How to Read an Institutional Map
A walk through the relationship explorer using a fictional republic — what the boxes and arrows mean, and what a diagram like this can and cannot tell you.
Writing
Everything on the site, newest first: essays, notes, atlases and experiments.
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Identity over time
Questions about what makes something persist through change — and an unexpected echo of them in software.
Backoff and Jitter Playground
Adjust an exponential backoff schedule and watch what happens when two dozen clients retry at once — with and without randomness.
Idempotency, and Why Retries Need It
A network can't tell a client whether its request failed or only its reply did. Idempotent operations make that ambiguity safe to retry through.
Retries are inevitable
Over a network, a client that times out cannot know what happened. So it will retry — and the system must be built to survive that.
The Ship of Theseus
If every plank of a ship is replaced, one at a time, is it still the same ship? A compact statement of the puzzle and its best-known variant.
A Specimen of the Reading Layout
Every typographic element an article on this site can use — headings, lists, quotations, code, tables, maths, notes and citations — shown in one place.
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