About

Intelligence, not information

There is no shortage of information about technology. There is a shortage of material that tells you what a thing is, how it actually behaves, and what changes for you as a result. The difference is not length or tone. It is whether the writing survives being acted on.

So every page here is built to answer the same progression, in order. A reader should be able to stop at any point and have got something usable.

1. What is it? Stated plainly, without restating the vendor's own description.
2. How does it work? The mechanism, in enough detail that its behaviour becomes predictable rather than surprising.
3. Why does it matter? Who is affected and what changes for them. Every reference page states this explicitly.
4. How does it fail? The failure modes, how you would notice, and what bounds them. Required on technology pages.
5. What should I understand next? The related concepts, technologies and paths, linked rather than repeated.

Two consequences follow from taking that seriously. Depth beats coverage, so there are fewer topics here than a site of this kind usually has. And an acknowledged gap beats confident filler, so some subjects say plainly that they are not covered.

What is here

On accuracy

Technical detail ages. A default changes between releases, a project is renamed, a standard is superseded. Every page therefore records when it was last reviewed against its sources and how often it should be, and the build reports pages that are overdue.

Where something could not be verified, it was removed rather than hedged. Several pages are shorter than they once were because figures that could not be traced to a source were taken out. An acknowledged gap is more useful than confident text that turns out to be wrong.

Where a source is openly licensed, derived pages carry the same licence and say so. Material under a confidential or proprietary licence is not used at all, regardless of how useful it would be.

What is measured

Page views and outbound clicks are counted with a cookieless analytics service that stores no personal data and sets nothing on your device, which is why there is no consent banner. No accounts, no profiles, no cross-site tracking, and nothing is shared or sold.

Two custom events are recorded: a site search that returns no results, and an assistant question that could not be answered, each with the words used. Those are the most direct ways a reader can point at a gap, and they are used to decide what to write next.

Editorial standards

Six standards every page is held to, and how to check each one yourself on the page in front of you, are set out on theeditorial standards page: sourced claims, a stated version scope, a review date, and analysis labelled separately from fact.