Thoughts

Notes on software engineering, distributed systems, and the future of human productivity.

An Approximation That Never Decides

I wrote it down as a choice: the fast distance formula or the exact one. That was wrong. A formula that only shortlists can be as wrong as its speed allows, and choosing between three of them turned out to hinge on a number that runs opposite to throughput.

Giving an Inbox to Each Agent

Password resets, invoices, and support replies still arrive by email, and my agents live on HTTP. Mailingest is the Rust mail platform I built so that an inbox costs one API call: an address whose mail shows up as a signed webhook.

When the Vectors Live in a Bucket

Object storage is the cheapest durable bytes you can buy and the worst place to search a million vectors. I forked VecPuff and taught its index to keep one bit per dimension resident, so a query pulls a full vector from S3 only when the cheap guess is too close to call.