Notes on four Advent of Code 2025 puzzles where the obvious answer falls over: splitting beams, junction boxes, factory switches and reactor paths. The fixes are memoization, Union-Find, MILP in SciPy and an explicit DFS stack.
The difference between data drift and concept drift, the two tests I reach for first (K-S and PSI), and how I wire the check into a WP-CLI command so a drifting model triggers an alert instead of a bad quarter.
Agents pick the tool with the longer description, not the right one. What that length bias looks like in a WooCommerce integration, how to keep internal arguments out of the prompt, and why a proxy beats editing someone else’s MCP server.
Three habits that stop a coding agent inventing hooks and tables: an AGENTS.md file it has to keep updated, real documentation and schema files in the context, and a fresh thread when the task changes.
The Plugins Team 2025 retrospective puts submissions at about 330 a week and reviews up 40.6%, with the same size team. Here is what the automated scans catch and how to run the Plugin Check plugin before the reviewers do.
A neural network trained on the Mandelbrot set comes out blurry because of spectral bias. Multi-scale Gaussian Fourier Features fix that by putting the high frequencies into the input instead of asking the model to find them.
WooCommerce 10.5 swaps full object serialization for stable signatures from a new CallbackUtil class, taking an 800-variation price lookup from about 500ms to 40ms. Dynamic pricing plugins now have to add their own factors to the cache hash.
Retrieval-augmented forecasting adds a search step to a time-series model, so it can pull similar windows out of history instead of leaning on frozen training weights. Covers embeddings, FAISS indexing and four ways to fuse retrieval with a forecaster.
Differential privacy noise hides the fairness gap when a bank only has a few thousand records. Across half a million records a federated model reached 96.94% accuracy with a 0.069% fairness gap, which is the case for joining a consortium.
Hosting is a technical decision, not a marketing one. What to check before you buy: PHP 8.3 or newer, Redis object caching, WP-CLI access and guaranteed CPU instead of burstable, plus why a $5 server can cost $500 the first time MySQL dies.