architecture
Sovereign Cloud for Regulated Industries: Four Requirements, Not One
Data residency, operational, jurisdictional and technical sovereignty are separate questions. Most estates satisfy two and assume they have satisfied all four.
Deen
The Hanafi Umbrella: Deobandi, Barelvi, and the Category Error
Hanafi is a school of law. Deobandi and Barelvi are movements inside it. Three names, but not three parallel choices, and the confusion does real work.
Deen
What Sharia Is (and Isn't)
The word, the sources, the five rulings, the aims, the ḥudūd and the doubt maxim, and what any of it asks of a Muslim living under Australian law. Sunni and Shia methods side by side, with the weak reports labelled.
Deen
Character (Akhlāq) and Iḥsān: The Third Dimension
The third part of the Hadith of Jibrīl is iḥsān. Here is what the Qur'an and sound hadith say about character, from anger and the tongue to envy and justice, with every report graded.
Deen
Family, Neighbours and Community: The Rights of Others
What the Qur'an and the sound hadith say we owe parents, spouses, children, relatives, neighbours of any faith, orphans, guests, the sick and the dead, with the weak sayings sorted from the sound.
architecture
The Business Case: Building a TCO Model That Survives the Questions
Three numbers decide every infrastructure business case, and most models get two of them badly wrong. Here is how to build one a sceptical CFO cannot dismantle.
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