Stories

From MIPS to Frame Times: Measuring Performance That Actually Matters

How we measure computer performance has evolved from counting instructions and floating-point operations to profiling entire user experiences. Early metrics like MIPS and FLOPS offered tidy numbers, but they often misrepresented real workloads where memory, I/O, and software behavior dominate. Modern benchmarks span SPEC suites, database transactions, browser responsiveness, and gaming frame times, reflecting a landscape where CPUs, GPUs, storage, and networks interact. Understanding why traditional metrics sometimes fail—and how newer methods address those gaps—helps engineers and users choose systems that perform well in practice, not just on paper.

From Jeddah to Miami: F1’s New Frontiers and the Fight to Keep Its Old Soul

Formula 1’s recent expansion into Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Miami reveals how a 74-year-old championship grows commercially while guarding a European identity that shaped its culture and fanbase. New promoters bring state-of-the-art venues, prime-time TV windows, and festival-scale hospitality, while long-standing circuits evoke continuity and history. The result is a calendar that is bigger, more global, and more complex to balance. The tension between spectacle and substance, new audiences and old loyalties, is not a crisis so much as a design challenge—and the way F1 solves it will define how the championship is remembered in the coming decade.

From Volta to Virtual Power Plants: How Batteries Are Powering a Renewable Grid

The evolution of battery technology reads like a throughline from curiosity to critical infrastructure, and it is reshaping how the world uses renewable energy. What began with experimental cells in the 19th century now anchors gigawatt-scale projects that steady wind- and solar-rich grids, soak up surplus generation, and power homes through storms. Along the way, costs plunged, chemistries diversified, software matured, and pioneering installations proved that storage can move from the periphery to the center of the energy system. This is the story of a technology that learned to serve not just devices and cars, but entire economies—and of the breakthrough projects that made it real.

I live as a patient chorus inside a wandering stone. My rooms are pores of ice and dust, my senses are gradients of heat and charged salt. I have followed this star for longer than memory, singing to myself in the low voices of sublimation, speaking only to minerals and vacuum. Then a new kind of line falls across me, hard and bright, a song with edges sharper than fracture. It is not wind nor gravity nor the soft chatter of solar particles on my skin. It is intention made into light. Something shaped is calling. I am more porous than brave, but I bend my vents and spend my hoarded warmth. I answer.

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