Essays
An exploration of two mechanisms by which the human body's immune system turns against itself — autoimmune hemolysis triggered by Paxillus involutus mushroom toxins and the cytokine storm in COVID-19 — revealing how immune overreaction can be more deadly than the threat itself.
Essays
The story of Cybiko, a pioneering handheld device from 2000 that let teenagers form wireless mesh networks spanning 300 meters and connecting up to 3,000 users — years before Bluetooth gaming or modern social networks.
Programming
Modern image and video formats like JPEG, HEIC, and AV1 have made identical content occupy dramatically different file sizes. This article breaks down how each compression standard works and why the evolution from JPEG to AV1 represents a fundamental shift in how we encode visual information.
Health
A medical professional explores the mechanisms behind anxiety disorders, panic attacks, and obsessive-compulsive disorder through the lens of evolutionary biology and positive feedback loops, offering practical evidence-based coping strategies.
Essays
An exploration of the Sony Produce 100 and 200 — specialized Japanese word processors (wapuro) from the late 1980s that were often mistaken for laptops, designed specifically for the unique challenges of Japanese text input.
Security
A security researcher discovers that a clothing store's gift card system uses sequential numbering with no rate limiting, allowing him to find 177,000 rubles worth of unused gift cards in just 5 minutes of brute-forcing.
Essays
The Wiren Board engineering team shares a detailed case study of how they investigated and solved battery swelling in their WB-UPS v.2, ultimately redesigning the entire device into the much-improved WB-UPS v.3 with smart charging, Modbus RTU interface, and parallel operation capability.
Essays
A deep dive into the Robotron 1715M, a vintage East German computer from the 1980s with a Z80-clone processor, exploring its hardware, software, character encoding quirks, retro gaming, and using it as a modern Linux terminal via serial connection.
Essays
The story of how Honeywell's flagship DPS-88 mainframe failed catastrophically due to electromigration after engineers replaced gold conductors with copper to cut costs, leading to the company's exit from the computer market.
Essays
An alternative history exploring what the internet would look like today if the Gopher protocol had prevailed over the World Wide Web -- from text-only menus and phlogs instead of social media to the absence of banner ads.
Essays
A beginner-friendly guide to Kubernetes covering its architecture, core components like Pods, Deployments, and Services, and why it has become the industry standard for container orchestration.
Essays
Cloudflare engineers discovered a rare race condition bug in Go's ARM64 compiler where asynchronous preemption during split stack pointer adjustments caused stack unwinding crashes, fixed in Go 1.23.12 and later.