Ideas, systems, and the engineering behind them.
Explore technical investigations, mental models, engineering history, and the systems that shape technology.
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Steelmanning and Strawmanning: Building Arguments That Hold
Why defeating a weak version of someone's view proves nothing, and how restating the strongest version first makes your own arguments sharper and fairer.
A strong place to startMental Model · 5 minGoodhart's Law: When the Measure Becomes the Target
Why any measure, once it becomes the goal people are judged by, stops accurately measuring the thing it was built to track.
A strong place to startMental Model · 6 minFalsifiability: The Test for Real Information
A claim only carries weight if you can say what evidence would prove it wrong. Learn to tell testable claims from statements that can never lose.
A strong place to startWorth Exploring
Questions, investigations, and ideas worth following
Post-Mortem: The Retry Storm That Looked Like a Capacity Problem
A failure analysis of a dependency outage where well-intended retry logic amplified load and delayed recovery.
Field Note: A Latency Budget Is a Design Constraint
A short observation on why latency budgets make distributed design conversations more concrete.
Investigation: What Should an AI Evaluation Actually Measure?
An open investigation into useful evaluation signals for AI systems that operate inside real products.
Ways to Think
Models that travel across systems, leadership, economics, and public life
Steelmanning and Strawmanning: Building Arguments That Hold
Why defeating a weak version of someone's view proves nothing, and how restating the strongest version first makes your own arguments sharper and fairer.
Deconstruction
Taking systems apart intellectually
How Queue Backpressure Works
A deconstruction of queues as shock absorbers, pressure signals, and hidden failure surfaces in distributed systems.
Engineering History
Historical engineering decisions connected to modern lessons
ARPANET Packet Switching
ARPANET's packet-switched design helped establish a model for resilient digital communication across unreliable links.
Learning Path
Curated routes through related knowledge
Foundations of Systems Thinking
A route through concepts, mental models, and articles for reasoning about complex software and infrastructure systems.
Knowledge Library
Durable concepts, principles, and reference material
CAP Theorem
During a network partition, a distributed data system must choose how it trades off consistency and availability.
Consensus
Consensus is agreement under uncertainty: multiple participants decide on one value even when messages and machines may fail.
Containers
A container packages an application process with its filesystem and runtime assumptions while sharing the host kernel.
Explore the Map
Follow connections through the knowledge system