Software developer and search engineer.

I’m Chris — a software developer based in London, currently CTO at Searchable. This is my personal blog, where I typically write about programming, search systems and technology.

Ten billion patches

Bessa, Douze and Jégou have released Dino10B, a 10-billion-vector nearest-neighbour benchmark built from DINOv3 image patches. The scale is overdue. How they got to ten billion is the more interesting part.

Curved space, flat index

Qdrant got 5 hyperbolic dimensions to beat 200 Euclidean ones on hierarchical data, and then HNSW returned 0.020 recall on it. The representation win is real and the index can't cash it - because an ANN graph isn't neutral plumbing, it has an opinion about what close means.

The rotation should have been learned

A correction to what I wrote about TurboQuant in May. A new paper from Mariano Tepper and Ted Willke makes the case that the rotation in front of a scalar quantiser should be learned from your data, and that learning it is cheap enough that I no longer think calibration cost belongs in the argument.

The cheap part got cheaper

AWS cut S3 Vectors query pricing by up to 80% at scale. It is a real win for your bill and says nothing about your moat - because the price cut lands on the one slice of retrieval where quality barely lives.

Code mode is batched retrieval

Hornet held the retriever, model and corpus fixed and swapped the harness from one tool call per turn to one Python program per turn. Recall went up 65%, tokens down 51%. Strip the new vocabulary and the win isn't Python - it's that retrieval was finally allowed to fan out.

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Work

  1. Company
    Searchable
    Role
    Chief Technology Officer
    Date
  2. Company
    Elastic
    Role
    Product Advisory Council Member
    Date
  3. Company
    Vimeo
    Role
    Director of Engineering
    Date
    1. Director of Engineering2025 — 2026
    2. Senior Engineering Manager2023 — 2025
    3. Principal Software Engineer2021 — 2023
    4. Senior Software Engineer2016 — 2021
    5. Software Engineer2014 — 2016
  4. Company
    DueDil
    Role
    Senior Software Engineer
    Date
  5. Company
    Idio
    Role
    Software Engineer
    Date
  6. Company
    Optix
    Role
    PHP Developer
    Date
  7. Company
    Oxygen
    Role
    Web Developer
    Date
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