I’ve been tracking npm supply-chain incidents long enough to know that most successful attacks share the same fingerprints — if you know what to look for, you can catch many of them before they ever touch your CI. I’m not talking about exhaustive auditing or complex formal verification here: these are quick, practical heuristics I use when a dependency looks new, a CI alert pops up, or a...
I recently spent weeks comparing three deployment paths for large language models: using hosted API services (OpenAI,...
Hello — I’m Anaïs Dupont. Over the years I’ve spent time inside engineering teams, poking at data pipelines, and...
I’ve been testing compressed vector embeddings for search pipelines for a while now, because the promise is...
I spent the last few weeks pushing a Pixel Tablet through a set of pro-photography chores: rapid culling, raw...
I bought a cheap smart plug for my kitchen lamp last month. It was under £50, tucked into a sale, with shiny app...
I spent a month living with the Tilt Five mixed-reality dev kit on my desk, on my coffee table, and — embarrassingly...
I’ve been testing compressed vector embeddings for search pipelines for a while now, because the promise is irresistible: save storage and speed up retrieval while keeping relevance high. In practice it’s a balancing act. Below I share hands‑on experiments, the failure modes I’ve seen, and...
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I spent the last few weeks pushing a Pixel Tablet through a set of pro-photography chores: rapid culling, raw adjustments, masked edits, and a handful of “magic” fixes that promise to save time. My aim was simple: figure out whether the Pixel Tablet’s on-device AI is fast and private enough...
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I bought a cheap smart plug for my kitchen lamp last month. It was under £50, tucked into a sale, with shiny app screenshots and hundreds of five-star reviews. On the face of it, it solved a small convenience problem: turn the lamp on and off from my phone, schedule it, and integrate with my voice...
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I spent a month living with the Tilt Five mixed-reality dev kit on my desk, on my coffee table, and — embarrassingly often — in the middle of the living room carpet while I debugged raycasting math at 2 a.m. The kit is delightful: the holographic glasses are lightweight, the retrofitted...
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I wanted a private, offline note-taking assistant that I could carry around on a cheap, low-power device. The Raspberry Pi 5—when paired with the right model and software—lets you do exactly that: run a local language model that summarizes, tags, and searches your notes without ever sending...
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I’ve helped teams evaluate incident management tooling from both an engineering and product perspective, and one question keeps coming up: can we replace PagerDuty with a cheaper alternative without sacrificing reliability or security? The short answer is: yes — in many cases — but it depends...
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I’ve spent a lot of time testing biometric systems and threat modelling authentication flows for mobile apps and kiosks. Face biometrics are convenient and increasingly common, but they invite a wide range of “liveness” or spoofing attacks — from simple printed photos to sophisticated...
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I remember the first time I had to migrate an authentication system for a business unit: months of planning, frantic late-night debugging, and a growing pile of post-it notes stuck to the monitor. Passwords were everywhere—hard-coded in scripts, reused across subsystems, and guarded by brittle...
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I’ve been living with a privacy-first smart home setup for a couple of years now, and every week I find one more way to stop sending data to cloud services while keeping — and sometimes improving — the convenience I actually want. If you care about privacy, security, and resilience, you can...
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I test a lot of tiny devices—fitness bands, smart rings, and the occasional prototype smartwatch—and one question always comes up: how do you meaningfully evaluate on-device AI when battery life is the limiting factor? It’s tempting to point to a single number (inference time, mAh drained)...
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