https://trybreakpoint.com/explainer/distillation-campaign https://trybreakpoint.com/explainers/distillation-campaign.png Adversarial distillation: how an LLM's encrypted reasoning was replayed back out Distillation trains a small "student" model on the outputs of a bigger "teacher". Labs do it to their own models to make the small, cheap versions. It… https://media.breakpoint.blog/distillation-campaign.mp4 2026-10-02 https://trybreakpoint.com/explainer/async-python-profiler https://trybreakpoint.com/explainers/async-python-profiler.png asyncio hides who called your slow query. Datadog's profiler fix: memcpy and a SIGSEGV handler A sampling profiler takes a snapshot of each thread's call stack every few milliseconds, and the function on top of the most snapshots is where the CPU… https://media.breakpoint.blog/async-python-profiler.mp4 2026-10-02 https://trybreakpoint.com/explainer/kernel-panic-logs https://trybreakpoint.com/explainers/kernel-panic-logs.png Kernel panic logs die with the machine. Jane Street's fix: pstore, /dev/kmsg, mlockall Jane Street stores kernel logs from every Linux host centrally, but the logs that matter most come from a failing disk or a kernel panic, which take out… https://media.breakpoint.blog/kernel-panic-logs.mp4 2026-10-02 https://trybreakpoint.com/explainer/claude-ai-faster https://trybreakpoint.com/explainers/claude-ai-faster.png Loop engineering: why Claude's perf loop counted instructions, not milliseconds In two weeks, more than 3,000 changes landed in claude.ai and the Claude desktop app with no customer-facing incidents or rollbacks, and the app got about… https://media.breakpoint.blog/claude-ai-faster.mp4 2026-09-26 https://trybreakpoint.com/explainer/typesafe-jev https://trybreakpoint.com/explainers/typesafe-jev.png Why your app waits seconds for an LLM to answer a yes/no question Your code needs three typed answers about a support ticket: is the customer angry, do they get a refund, which team takes it. A chat model writes a reply… https://media.breakpoint.blog/typesafe-jev.mp4 2026-09-26 https://trybreakpoint.com/explainer/dynamic-activation-steering https://trybreakpoint.com/explainers/dynamic-activation-steering.png Why activation steering can change the wrong AI answers An AI nudged toward pears can start putting them in unrelated fairy tales. Activation steering changes internal representations, but an intervention… https://media.breakpoint.blog/dynamic-activation-steering.mp4 2026-09-19 https://trybreakpoint.com/explainer/ketama-memory https://trybreakpoint.com/explainers/ketama-memory.png Why Cloudflare's consistent hash rings ate so much RAM Cloudflare's Pingora Backend Router accumulated hash points across weighted servers and feature-specific rings. A simple routing algorithm had become a… https://media.breakpoint.blog/ketama-memory.mp4 2026-09-19 https://trybreakpoint.com/explainer/notion-concurrent-editing https://trybreakpoint.com/explainers/notion-concurrent-editing.png Why pressing Enter makes Notion's CRDT harder Two people edit the same sentence. One presses Enter. Where should the other's new word go? https://media.breakpoint.blog/notion-concurrent-editing.mp4 2026-09-19 https://trybreakpoint.com/explainer/pace-the-frontier https://trybreakpoint.com/explainers/pace-the-frontier.png Dario Amodei's proposal to pace the AI frontier Dario Amodei of Anthropic argues that keeping AI safe means giving safety work time to catch up with rapidly improving models. https://media.breakpoint.blog/pace-the-frontier.mp4 2026-09-12 https://trybreakpoint.com/explainer/habitat-connection-pool https://trybreakpoint.com/explainers/habitat-connection-pool.png How OpenAI's Habitat storage scaled past connection pressure OpenAI's storage demand grew more than tenfold annually for three years. This explainer follows Habitat's event-loop stalls, connection-pool feedback… https://media.breakpoint.blog/habitat-storage.mp4 2026-09-12 https://trybreakpoint.com/explainer/pinterest-ssd-search https://trybreakpoint.com/explainers/pinterest-ssd-search.png Why Pinterest's vector search needs so much RAM Billions of embeddings make vector search a memory problem. Pinterest's Manas retrieval platform tackles it by changing how vectors are represented and… https://media.breakpoint.blog/pinterest-ssd-search.mp4 2026-09-12 https://trybreakpoint.com/explainer/compiled-bytes https://trybreakpoint.com/explainers/compiled-bytes.png Why 10% more C++ code made Figma builds 50% slower Figma's C++ codebase grew 10% over twelve months. Build times grew 50%. Growth https://media.breakpoint.blog/compiled-bytes.mp4 2026-09-07 https://trybreakpoint.com/explainer/pathfind-the-runbook https://trybreakpoint.com/explainers/pathfind-the-runbook.png How Stripe uses graph search to repair database fleets A replicated database keeps each shard on several machines and lets exactly one https://media.breakpoint.blog/pathfind-the-runbook.mp4 2026-09-06 https://trybreakpoint.com/explainer/interval-cache https://trybreakpoint.com/explainers/interval-cache.png Why rolling dashboards miss the cache at Netflix scale A dashboard showing "the last 3 hours" refreshes every 10 seconds. Almost all of https://media.breakpoint.blog/interval-cache.mp4 2026-09-05 https://trybreakpoint.com/explainer/outbreak-prediction https://trybreakpoint.com/explainers/outbreak-prediction.png How Google automates geospatial outbreak prediction Building a geospatial prediction model for a crisis takes specialist teams weeks: finding covariates across portals, cleaning them, guarding against… https://media.breakpoint.blog/outbreak-prediction.mp4 2026-08-30 https://trybreakpoint.com/explainer/dns-cache-diet https://trybreakpoint.com/explainers/dns-cache-diet.png How Cloudflare removed 100 TB from its DNS cache Cloudflare's public DNS resolver caches 250 billion answers at once, so every byte a cache entry wastes costs more than 250 GB of memory across the fleet.… https://media.breakpoint.blog/dns-cache-diet.mp4 2026-08-28 https://trybreakpoint.com/explainer/github-outage https://trybreakpoint.com/explainers/github-outage.png Inside GitHub's August 17 outage and retry storm On August 17, 2026, GitHub was down for 7 hours 47 minutes: github.com, authentication, Actions, APIs, pull requests, issues and Copilot, with roughly 20%… https://media.breakpoint.blog/github-outage.mp4 2026-08-24 https://trybreakpoint.com/explainer/pixel-watermark https://trybreakpoint.com/explainers/pixel-watermark.png How Datadog hides share links inside dashboard screenshots Datadog renders about a billion dashboard widgets a day, and people screenshot https://media.breakpoint.blog/pixel-watermark.mp4 2026-08-23 https://trybreakpoint.com/explainer/inventory-skip-locked https://trybreakpoint.com/explainers/inventory-skip-locked.png How Shopify moved inventory reservations from Redis to MySQL When a buyer clicks "Complete purchase", Shopify has to guarantee the item is https://media.breakpoint.blog/inventory-skip-locked.mp4 2026-08-23