operations
What You Already Paid For and Haven't Switched On
A customer asked what database monitoring would cost. Ten minutes in it was clear they already had it. Entitled, not deployed, nobody had looked.
operations
How Much of Your Platform Are You Actually Using?
Fifteen questions, about four minutes. Scores your estate across five areas and tells you what I'd do next in each one. Nothing is sent anywhere.
Ai
RAG Is a Distributed Systems Problem
Five stages in the path, and only the last two involve the model. Retrieval is memory bound, generation is GPU bound, and they do not belong on the same hosts.
architecture
Which Inference Engine, and Does It Matter?
They implement the same ideas. The difference is what each optimises for and what it costs you to run, which is a less exciting answer than people want.
architecture
What Does a Token Actually Cost You?
The arithmetic is easy. The denominator is where models fall apart, and the biggest lever has nothing to do with hardware.
architecture
Smaller Numbers, Faster Tokens
Quantisation is usually framed as a quality tradeoff. The more useful framing is bandwidth, because decode re-reads every weight for every token. Tags: architecture, operations
architecture
A Quarter of the Card Is Not a Quarter of the Capacity
Passthrough, time-sliced vGPU and MIG do different things to the thing that actually limits you. And fractional slices don't divide capacity the way the spreadsheet says.
architecture
Your GPU Is Not Slow, It Is Waiting for Memory
Inference behaves like two workloads with opposite requirements, sharing the same silicon. Once you see that, the strange utilisation numbers start making sense.
architecture
Tenancy Design
Of all the decisions in a VCF build, tenancy is the one made worst. Not because it's hard, but because of when it gets made.
Deen
Ramadan and Fasting in Australia
The same rules as my parents' Ramadan, in very different circumstances: what the Qur'an says, what breaks a fast in each school, why Sydney mosques start on different days, and the likely 2027 dates.
Deen
Prayer (ṣalāh): How and Why
What actually happens on the prayer mat, five times a day: the words, what they mean, the times in Sydney, and where the Ḥanafī, Mālikī, Shāfiʿī, Ḥanbalī and Jaʿfarī schools do it differently.
Deen
Belief in God, the Prophets and the Unseen
Every Muslim creed starts with one God, unlike anything. The arguments begin after that: His hand and Throne, seeing Him, the created Qur'an, free will. Five schools of theology, set side by side.