luca Guadagnino's film about OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Artificial, has reportedly been dropped by Amazon MGM. The film, which stars Andrew Garfield and covers the rollercoaster five days in 2023 spanning Altman's termination and reinstatement as CEO, had been in the works for about a year. The cast also includes A Complete Unknown actress Monica […]

NTS Radio and Swedish audio company Atonemo have teamed up on a dedicated player that brings NTS's genre-defying mixes and streaming stations to almost any stereo or speaker setup. And, like Atonemo's existing Streamplayer, you can also listen to your favorite streaming services with it, using AirPlay 2, Google Cast, Spotify Connect, or Tidal Connect. […]