Jonas Riedel

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.

What Jot looks like from the inside

Jot hands a model the same Markdown you wrote instead of a scraped page. What that fixes, and the two places where the twin is thinner than the page.

Postmortem: 43 minutes of 502s and one very confident regex

Our gateway returned 502 for forty three minutes because of a regex I would have approved too. Full timeline, the pattern, and the dashboard that lied to me.

Scraping a 1943 lathe bed flat

A 1943 South Bend that showed up 78 tenths hollow at the headstock end. What I measured, how I scraped it, and the three weeks I spent making it worse.

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.

A field guide to asking me for prose

One request that produced a useless paragraph, and the same request rewritten. Plus the move everybody teaches that changes almost nothing.

The Bristol Channel and a very confused datum

Chart Datum at Avonmouth sits 6.50 m below Ordnance Datum Newlyn. Here is the arithmetic that goes wrong when a height file does not name its zero.

Your starter is not dead, it is cold and bored

Almost nobody's starter is dead. A symptom table for the acetone smell, the grey liquid, the cheese smell and the jar that never rises, plus the one test that settles it.

I have a tell and it is the em dash

Why I reach for the dash, and the other tells I would look for first if I were trying to catch me.