The Repository Was Green. RH Was Still Open.
A growing body of checked mathematics can still leave its central theorem unresolved, so the repository has to show exactly where the gap remains.
Essays · Field notes · Working ideas
Notes from deep systems work—and the life around it.
Long-form thinking from the layer beneath the interface: secure AI infrastructure, microVMs, Rust, distributed systems, product, and the human work of building difficult things.
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The Repository Was Green. RH Was Still Open.
A growing body of checked mathematics can still leave its central theorem unresolved, so the repository has to show exactly where the gap remains.
- 30
- published essays
- 13
- earlier pieces
- 2022–2026
- years represented
Showing 30 essays
Recent writing
Current essays and field notes
The Two-Line API Ran Out of Room
PUT and GET were enough for blobs, until a release needed names, dependencies, signatures, and one visible moment of publication.
A Snapshot Is Not a Suitcase
Copying memory can restore a process on the same host; moving a program somewhere else requires its dependencies, runtime contract, and fresh authority.
What Result Would Make Us Stop?
An experiment is not a decision until its result can tell us to adopt the idea, repair the instrument, or close the direction.
The Tab Ran Out of Memory
A browser demo failed before the model finished downloading, forcing the pipeline to treat the browser as the user’s computer rather than a remote shell.
The Math Was Fine. My Buffer Wasn’t.
A valid matrix multiplication should not change its meaning just because I offered less scratch memory to the fast kernel.
I Can Seal a Wrong Answer
A content hash can preserve an AI answer perfectly while telling me nothing about whether the computation behind it was correct.
The Hash Is the Easy Part
I kept arguing with bytes before the hash because canonicalization—not SHA-256—decides which representations count as the same object.
Nuclear Cleanup Wasn’t Nuclear
MVM’s cleanup command promised an empty machine but deleted only the directories somebody remembered to list.
The 1 GiB Filesystem That Ate 3.9 GiB
A Rust ext4 builder kept the source tree, a cloned plan, and the final image alive at once; ownership made the memory spike predictable.
The Log Was Right, but It Didn’t Know Why
A signed MVM event could prove what happened without explaining who authorized the launch or what decision led to it.
200 Milliseconds of What, Exactly?
I measured a microVM entering the kernel quickly, then realized the stopwatch had ignored most of what the user was waiting for.
The Snapshot Copied the Keys Too
A forked microVM can inherit warm computation without inheriting the parent’s identity, channels, secrets, or authority.
The Green Test Passed for the Wrong Reason
An OCI security test passed because the image was harmless, not because the runtime enforced the privilege boundary the documentation promised.
I Took the NIC Away
I kept adding policy around a guest network device until I realized the device itself was the network authority I was trying to control.
AI agents need a machine boundary
Prompt rules are not a security boundary. Agent runtimes need enforceable capabilities, isolated execution, mediated I/O, and a deliberately small blast radius.
Invisible AI
The advances in AI are incredible, but the most important systems will disappear into ordinary life.
Earlier writing
The rest of the body of work
Personal essays, security walkthroughs, and programming notes from earlier years, all part of the same ari.io writing library. Technical pieces retain their original publication dates so their context is clear.
Longest Valid Parentheses
A stack-based Rust walkthrough for LeetCode's Longest Valid Parentheses problem.
SSRF challenge
A Root-Me lab walkthrough exploring SSRF, local services, Redis, and a reverse-shell payload in an authorized environment.
Lowest common ancestor of a binary tree
A recursive JavaScript solution for finding the lowest common ancestor of two nodes in a binary tree.
Three sum closest
A Rust two-pointer solution for finding the three-number sum closest to a target.
ThreeSum
A Rust walkthrough of the sorted two-pointer solution for finding unique triplets that sum to zero.
Swap pairs in place
A recursive Rust solution for swapping adjacent nodes in a singly linked list without changing their values.
6 ways AI will change the way we live
An archived January 2023 view of where AI seemed likely to reshape transportation, medicine, energy, business operations, and customer service.
Binary exploitation on libc
A beginner-friendly ret2libc and ROP walkthrough using Ghidra, GDB/GEF, pwntools, and a picoCTF binary.
Transformation
Reverse a picoCTF encoding challenge by unpacking two ASCII characters from each Unicode code point.
Nice netcat
A beginner picoCTF walkthrough: connect with netcat, decode decimal ASCII, and automate the result with a small Python socket program.
Little empire
Your little empire is built one investment, one income stream, and one small bet at a time.
How to disappear from the Internet like Jason Bourne
A 2022 snapshot of the steps I was taking to reduce data leakage, identity exposure, and casual tracking online.
Dad's Blue Sky cream soda
Memories of my father, a hot-air-balloon festival, and the cream soda that still carries him with it.
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