I’ve spent the last few weeks alternating between my living room, a noisy coffee shop, and a shared office desk, testing several budget AI noise-cancelling earbuds against my long-time reference: the Sony WH-1000XM4. The question I wanted to answer was simple but practical: can cheap AI earbuds realistically replace a pair of premium over-ear headphones for hybrid work? Spoiler: the answer...
Fine-tuning GPT-style models on proprietary customer data is one of those tasks that promises huge value—better, more...
I used to dread the monthly cloud bill email. A spike in egress charges would arrive like clockwork after a product...
Buying an enterprise AI observability tool is one of those decisions that looks simple on a feature sheet and quickly...
I’ve spent the past year benchmarking vector databases as part of larger semantic search projects, and one thing...
I’ve spent the last few years building and evaluating machine learning systems for real teams, so when customers ask...
I’ve spent years testing gadgets and poking at the settings screens most people never touch. Smart home gear can make...
I’ve spent years testing and explaining how software actually behaves in the wild, and bias in AI-powered hiring tools is one of those topics where nuance matters. On paper, an automated resume screener or an interview-sentiment model promises efficiency and consistency. In practice, those same...
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I’ve been obsessed with the idea that real intelligence doesn't have to live in the cloud. Watching devices that run for years on coin cells or tiny LiIon packs do genuinely useful, low-latency inference has felt like a slow-moving revolution for the last few years. TinyML — machine learning...
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I’ve been tracking the slow, steady shift toward passwordless authentication for years now — testing products, probing security claims, and watching organizations wrestle with the trade-offs. Passwordless is no longer a futuristic checkbox; for many enterprises it’s a practical way to reduce...
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I’ve spent years testing AI tools, writing about their quirks, and helping teams pick the right tech that actually fits their day-to-day work. Choosing an AI assistant for your team isn’t just about picking the model with the highest benchmark — it’s about matching capabilities to workflow,...
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I want developer pipelines that are secure, fast, and simple to understand. Over the years I’ve seen teams over-engineer CI/CD so much that it becomes the riskiest part of their product: secrets scattered in variables, build steps that run as privileged, and complex umbrella scripts no one dares...
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I’ve spent years building and securing cloud-native apps, and one lesson keeps coming back: even a single small virtual machine (VM) exposed to the internet can become your weakest link if you don’t harden it. This guide walks you through a pragmatic, step-by-step approach to hardening a small...
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I get asked a lot: can you trust OpenAI’s API with sensitive business data? As someone who tests and writes about cloud services and security, my short answer is: “it depends.” But that’s not very useful on its own. Below I walk through a practical, evidence-based risk checklist you can use...
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I’ve spent years helping teams balance two competing forces: keeping cloud bills from spiralling out of control while preserving — or even improving — application performance. It sounds like a compromise in principle, but with the right measurement and a practical checklist you can achieve...
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I spent a week traveling for work with only a pair of budget earbuds in my bag. No expensive over-ears, no backup wired headset — just a compact case, a USB-C cable, and whatever the manufacturer promised on the box. The experiment was simple: treat those earbuds like my only audio tool for...
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I’d been waiting to put a Pixel Tablet through its paces because I keep thinking about the same question I hear from readers and fellow creators: “Is the new Pixel Tablet worth it for creative pros on a budget?” I tested it for a week as my primary sketching, photo-editing, note-taking and...
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