Network breakthrough: Amazon flat random networks

Network breakthrough: Amazon flat random networks

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A 2026 report by Wired shared that Amazon supposedly has developed a new kind of flat network architecture. It’s kind of a holy grail idea that people have tried before, but never been able to pull off well. This new architecture supposedly allows them to use 69% fewer routers and switches, and 40% less power at the massive Amazon Web Services (AWS) data centers. Yet provide 33% better throughput.

The core of the breakthrough is called resilient network graphs, or RNG. It’s a way to use random cable connections to make a network more efficient. It’s counter-intuitive, but researchers have long thought a more distributed or even random physical networking connectivity architecture would be faster and remove many bottlenecks often found in strict tree or ring hierarchies.
What finally makes it possible are two key innovations. On the hardware side is a device called a ShuffleBox, which randomizes physical cable connections between network components to make the network structure more efficient. It pairs that hardware with routing software called Spraypoint, a custom traffic-routing algorithm specifically designed to work within the RNG design. 

It’s about truly living

It’s about truly living

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Following Christ is not about just ‘avoiding being bad’. Nor is it just some big list of what you cannot do. It’s about following a way that lets us embrace a life of meaning and real freedom. Life as we are meant to live. A life of true joy. A life lived with others without shame or fear. Living the kind of interior peace and fulfillment that all the money, politics, fame, power, possessions, and fancy jobs cannot give. More than that, it’s living day by day in a personal relationship with an infinite God who loves you.

It is most especially true on how we should live with each other. To love our neighbors even if they do not love us. To treat others fairly in all aspects of our life. But even more so, to see the unique gifts and talents we have used rightly at the service of others. To help the poor, the orphan, the needy who sit outside our door so everyone has what they need. It shows us how to really correct wrongs by asking for forgiveness when we have hurt others and find peace when we forgive those who have hurt us. It frees us from being trapped in lives of bitterness, outrage, and revenge for a hurt that often clouds how we react to everyone in our lives.

Believing living a certain way will make your life better is an act of faith. Many dismiss the idea of faith. Despite what the modern world says, you act on faith all the time. Faith is essential and unavoidable part of your life all day. You have faith your car is safe every time you get in. You have faith the company you work for will pay you on time. You have faith that laws and public policies will make our lives better. You live in faith that your heart will keep beating from one moment to the next. Every moment of your life has small and large acts of faith.

Faith is rarely blind – we have good evidence for our faith. We believe engineering work around the design of cars and the laws governing building them make cars safe. We put faith in public policy based on years of behavioral research and test them evidence. We learn to trust friends and family by our actions. We put our faith in the teaching of Christ with evidence too. We look at the lives of those that lived well what Jesus taught, and see the evidence. We examine his teachings to see if they stand up to real life. We look at the lives of those who learn to forgive and ask for forgiveness.

You make acts of faith every day – why not make an act of faith to try something today God’s way and see what happens?

Local Portland Tech resources

Local Portland Tech resources

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Portland Tech conferences: https://dev.events/NA/US/OR/Portland/tech

List of various tech networking aggregators: https://www.macslist.org/working-in-portland/join-portlands-tech-community-local-networking-opportunities

AI Portland

https://luma.com/portland

https://techpdx.io

The Tech Transition Hub connects you to free career support, training, and resources designed to help you move back into stable, meaningful work: https://www.pcc.edu/opportunity-center/jobs/tech-transition-hub/

https://www.portlandmetrohub.org

calagator.org

https://meetup.com/

portlandtech.org

pdxstartups.switchboardhq.com

https://www.techoregon.org/events

Company with only AI employees

Company with only AI employees

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JustPaid is an AI-powered billing and payment processes financial platform startup for businesses. What makes them more interesting is that besides the founders, the company was developed completely by AI agents.

What has brought them to the news (The Wall Street Journal) is that they use OpenClaw with Claude Code to create an entire software engineering team with 7 fully autonomous AI agents. The company’s human employees focus on tasks like customer requests.

The company also says it hired an employee who was trained almost entirely by the AI agents. They have just nine employees, three of whom are cofounders. The AI bots nearly equal the humans.

Pinnaka said he was spending $4,000 a week to run Claude Code and OpenClaw when he first started experimenting with them. He now claims to have brought the bill down to $10,000 to $15,000 per a month.

None of this is confirmed, but it’s highly likely there is a lot of truth to the claims because other companies are starting to claim to be doing the same thing.

Musk bans resumes – asks for 3 bullet points instead

Musk bans resumes – asks for 3 bullet points instead

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Resumes are becoming increasingly useless in the AI era. For top positions in his new chip design team, Musk now asks for something else:

Write 3 bullet points on the toughest technical problems you’ve solved

I like this approach. It cuts to the chase and really requires you to distill all those desperate skills you have into how you solved real problems. A resume is still required to apply for most other jobs at Tesla in the U.S.—with some positions even calling for an “evidence of excellence”. But Musk’s unconventional request follows a growing trend in skills-based hiring. Almost three-quarters of companies are using skills-based assessments during the hiring process.

AI Context storage – Fighting the amnesia loop

AI Context storage – Fighting the amnesia loop

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Having big context windows is critical for LLM’s, but fitting a decent sized context on a GPU is rough work. Even when you do get a decent budget, the reality is that you’ll be running out of context more than a few times in an 8 hour session with a 120,000 or even 250,000 token context window.

It’s worse than that since research seems to indicate contexts start to degrade and lose coherence after you use up about 60% of your context budget. You can try /compress commands, but eventually things degrade enough you have to close and restart – which means you lose all that great context and have to retrain the LLM.

There’s a couple ways to fight this.

On Claude, you can persist sessions to external storage and resume sessions.

On Copilot CLI, the memory already exists. Copilot CLI writes every session to a local SQLite database — ~/.copilot/session-store.db. Desi Villanueva wrote a simple python script that will re-load that context if you use Copilot. Handy if you use it for Visual Studio Code.

Oregon in bottom half of growth since 2020

Oregon in bottom half of growth since 2020

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Since 2020, Oregon has ranked in the bottom half of U.S. states for real GDP growth. While companies aren’t fleeing en masse, some are building new facilities and hiring additional workers elsewhere, citing higher costs, longer permitting timelines and a complicated path to growth in Oregon

Nearly a quarter of 400 Oregon businesses surveyed in a 2025 University of Oregon study said they had been contacted by out-of-state recruiters since 2021. Dutch Bros, the Grants Pass–founded coffee chain now valued in the billions, shifted 40% of its corporate staff to Phoenix last year.

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Adversarial Machine Learning Anti-drone attack

Adversarial Machine Learning Anti-drone attack

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Researchers at UC Irvine have a more updated Adversarial Machine Learning attack that appears to work on drones.

By creating an umbrella with a specially painted top, the researchers were able to confuse the AI tracking and navigation of a DJI Mini 4 Pro drone and cause it to crash. The method is called the FlyTrap attack and is a visual pattern that performs a next-gen physical distance pulling (PDP) attack that works across multiple angles, even in motion in real settings.

The printed visual draws victim drones closer as its neural network tracking systems interpret the pattern to be the subject moving further away. As the drone approaches the umbrella, the pattern causes the targeting bounding box to continue shrinking – so the drone moves to get closer. Autonomous drones lured by the pattern can then easily be ensnared using a net gun, or further induced to crash to Earth.

None of this would stop a human-controlled drone of course (like we see in Ukraine). But as drone warfare becomes more and more autonomous – it would take down fully autonomous drones. Perhaps modern camo clothing needs to become anti-AI patterned more than traditional human visual camouflage. Or perhaps screens of this kind of camo can be used to protect bases or encampments.

Breakthrough in PS3 SPU emulation

Breakthrough in PS3 SPU emulation

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The PS3 processor was paired with up to seven Synergistic Processing Units, each a 128-bit SIMD co-processor with its own 256KB of local store memory. It was notoriously hard to get working well in native games – simulating those SPUs has been even more complex and very difficult to make performant.

RPCS3 emulates SPU workloads by recompiling the original Cell instructions into native x86 code. It recently got a huge improvement by some new usage patterns discovered by elad335. He believe these could also speed up normal SIMD and CPU processes as well.

the Elad’s contribution identifies new patterns in how PS3 games use SPU instructions and implements more efficient recompilation for them.