System Architecture

Learn what toil is in SRE, how it affects operational work, and why minimizing it is crucial for efficiency and morale.

Google Cloud Bigtable is an HBase-compatible, enterprise-grade NoSQL database with low single-digit millisecond latency and limitless scale.

Why caching is a trade-off, not a solution Browser cache (HTTP headers, service workers, bfcache) CDN caching (edge, invalidation, cache keys) Application-le...

What makes a resilient system? It needs to be strong, but flexible. Pace Layers, sometimes called pace layering, is a framework created by Stewart Brand of the Long Now Foundation that explores how different parts of civilisation change at different speeds. Fast-moving layers like fashion bring novelty and experimentation, while slower layers like culture and nature provide stability and memory. Together, the layers support, reinforce, and challenge each other—creating robust, adaptable societies. Pace layers is a model I have come back to again and again. What is the Pace Layers Framework? The pace layering model has six levels, with each deeper layer moving more slowly than the one above it. In Brand's words: Fast learns, slow remembers. Fast proposes, slow disposes. Fast is discontinuous, slow is continuous. Fast and small instructs slow and big by accrued innovation and occasional revolution. Slow and big controls small and fast by constraint and constancy. Fast gets all our attention, slow has all the power. In short: the fast layers innovate, the slow layers stabilise. Brand argued that all durable dynamic systems have this sort of structure—it’s what makes them adaptable and resilient. According to pace layering, the six layers of pace and size in the working structure of a robust and adaptable civilisation are: Fashion/Art Commerce Infrastructure Governance Culture Nature Pace Layering Example: Electric Scooters An example brings pace layers home to me. Here, I consider electric scooters, but you can take almost any innovation and think through the layers. Fashion/Art New scooter designs, colours, marketing campaigns, and influencer hype cycles. These come and go quickly—some stick, most fade. Commerce Scooter rental startups, pricing models, venture capital funding, and competition with bikes, cars, and other transport. Commerce runs slower than fashion, but still moves quickly through experimentation. Infrastructure Charging docks, scooter lanes, designated parking areas, and integration with city planning—all these take time. Cities and transport systems have to adapt, if electric scooters persist, for them to thrive rather than die out. Governance The laws and regulations surrounding scooters often lag behind the pace of commerce, including speed limits, taxes, penalties, incentives, safety requirements, age restrictions, or bans. Governance responds as the effects of scooters unfold. Culture Culture in the deep sense of how this changes mobility and ideas around travel. It may affect socialising, where people work and live, and what we choose to do as a society. Culture evolves slowly as habits and norms change in tandem with governance and infrastructure. Nature The environmental realities of scooters vs other transport means. Batteries, natural resources, long-term sustainability, and the effect on the climate. Applying the Pace Layers Model to AI Applying pace layers to the growth and development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is also instructive: Fashion: AI tools and interfaces change daily. Commerce: Models and capabilities change weekly or monthly. Companies compete on quarterly and annual cycles. Infrastructure: Investment, data centres and energy generation are being approved and built slowly. Governance: The rules, ethics, court cases, and legal challenges surrounding the regulation of AI content and companies are developing on a case-by-case basis. Culture: How AI changes work, employment, where people live, and power structures are all in progress. Nature: Effects on the planet, energy and climate take longer to play out. AI can feel like it's changing every day, yet its deepest consequences will play out over decades and centuries. Pace Layers and Time Hierarchy In his book The Clock of the Long Now, Brand also discusses time hierarchy in nature. He describes a coniferous forest: The needle changes within a year. The tree crown over several years. The patch over many decades. The stand over a couple of centuries. The forest over a thousand years. The biome over ten thousand years. The faster elements are constrained by the slower ones: the needle by the crown, the crown by the patch, and so on up to the biome. Yet innovation still percolates through the system via evolutionary competition. Occasionally, shocks—fire, disease, human activity—disrupt the whole structure, sometimes all the way to the biome. You can see this idea in my sketch on Time Hierarchy. Considering the Pace Layers Model I find pace layers thinking interesting as a way to differentiate between the fast and slower changes I see around me. It helps me make better sense of the world and see the age-old tussle between innovation and stability. Related Ideas to Pace Layers Also see: Time Hierarchy The Overview Effect The Overton Window: the range of politically acceptable ideas Human pace The Gartner Hype Cycle Marchetti's Constant The Destiny Instinct The S-Curve The Law of Unintended Consequences I revised my original pace layers sketch because I kept discussing it with people and thought it needed a better visual. Read more on Pace Layers at the Long Now

RNGD is FuriosaAI's second AI accelerator. Its Tensor Contraction Processor architecture offers unmatched performance and efficiency for data centers.

Stephen Wolfram explains the science of ruliology--studying what abstract rules do--and integral applications of the science in his own work.

Documentation for Cedar policy language

How we learned to stop worrying and love writeable root filesystems.

So that we may educate as well as horrify: the internals of our new Sprites execution platform.

Goodhart’s Law says that “when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”

How the Codex CLI and MCP turn the 'stale CMDB' problem into a solved reasoning task—starting with Kubernetes

Over the decades the number of Linux distributions has effectively exploded, from a handful in the late ’90s to quite literally hundreds today, not counting minor variations. There lately see…

If you’re gonna be a hacker eventually you’re gonna have to write code. And if you write code eventually you’re gonna have to deal with concurrency. Concurrency is what we call it…

In today’s Chromed-up world it can be hard to remember an era where browsers could be extended with not just extensions, but also with plugins. Although for those of us who use traditional Ne…

An important aspect in software engineering is the ability to distinguish between premature, unnecessary, and necessary optimizations. A strong case can be made that the initial design benefits mas…

The Internet has spoiled us. You assume network packets either show up pretty quickly or they are never going to show up. Even if you are using WiFi in a crowded sports stadium or LTE on the side o…

We’ve had privacy tech in the natural world for millennia. Can we bring it to our new digital world? In What destroyed ‘the right to be let alone’, Tiffany Jenkins in the Washington Post argu…

HTTP-like protocol

Storing the history behind AI-generated code in a simple sidecar folder.

A developer’s guide to cloud networking that won’t leave you drowning in acronyms

How building software with AI agents is reshaping engineering, moving from deterministic coding to probabilistic, agent-driven development.

or: Writing a Translation Command Line Tool in Swift.

A guide to tools and resources for joining the independent web movement. Discover blogging platforms like Pika, search engines that prioritize small sites, directories for finding like-minded creators, and more.

Secure container distribution for commercial software. License-aware auth, customer-specific credentials, and a hardened path from docker pull to paid delivery.

Git Source Code Mirror - This is a publish-only repository but pull requests can be turned into patches to the mailing list via GitGitGadget (https://gitgitgadget.github.io/). Please follow Documen...

A collection of bad practices in HTML, copied from real websites.

the P2P file sharing Network