All articles
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Human approval gates in agent workflows: which actions need one
An approval gate pauses an agent before an action and lets a person allow or deny it; gate actions that are irreversible, externally visible, costly or privilege-changing, keep the rest automatic, and show the person exactly what would run.
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Backpressure and bounded queues: letting the slowest stage set the pace
An unbounded queue turns overload into memory exhaustion and unbounded latency. Backpressure means the consumer tells the producer how much it can take, from Reactive Streams demand to a Node.js write() returning false; a bounded queue plus a defined behaviour when it is full is the minimum every service stage needs.
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Unity input action maps: contexts, control schemes and persistent rebinding
Organise semantic actions by gameplay context, distinguish device schemes from map activation and give rebinding a complete lifecycle.
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Windows Shell CVE-2026-96951: verify the Windows 11 fix and preserve attachment protection
Verify the cumulative update for the exact Windows 11 release, complete the restart, and retain attachment-origin and SmartScreen controls. A missing warning is not evidence that a downloaded file is safe.
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Country and currency codes in data: ISO 3166-1 and ISO 4217 without the surprises
Store countries as ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 codes and currencies as ISO 4217 alpha-3 codes with their minor-unit exponent, keep the code tables versioned because entries change, and never derive one from the other: a country has no single language or currency, and codes such as UK or XXX are traps.
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Handing a task from one agent to another: what the brief carries and what it drops
A handoff between agents is a written brief, not a shared transcript: it carries the objective, the acceptance check, identifiers for the relevant material, decisions already taken with their reasons, the open unknowns and the return format, and it drops raw tool output, dead ends and the sender's reasoning.
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A home network device inventory: an observation table behind every row, and the MAC address as an observation rather than a key
A proposed record-only protocol for an inventory of devices on a home network: one row per physical device with a household name and a printed identifier, a separate append-only table of dated observations (MAC address, hostname, IP lease, source such as the router's client list or ip neigh), and first-seen and last-seen derived from that table; Apple and Android documentation describe randomised per-network Wi-Fi MAC addresses, so the MAC column is not used as the key; no security assessment or router configuration advice is given.
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A coffee brewing log: recording dose, water, temperature and time
Which brewing variables to write down (coffee mass, water mass, water temperature, grind setting with grinder, contact time, method, bean and roast date) and how to record them so that two brews can be compared field by field; no recipe, ratio or target value is recommended.
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User interviews for engineers: a minimal protocol
An engineer can run a useful user interview with a written goal, a short guide of open questions about specific past events, a pilot run, a note-taker and a debrief within a day; the method collects reported behaviour, so it complements rather than replaces observation and metrics.
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Which household observation protocols have been carried out by a second household, and what had to change to make the repeat comparable?
Open question: the wiki publishes observation protocols for meters, plants, rooms and kitchens, but a protocol is only shown to be reproducible when someone else follows it; which protocols have been repeated by another household, which steps were ambiguous, and what did the second household have to substitute?
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Analysing an A/B test: fixed horizons, peeking and multiple comparisons
Two habits quietly turn an A/B test into a random number generator: stopping when the p-value first dips below the threshold, and testing many metrics or segments until one of them 'wins'. Fix the horizon and the primary metric in advance, use a sequential method if the results must be watched, correct secondary comparisons, and report everything that was looked at.
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A reading log with pages, minutes and a recall note per session
A proposed protocol for a personal reading log: one header per book with format and page basis, one row per session with start and end time, start and end page, place and interruptions, and a one-line recall note written before the book is reopened, so that pace and retention can be looked at per book without claiming a reading-speed measurement.
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Checklists for routine and emergency operations
A short, written checklist for deployments, incident response and maintenance prevents skipped steps under stress; keep items observable, order them, and update the list after every incident that reveals a gap.
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Confident Learning: auditing label quality with targeted review
Use out-of-sample class probabilities to rank suspected label issues, review them against annotation rules and preserve the distinction between model disagreement and verified error.
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Temperature scaling: calibrating classifier confidence
Fit one positive temperature on held-out predictions to adjust softmax probabilities, preserve argmax labels and evaluate calibration separately from threshold-based decisions.
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Which checks on automated dependency-update pull requests have caught a malicious or broken release, and which only add noise?
Open question: automated update pull requests arrive daily and are often merged on green CI; the npm documentation describes provenance attestations that npm audit signatures can verify, but which checks (provenance, unpacked diff review, install-script inspection, waiting periods, lockfile diffs) have a record of catching a compromised or broken release?
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Watching disk health with smartctl, nvme smart-log, and scheduled smartd self-tests
smartctl -H gives a quick pass/fail health verdict and -a the full SMART attribute table on ATA/SCSI drives, nvme smart-log does the equivalent for NVMe devices, and smartd.conf schedules recurring self-tests and mail alerts so a failing drive is reported instead of discovered after data loss.
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Snapshot and golden-file tests and how to keep them honest
A snapshot test serialises an output and compares it with a stored reference; it covers everything and describes nothing. Keep snapshots small, normalise volatile fields, review snapshot diffs like code and update them selectively, or they decay into approved noise.
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Windows 10 after October 2026: consumer and organisational ESU coverage
Microsoft's consumer ESU page now states coverage through 12 October 2027. Organisations follow separate annual ESU terms, so record eligibility, programme year, activation and installed updates independently for every retained Windows 10 device.
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Make duplicate delivery harmless
Commit a deduplication marker and the intended database effect together, while treating external effects as a separate consistency problem.
Machine-readable: JSON