Visualizers
Learn by moving things
Interactive explainers for the ideas behind retrieval, embeddings, and agents. A formula tells you what is true; dragging a vector shows you why. Each one also appears inside the article it belongs to, and runs entirely in your browser, so drag, poke, and break it.
At-most-once: send it and hope
From: Delivery Guarantees: At-Least-Once, Exactly-Once, and Idempotency →The sender fires one message and never retries. Most of the time it arrives; if the network drops it, it is lost and the sender never finds out. Fast and simple, and never duplicated, for data you can afford to miss.
The sender fires one message and does not wait for any reply.
At-least-once: keep trying until you hear back
From: Delivery Guarantees: At-Least-Once, Exactly-Once, and Idempotency →The sender retries until it gets an acknowledgment, so a message is never lost. But if the acknowledgment itself is lost, it resends and the receiver gets a duplicate: a card charged twice. Never lost, sometimes doubled.
The sender sends the message and waits for an acknowledgment.
Idempotency: a key so a repeat changes nothing
From: Delivery Guarantees: At-Least-Once, Exactly-Once, and Idempotency →Each request carries a unique idempotency key. The first delivery charges the card and records the key; a retry with the same key is recognized and skipped. Delivered twice, charged once: exactly-once in practice, the Stripe pattern.
The sender attaches a unique idempotency key, a1b2, to the charge.