clean and verified are different claims: a two-axis trust state machine in postgres

Mon, 11 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

ask a language model for a line of tacitus in spanish and it will hand you a sentence. fluent, confident, correctly punctuated. and sometimes the sentence contains a word that no translator ever wrote — a word a scanner invented, when it read the á in a 1919 printing as the digit 4, or turned violento into violen10, and then a spell-checker came along afterward and smoothed the wreckage into something that looks like spanish.

the text is clean. it is not correct. and nothing about the way it reads tells you which.

the elo race that silently ate 79% of every vote

Mon, 15 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

it’s the kind of bug that lets you sleep fine for weeks.

i’d built a little nougat-ranking toy — you get shown two flavours, you pick the one you’d rather eat, and an ELO rating quietly updates in the background so a leaderboard falls out of thousands of these pairwise duels. side project, single box, htmx and go and postgres, held together with database/sql and good intentions. it worked. people voted. the leaderboard moved. every vote came back with a fresh pairing and a 200. green across the board.

then, before pushing it anywhere with real traffic, i did a proper hardening pass: stand up a throwaway postgres, seed it with a plausible went-viral amount of data, and hammer every endpoint like someone who wants to break it. the very first thing i measured told me that roughly four out of every five votes had been quietly doing almost nothing the whole time.

not erroring. not failing. the vote was recorded. the rating just didn’t move the way it was supposed to.

postgres on krtffl.dev

clean and verified are different claims: a two-axis trust state machine in postgres

the elo race that silently ate 79% of every vote