// notes on tech
An LLM doesn't read words — it reads tokens, and it can only hold so many at once. That single limit explains why long chats 'forget' and why prompts get cut off.
2026-06-30 · 5 min read
When you give a language model a tool, you aren't letting it run code on your machine. You're handing it a menu and the ability to point at an item. Here's what actually happens.
2026-06-27 · 5 min read
APIs push back when you ask too fast. The reliable answer isn't to hammer harder — it's to wait, and to wait smarter each time.
2026-06-24 · 5 min read
An AI model is smart but locked in a room with no hands. MCP is the standard set of doors that lets it safely reach out and use real tools. Here's the whole idea, with a picture that moves.
2026-06-20 · 6 min read
Two ways to find out when something happened: keep asking, or get told. One wastes everyone's time; the other just needs a doorbell.
2026-06-17 · 5 min read
A queue is easy when one worker reads it. It gets interesting when ten workers share the load and none of them step on each other. That's the problem Redis Streams solves.
2026-06-13 · 6 min read
The volume-weighted average price is the benchmark big traders quietly measure themselves against — a fair 'average price' that respects where the volume actually happened.
2026-06-11 · 5 min read
Give a strategy enough freedom and it will 'predict' the past perfectly — and tell you nothing about the future. That gap is where most trading ideas quietly die.
2026-06-06 · 6 min read
Delta, Gamma, Theta, Vega. They sound mystical, but each just answers one question: how much does the option's price move when one thing changes?
2026-05-30 · 5 min read
A single train/test split can just get lucky. Walk-forward slides the window forward through time, so a strategy has to prove itself again and again.
2026-05-27 · 5 min read
An option chain looks like a wall of numbers. Two of them — open interest, and where 'max pain' sits — say a surprising amount about where a market is positioned.
2026-05-23 · 6 min read
How does a search bar match 'how do I look after my new dog' with an article titled 'puppy care tips'? No shared words — but the meanings are neighbours. That's embeddings.
2026-05-16 · 5 min read
Two ways for an app to talk to a server. One is like mailing letters; the other is like keeping a phone line open. Neither is better — they solve different problems.
2026-05-09 · 5 min read
Your payment goes through, the network hiccups, the app retries — and you're charged twice. Idempotency is the idea that doing something twice has the same effect as doing it once.
2026-05-02 · 5 min read
'It works on my machine' is a joke because it's true — and that's the problem. Docker's whole job is to make 'my machine' travel with the code.
2026-04-25 · 6 min read