Alcazar · Technical Blog

Technical notes, architecture writeups, and release stories.

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Leave the right message behind

Set up encrypted messages, files, and instructions for the people who would need them most if something happened to you.

See the dead man's switch

Claude Mythos is the first model Anthropic didn't really release

Apr 9, 2026

Claude Mythos looks less like a normal model launch and more like a warning shot. The biggest jump seems to be in cybersecurity and agentic coding, which matters for both software engineering and AGI timelines.

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How time-lock puzzles work

Mar 30, 2026

What time-lock puzzles are, how the classic RSA construction works, what hidden-order groups mean in plain English, and which alternatives researchers use instead.

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Hermes vs OpenClaw: what should you actually start with?

Mar 23, 2026

Hermes and OpenClaw are both self-hosted AI agent platforms, but they make different bets. Here is the simple version of which one to start with, what each is better at, and what the benchmarks do and do not really prove.

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What is the best agentic AI today?

Mar 20, 2026

OpenClaw, Pi, NVIDIA NemoClaw, NVIDIA Nemotron, LangGraph, GPT-5.4, and Gemini 3.1 Pro: here is our current best answer on what actually leads agentic AI right now.

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Wide logging: Stripe's canonical log line pattern

Mar 16, 2026

Canonical log lines turn each request into one dense, queryable event. Done well, they make debugging faster, metrics more flexible, and analytics far more useful.

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Whisper is no longer the whole answer: how to transcribe audio and video in 2026

Mar 15, 2026

The best transcription stack now depends on privacy, latency, jargon, and cost. Here is what the current benchmarks say, what practitioners actually use, and what I would pick.

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The best time to post on Hacker News

Mar 14, 2026

The honest answer is that timing helps, but not as much as people hope. Here is the practical advice, the official rules, and the etiquette that actually helps.

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Portable Secret is now open source

Feb 26, 2026

The generator can be saved as a single HTML file and used offline, including on air-gapped machines.

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Portable Secret: encrypted files in one HTML

Feb 23, 2026

A browser-readable container for encrypted text and attachments, with local key derivation and no server-side storage.

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Building a Hacker News digest around discussion, not headlines

Feb 4, 2026

Daily digests selected for comment quality, with thread summaries linked back to the original comments.

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Realtime updates without WebSockets

Jan 25, 2026

Long polling plus snapshot invalidation covers most realtime UI needs with less operational complexity.

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Designing better database IDs with UUIDv7 and typed public IDs

Jan 14, 2026

Time-ordered internal keys, typed public IDs, and checksums for safer APIs and easier debugging.

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