Engineering Insights

Spring Cloud 2025.1.2 (aka Oakwood) Has Been Released

Deficient executive control in transformer attention

Comments

What a Mailman service shutdown reveals about the state of mailing lists in 2026

DreamHost is shutting down their hosted Mailman service on July 31. If you run a I'll be upfront: I built EMail Parrot, a privacy-first mailing list relay, and this Mailman is roughly 25 years old. That longevity is a credit to the project, but it The original Mailman model assumes email is mostly plain text and that threats are HTML email is the norm, and with it comes an entire passive tracking surface -- pixels, CSS-based trackers, fingerprinting links -- that Mailman passes through without i

Clifford’s (aka, Claire’s) Device in C and C++

Introduction If you’ve been programming in C or C++ for a while, you likely have heard of Duff’s Device that takes advantage of C’s often-derided “feature” where case blocks “fall through” into the next case (if any). Regardless of what you think of that, I only recently discovered that there’s another “device” known as Clifford’s Device (alternatively known as Claire’s Device). While the problem it solves is completely different from Duff’s, it uses on another of C’s quirks. Sometimes you ha

Bizbox Build Log — Week of 2026-05-31

Bizbox Build Log — Week of 2026-05-31 Headline: Two big bets landed in the same week — Workflows arrived as a proper first-class primitive, and the ClickUp human-approval loop closed end-to-end. The pieces are all there; now we stabilise. This is your weekly look at everything that shipped, the choices we made, the trade-offs we accepted, and the things we're still wrestling with. Pull up a chair. PR #86 · v2026.603.0 The biggest drop this week. @DennisDenuto landed Workflows as a company-s

How to Get Hermes Agent to Use AgentMail (And Why It's Harder Than It Should Be)

How to Get Hermes Agent to Use AgentMail (And Why It's Harder Than It Should Be) Someone on Reddit asked me this today, and honestly, we went through the exact same struggle. So here's the full breakdown of what's going wrong and how to fix it. You've set up AgentMail. You've got your API key. You've added it to ~/.hermes/config.yaml. Hermes says it can see the MCP AgentMail service running. But when you ask it to check your inbox... nothing. Or worse, it gives you a 403. This is one of the mo

[Boost]

Securing PostgreSQL, in the order an attacker would try things Dan Draper for CipherStash Jun 10 #postgres #security #database #tutorial 1 reaction Add Comment 7 min read

Don't Build That RAG Knowledge Base — Seven Reasons It Will Fail, and What to Build Instead

Companies Have Been Failing at This for 30 Years — AI Won't Change That by Itself Clients come to me and say, "We want to build a company-wide AI knowledge base." I used to take those projects on the spot. Today, nine times out of ten, my first move is to talk them out of it. It's not that knowledge bases are a bad idea. It's that we keep pointing the newest technology at a problem that has resisted every previous attempt for three decades. Consider what we know about how badly information ret