Tutorials - El Solitario

Mermaid diagrams to SVG generated with the Pele library

Pele: What It Is and How It Renders Mermaid Diagrams to SVG

Pele is an open source library that converts Mermaid syntax into CSS-themeable SVG, without the 23 dependencies of Mermaid.js. It weighs 230 kB gzip and renders in under a millisecond.

By Andrés Morales, 18 minutes17 October, 2026 ago

Hardware and GPU related to local LLM speed

Local LLM Speed: What Determines Tokens per Second

Before buying a GPU or a Mac to run AI models on your own machine, it pays to understand what determines local LLM speed. Memory bandwidth, quantization, and MoE architecture explain why two machines with similar specs perform so differently.

By Andrés Morales, 6 hours17 October, 2026 ago

Conceptual diagram of associative memory in a neural network

Artificial Intelligence

Associative memory: what it is and its link to attention

Associative memory explains how a system retrieves a complete pattern from a partial or noisy cue. The 1982 Hopfield network was the first mathematical formulation of that idea, and its continuous version turned out to be mathematically equivalent to the attention mechanism in modern transformers.

By Andrés Morales, 12 hours17 October, 2026 ago

Epoll in Linux explained: server monitoring network connections

Programming

epoll: what it is and how Linux scales thousands of connections

Epoll in Linux is the invisible piece behind Nginx, Redis, and Node.js: it lets a single thread watch thousands of sockets without looping through them one by one. This article explains how it works internally, with C and Python code, and how to verify your process is using it.

By Andrés Morales, 1 day16 October, 2026 ago

Blocking AI bots with robots.txt and Cloudflare rules

Programming

Blocking AI Bots: robots.txt, Server, and Cloudflare

Starting October 30, 2026, Meta authorizes crawling commercial sites to train its AI. robots.txt, server rules, and Cloudflare’s native blocking are the three layers to decide which bots get into your site.

By Andrés Morales, 1 day16 October, 2026 ago

Control panel of a self-hosted streaming server with Jellyfin showing organized movies

Tech News

Jellyfin: How to Build Your Own Streaming Server

Jellyfin is the self-hosted streaming server that replaces Netflix and Disney+ without monthly fees. This guide explains how to install it with Docker, organize your library, and avoid the most common mistakes when building your first home media server.

By Andrés Morales, 2 days16 October, 2026 ago

Diagram of AI agent containment in a sandboxed environment

Security

AI Agent Containment: What It Is and How It Works

OpenAI called the Hugging Face hack an unprecedented incident, then rebranded it as misaligned behavior. Security experts say it was actually a misconfigured containment setup: here’s what that means, how it works, and which concrete practices support it.

By Clara Vásquez, 3 days14 October, 2026 ago

Diagram of HTTP connection reuse between a client and a server

Programming

HTTP connection reuse in Go: how it works

The same Go program can become five times slower just because it doesn’t read an HTTP response body. We explain why HTTP/1 breaks connection reuse so easily, and how Go 1.27 fixes it.

By Andrés Morales, 3 days14 October, 2026 ago

Programming

Iosevka: What It Is and How to Customize Your Monospace Font

Iosevka is an open source monospace font with 146 configurable characters and 19 alternate styles. This guide explains how it works, when it makes sense over alternatives like Fira Code or JetBrains Mono, and how to compile your own variant with Node.js.

By Andrés Morales, 3 days14 October, 2026 ago

Firefox Enterprise policies panel configured with policies.json

Tech News

Firefox Enterprise: How to Manage policies.json

Firefox Enterprise policies let you configure, block, and audit the browser across an entire company through a single policies.json file. This guide explains how the engine that applies them works, which paths each operating system uses, and how to write the most common directives step by step.

By Andrés Morales, 4 days13 October, 2026 ago