An optocoupler is a part I’d seen in schematics for a while and quietly skipped over. There’s an LED pointed at a photo-sensitive transistor with a dashed line between them. The dashed line is the entire point: the two halves of the part are not electrically connected. The signal crosses as light, over a few hundred microns […]
If you’ve ever read an e-book with your hands tucked under a cozy blanket: apparently there are page-turner remotes just for that. And in this post, we’ll DIY it with an ESP32-based device called Lilka.
I built a minimal FastAPI “customer support reply drafter” with TF-IDF retrieval and Langfuse tracing. You’ll see exactly what context the model used, where latency came from, and what each request cost, plus the trade-offs behind the design.
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is a pattern that fixes the knowledge cutoff and hallucination problems by giving an LLM access to the right data at answer time. Instead of asking the model to “remember everything”, RAG lets it look things up first, then answer.
It all started when I saw Prisma put “serverless” and “no cold starts” in the same sentence describing their “Prisma Postgres” product 🤔
As a cybersecurity analyst, you are tasked with investigating a data breach targeting your organization’s Openfire messaging server.
Attackers have exploited a vulnerability in the server, compromising sensitive communications and potentially exposing critical data.
Today, we dive into a host-based forensics investigation − a curious case of a breach inside the enterprise environment of a company called TechSynergy.
They have detected an anomaly after an employee engaged with an unexpected email attachment. This triggered a series of covert operations within the network, including unusual account activity and system alterations.
LLMs are powerful. And expensive. Every token counts, and if you’re building something that uses an LLM API (Claude, OpenAI, Gemini or PaLM, Mistral, etc.), malicious users can abuse it to burn through your credits. This is especially true for apps that take user input and feed it to the model. The trick is that […]
Today we’re looking at the XLMRat malware. It is a remote access trojan (hence the RAT part) built to be small, sneaky, and stupidly persistent. It typically rides in via phishing or social engineering, often disguised as something mundane, like a JPG or TXT file. It targets Windows systems and speaks fluent PowerShell. It’s popular […]
AI-assisted coding feels like magic. You type what you want, and out comes working code. (well, maybe after a few hours of setup − but still) Like all magic, though, it has a cost. And right now, that cost is mostly hidden − even as the invoices show up every month. What makes it work […]