The $1k AWS Mistake
A cautionary tale about AWS VPC networking, NAT Gateways, and how a missing VPC Endpoint turned our S3 data transfers into an expensive lesson. I’ve been using AWS since around 2007. Back then, EC2 storage was entirely ephemeral and stopping an instance meant losing all your data. The platform has come a long way since […]
Multimodal Diffusion Language Models for Thinking-Aware Editing and Generation
🌌 Introduction Demo: Parallel text-image generation in action. While thinking-aware generation aims to improve performance on complex tasks, we identify a critical failure mode where existing sequential, autoregressive approaches can paradoxically degrade performance due to error propagation. To systematically analyze this issue, we propose ParaBench, a new benchmark designed to evaluate both text and image […]
A down detector for down detector’s down detector
Downdetector’s Downdetector’s Downdetector A tiny independent status checker. All Systems Operational Downdetector’s Downdetector is responding normally from all regions. CHECKS BY REGION Region Status HTTP Latency London, GB â—Ź Up 200 320 ms Sydney, AU â—Ź Up 200 468 ms New Jersey, US â—Ź Up 200 504 ms Last checked: 2 minutes ago – 3 […]
I just want working RCS messaging
November 18, 2025 I’m in over a month now with non-working RCS on my iPhone 15 Pro. Apple blames the carriers, the carriers tell me it’s not them (mostly T-Mobile since I have good contacts there). They tell me they can’t really do anything about iPhones not working on RCS, go back to Apple. This […]
Neopets.com Changed My Life (2019)
Ah, Neopets. Many people my age (aka millennials) know about the kid’s website where you made a Neopet to take care of. You named it, fed it, and even could give it a pet of its own. Not to mention the hundreds of cool games you could play on there. Just the name brings back […]
I made a down detector for down detector
Checks by region Region Status HTTP Latency Loading region checks…
Lucent 7 R/E 5ESS Telephone Switch Rescue
I am still recovering from the fairly challenging logistical project of saving a Lucent 5ESS. This is a whale of a project and I am still in a state of disbelief that I have gotten to this point. Thanks to my wife, brother, and a few friends for their help and the University of Arizona […]
Cloudflare outage on November 18, 2025 post mortem
On 18 November 2025 at 11:20 UTC (all times in this blog are UTC), Cloudflare’s network began experiencing significant failures to deliver core network traffic. This showed up to Internet users trying to access our customers’ sites as an error page indicating a failure within Cloudflare’s network. The issue was not caused, directly or indirectly, […]
Ford can’t find mechanics for $120K: It takes math to learn a trade
Farley complained that “we don’t have trade schools anymore,” reports Avi Zilber in the New York Post. The Ford CEO’s grandfather was one of the company’s early employees, hired to work on the Model T. “We are not investing in educating a next generation of people like my grandfather who had nothing, who built a […]
Having Fun with Complex Numbers: A Real-Life Journey for Upper Elementary Studen
Having Fun with Complex Numbers A Real-Life Journey for Upper Elementary Studentsby Dr. Qiujiang Lu Book description Welcome to the amazing world of math—made just for kids like you! Are you between 8 and 12 years old? Then get ready—this book is your gateway to unlocking the true power of math! Regular numbers represent positions—called […]