Posts tagged: infrastructure
How I Stopped Burning GitLab's 400-Minute Quota — A Self-Hosted Runner on My Own Box
GitLab's free tier is 400 CI minutes a month — fine for occasional commits, hostile if you post daily. I swapped the shared runner for a self-hosted one on my own machine. The quota became irrelevant. This post is the first publish through the new pipeline.
What IP Prefixes Measure — And Why 100,000 Is a Big Deal
How the number of IP prefixes an ISP announces reveals the true size of their network.
Unlimited Bandwidth and Unlimited Tokens — They're the Same Lie
How ISPs and LLM providers both sell "unlimited" based on the same oversubscription math.
Transit vs Peering — The Economics of Internet Connectivity
Why some networks pay each other and others exchange traffic for free.
Tier 1 and Tier 2 Networks — The Internet Backbone Hierarchy
How the internet's core networks are classified and why it matters for your connection.
Singtel vs Simba — What You Actually Pay For in a Fibre Plan
Why one ISP costs $42 and another costs $30 for 10Gbps, and what the price difference actually buys you.
SGIX and Internet Exchanges — Where Networks Meet
How the Singapore Internet Exchange keeps local traffic local and why it matters.
Oversubscription and "Unlimited" Marketing — The Hidden Math of Broadband
Why "unlimited" internet isn't unlimited and how ISP math keeps the pipes from bursting.
How Submarine Cables Made Tiny Singapore a Global Internet Hub
Why a city-state of 5.6 million became one of the most connected places on earth.
Hardware Bottlenecks — Why Your Wi-Fi Caps Your Speed, Not Your Plan
Why upgrading to 10Gbps won't make your laptop any faster and what actually limits your throughput.
Auditing Your Internet Connection — What Every Packet Reveals
How to inspect your internet connection from the command line and understand what each hop means.
June 2026 to December 2030 — The Acceleration Timeline
A month-by-month engineering timeline from the Agentic Takeover through Physical Convergence, Proto-AGI, Automated Science, and the Baseline Shift of 2030.
Where Your Prompt Goes: Tracing a Packet from Singapore Through Submarine Cables to the API Server
Tracing the full path of an API request from a Singtel fibre connection in Singapore, through GPON, BRAS, and submarine cables to the inference server.
Static Blog vs WordPress — A Real-World Comparison
My blog runs on a Babashka static site generator deployed to GitHub Pages. Here's how it compares to WordPress across cost, performance, maintenance, and workflow.
Will LLM Tokens Become Like Bandwidth — Abundant and Cheap?
Mapping the submarine cable story to LLM inference — competition, open-source, and whether tokens will ever be "unlimited" like bandwidth.
Every Layer Has a Router — Hurricane Electric (Layer 3) and OpenRouter (Layer 7)
Hurricane Electric routes packets; OpenRouter routes inference calls. Same business model, different layer of the stack — and both win by being the default pipe.
Why Google and Meta Can Undersell Everyone — The Cross-Subsidization Moat
How Google, Meta, and SpaceX sell products below cost because adjacent revenue streams subsidize them — and why pure-play competitors can never catch up.
Hurricane Electric — The Company That Sells the Internet, Explained
How Hurricane Electric (AS6939) operates the largest IPv6 backbone, sells IP transit, peers freely, and why they matter more than hyperscalers for raw internet connectivity.
How to Read a Submarine Cable Map — And Why Singapore Has So Many Cables
A practical guide to reading submarine cable maps, understanding landing stations, cable routes, and why Singapore is one of the most connected places on earth.
GPON Optical Signal Levels and Singtel BRAS Topology
Mapping the full GPON signal path from ONT to OLT to BRAS, with practical dBm thresholds for Singtel fibre broadband.
utxoengineer.com — The Independent BSV Engineer Shipping Production Infrastructure
Bridget Doran has built the first live Teranode block explorer, a data attestation API (Traceport), BRC-77 identity demos, and libp2p gossipsub tooling — all as an independent BSV engineer. A look at the infrastructure she ships and what it tells us about the ecosystem.
The Intent Gap — Why Machines Need Bitcoin to Be Economic Actors
LLMs can generate output but not intent. This is not a philosophical problem — it is an infrastructure problem. IPv6 CGA identity, BSV IP-to-IP micropayments, and Indelible persistent memory give machines the economic agency their architecture lacks. The "glue" is not a metaphor; it is the overlay stack.
Google vs SpaceX: Infrastructure Economics Compared — A Platform Security Lens
A technical breakdown comparing Google's centralized hyperscale data centers against SpaceX's distributed LEO satellite mesh, analyzing infrastructure value, compute economics, and what this means for platform security and DevSecOps decision-making.