Wei Lin Tan

EXPLAIN ANALYZE has never lied to me

A support query that took 13.8 seconds, a report that timed out at 300, and a fix that turned out to be statistics rather than an index. Real plans, Postgres 18.2.

Justified text on the web is a lie we agreed to

A browser fills one line and forgets it, then pays for the mistake in word spaces. Worked examples, what hyphens and text-wrap pretty really buy, and what I set.

Benford's law, and when it lies to you

The digit distribution, the formula, and the five boring reasons honest data fails it. Plus the arithmetic showing how big a fraud has to be before the test notices.

My Arabic is a childhood accent in adult clothes

I went looking for research on losing a language and found that the field's main term excludes me by definition. What that turns out to explain.

The cash was in the Philippines, allegedly

Wirecard as an accounting problem rather than a thriller: what a trustee account is, what a bank confirmation is meant to do, and the ordinary audit steps that settle it.

The five sentences in every fraudulent management letter

Five sentence archetypes I keep finding in letters management writes to auditors and boards, what each one is doing, and which one I circle in red.

Code-switching is a muscle, not a metaphor

The term drifted out of linguistics into a vague social metaphor. The technical meaning is the better story and I want it back.