Hand-picked articles, guides, and best practices from the AskHandle team.
February 23, 2026 · Nina Kimes · 3 min read
Large language models (LLMs) often feel fluent enough to be trusted, yet they can confidently state false facts, invent citations, or misread a question. That mismatch between polished language and shaky truth is what people call “hallucination,” and it’s one of the biggest barriers between today’s chatbots and dependable assistants.
February 22, 2026 · Ben Larson · 3 min read
A lot of development happens on a laptop: a local web server, a webhook endpoint, an API you’re testing, or a demo you want to show to someone. The problem is that “localhost” is private. ngrok solves that by giving your local app a temporary public URL that forwards traffic straight to your machine.
February 22, 2026 · Katherine Holland · 3 min read
Choosing between a single giant dense model and alternatives like Mixtures of Experts (MoE) or model merging is less about ideology and more about trade-offs: how much quality you can buy, how predictably you can run it, and how painful it will be to ship and maintain. Each approach can win depending on whether you care most about peak accuracy, serving cost, iteration speed, or operational simplicity.
February 21, 2026 · Lillian Kim · 3 min read
GPUs keep winning in AI not because they’re “perfect,” but because they hit a rare combination: high throughput, strong software support, flexible programmability, and a supply chain that can actually deliver millions of chips into real systems. Custom accelerators and NPUs can outperform GPUs on specific workloads, yet they often struggle to match the broad usefulness and frictionless adoption that make GPUs the default choice for training and increasingly for inference.
February 20, 2026 · Ben Larson · 3 min read
In the current AI boom, AI Agent and Agentic AI are often treated as synonyms, but the gap between them is the difference between a tool that waits for orders and a teammate that pursues goals. Understanding this shift—from the diligent clerk to the autonomous strategist—is key to seeing where automation is heading.
February 19, 2026 · Ben Larson · 3 min read
If you’ve ever tried to “just extract the text” from a Word document and keep all the formatting, you’ve probably discovered it’s anything but “just.” Under the hood, Word is closer to a layout engine plus a tiny CMS than a simple text editor, and that makes faithful extraction surprisingly hard.
February 18, 2026 · Annie Hayes · 3 min read
Agentic AI is a new generation of artificial intelligence that does not just answer questions, but can set sub‑goals, make decisions, and take actions on its own to achieve an outcome with minimal supervision. It is popular because it promises a step change from “smart assistants” to semi‑autonomous digital workers that can operate across many systems and workflows.
February 17, 2026 · Annie Hayes · 3 min read
RAG, short for Retrieval-Augmented Generation, is one of the most practical ways to make AI chatbots and assistants more useful for real work. It combines two things: searching for relevant information and generating a natural-language answer. The result is an AI system that can respond with content grounded in specific documents rather than relying only on what it learned during training.
February 16, 2026 · Dustin Collins · 3 min read
Chunking is one of those quiet decisions that can make AI search feel crisp and helpful—or scattered and frustrating. Good chunking turns long documents into search-friendly pieces that match user questions, preserve meaning, and keep retrieval costs under control. Below are practical strategies you can apply to get better results from keyword search, vector search, or hybrid retrieval.
February 15, 2026 · Aria Singh · 3 min read
A data center is one of those places most people rely on every day without ever seeing. It’s not a single machine, and it’s not just “a server room.” It’s a carefully engineered facility built to keep computing running continuously, safely, and predictably.
February 14, 2026 · Katherine Holland · 3 min read
API tokens are everywhere: personal access tokens, webhook secrets, session keys, “bearer” strings for internal tools, and one-off secrets you hand to a teammate for testing. When you need a strong random token quickly, the terminal is often the fastest and most dependable place to create it—no extra apps, no copy-pasting from questionable generators, and no waiting on a UI.
February 13, 2026 · Emily Henderson · 3 min read
For decades, automation primarily threatened blue-collar work: factory lines, warehouses, and repetitive physical labor. Today, artificial intelligence is reshaping a different part of the economy. Increasingly, it is white-collar jobs — particularly those built around fixed, repeatable tasks — that are being automated. This shift is not speculative. It is structural. And it is accelerating.
February 12, 2026 · Emily Henderson · 3 min read
A humanoid robot is a machine designed to resemble the human body in structure and movement. Typically, it has a head, torso, two arms, and two legs, allowing it to walk upright and manipulate objects using hands or grippers. Unlike industrial robotic arms bolted to factory floors, humanoid robots are built to function in environments designed for people — homes, offices, warehouses, hospitals, and factories.
February 11, 2026 · Katherine Holland · 3 min read
BM25 is one of the most widely used algorithms for ranking search results. It determines how relevant a document is to a query by analyzing term frequency, term rarity, and document length. Despite being developed decades ago, BM25 remains a foundation of modern search systems.
February 10, 2026 · Lillian Kim · 3 min read
Keyword search looks simple to users: type a query, get the best results. For the team building the search system, ranking is the hard part. Good ranking methods balance relevance, freshness, trust, and speed—while staying robust against spam and shifting user intent.
February 9, 2026 · Billy Ewing · 3 min read
The 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan Cortina has delivered a technological leap that's transforming how millions experience winter sports. First-person view (FPV) drones are capturing breathtaking footage that puts viewers right in the action—racing down mountainsides at 130 km/h, soaring alongside snowboarders launching off massive jumps, and diving through the twisting corridors of luge tracks.
February 8, 2026 · Katherine Holland · 3 min read
Overtime can feel like the quickest path to hitting a deadline. The hours add up, the commit count rises, and the team looks busy. Yet “more time at the keyboard” often leads to worse software. High-quality code is not just output—it’s clarity, correctness, maintainability, and safety over time. Long stretches of overtime work push directly against those goals.
February 7, 2026 · Melissa Olson · 3 min read
Job interviews are no longer limited to a chat and a whiteboard. Many companies now include a “take-home” as part of the hiring process—work you complete on your own time and submit later. If you’ve never done one, it can feel vague: How long should it take? What are they judging? What’s fair to push back on?
February 6, 2026 · Billy Ewing · 3 min read
Gold has held human attention for thousands of years. Trends rise and fall, currencies change design, and technologies come and go, yet gold keeps its place as something people want to own. That long-running value is not an accident. It comes from a mix of nature, chemistry, scarcity, and human behavior. It also raises a modern question: if we can make so many things in laboratories, can we make gold too?
February 5, 2026 · Nina Kimes · 3 min read
Software is everywhere, and so are the risks to it. Keeping applications and networks safe is a constant task. Auto security scanners help with this work. Tools like Qualys, Tenable, and Veracode automate the search for weaknesses before attackers can find them.
February 4, 2026 · Annie Hayes · 3 min read
Server-side logging is critical for debugging, monitoring, auditing, and performance analysis. At the same time, poorly designed logging systems can slow down the very applications they are meant to protect. Writing logs synchronously, blocking request threads, or overloading storage systems can create bottlenecks that impact response times.
February 3, 2026 · Dustin Collins · 3 min read
Serverless applications are changing how software is built and deployed. Developers no longer need to manage physical or virtual servers to run their code. Instead, they focus on writing functions and business logic while a cloud platform handles infrastructure behind the scenes.
February 2, 2026 · Melissa Olson · 3 min read
Rare earth materials are a group of metallic elements that play a critical role in modern technology, energy systems, and industrial production. Most people use products containing them every day without realizing it. Though their name suggests scarcity, their importance comes from their unique properties rather than their abundance.
February 1, 2026 · Melissa Olson · 3 min read
Green energy is often talked about as the “clean” alternative to fossil fuels, but the label can get confusing. Some energy sources are renewable but not always low-impact. Others are low-carbon yet come with trade-offs that people disagree on. To make sense of it, it helps to look at what “green” usually means in practice: energy that creates minimal pollution, produces low greenhouse gas emissions, and causes relatively limited harm to ecosystems and communities.
