The Unholy Labs Journal

Research & Notes

Long-form articles on automation, production, applied AI, game design and the engineering behind our own products. The topics come from our work.

25 articlesLatest Sep 01

01LatestSep 0110 min readBy Mert Dönmezler

Rendering Performance Budgets for Atmospheric Interfaces

Why a page with shaders, film grain and frosted glass stutters when no single effect is slow, and how to set a per-frame budget on a named device, keep continuous effects in check and test the result.

web-performance
rendering
frontend
research
core-web-vitals

August 2026

02Aug 25
Privacy by Design for On-Device AI
Building privacy into an on-device AI product as architecture: the threat model, what pseudonymisation and zero retention actually protect against, and rules for when data may leave the device.
- privacy
- on-device-ai
- gdpr
- kvkk
10 min read
03Aug 14
Attention Scarcity and Dunbar's Number in Personal Relationship Management
Friendships mostly fade because attention runs short. Dunbar's layered network puts a hard budget on that attention, and a sales-CRM model cannot work within it.
- personal-crm
- social-networks
- research
- dunbars-number
10 min read
04Aug 05
Dynamic Pricing as a Game Mechanic in Hospitality
Why a bar price that moves with demand feels unfair, what actually drives that judgement, and the conditions under which a published, rule-governed drink exchange can hold up.
- dynamic-pricing
- hospitality-tech
- gamification
- research
11 min read

July 2026

05Jul 28
Replay Entropy: Quantifying Variety in Finite Card Sets
How varied a finite card set feels depends on replay entropy. In content-driven games, the mix of rule types and the draw policy matter more than library size.
- game-design
- information-theory
- replayability
- research
12 min read
06Jul 16
The Probability Structure of Social Deduction
Social deduction games produce beliefs that feel better calibrated than they are. The design lever that matters most is the probability that a traitor exists at all.
- game-design
- social-deduction
- probability
- research
12 min read
07Jul 07
Localisation Is Not Translation: Cultural Rewriting for Multi-Market Games
Humour and social risk in a multi-market game have to be rewritten for each culture. How to frame the job, which content breaks in transfer, and how to test the result with players in each market.
- localization
- internationalization
- game-design
- research
11 min read

June 2026

08Jun 24
Tension Curves and Power Reversal in Social Games
Tension in a social game follows how uncertain the outcome looks to the players far more than the stakes, and scheduled, bounded power reversals keep the whole table playing until the last card.
- game-design
- tension-curves
- game-balance
- research
11 min read
09Jun 15
Content Rotation and the Forgetting Curve: Novelty as a Retention Mechanism
How fresh a finite content library feels depends on what a group has seen recently and how often. Research on forgetting explains why rotating part of the pool works better than adding items.
- game-design
- retention
- content-strategy
- research
10 min read
10Jun 04
Participation Architecture: Designing Against Social Withdrawal in Party Games
Why party games so often end with two people talking and four watching, what undirected prompts have to do with it, which mechanics give every player a turn, and how to measure the result.
- game-design
- party-games
- player-psychology
- research
12 min read

May 2026

11May 26
Data Contracts and Idempotency: Two Reliability Primitives for Pipelines
Most pipeline incidents trace back to two missing primitives: data contracts enforced at the producer boundary and idempotent writes at the consumer boundary.
- data-engineering
- reliability
- data-contracts
- research
12 min read
12May 15
Perceptual Colour Tolerancing: From Delta E to Press-Ready Files
How to turn print colour disputes into a specification you can test: a CIEDE2000 metric, a tolerance for each element class, and a check in pre-press.
- color-science
- print-production
- quality-control
- research
10 min read
13May 06
Modeling Automation ROI Under Uncertainty
How to model automation ROI as a distribution: break the benefit into its terms, take priors from a reference class of past projects, and decide on percentiles instead of the mean.
- roi
- automation
- decision-analysis
- research
11 min read

April 2026

14Apr 27
Orchestration Patterns for Multi-Agent Workflows
The reliability of a multi-agent workflow is set by its weakest recovery path. How to allocate autonomy step by step, and how to design retries, compensation, idempotency keys and verification around that.
- ai-agents
- orchestration
- distributed-systems
- research
12 min read
15Apr 16
Retrieval-Augmented Generation as an Architectural Discipline
Most retrieval-augmented generation failures start in the corpus and the retriever, before the generator sees anything, and that changes what you build, measure and ship.
- rag
- information-retrieval
- ai-engineering
- research
11 min read
16Apr 07
Evaluating Language-Model Systems in Production: Beyond Benchmark Scores
How to evaluate a language-model feature inside a real product: a frozen task set from real traffic, measured rater agreement, controlled model judges and release gates.
- llm-evaluation
- ai-engineering
- research
- metrics
11 min read

March 2026

17Mar 28
RPA vs AI Agents: Scripts vs Decision-Makers
When RPA is the right tool, when an AI agent is, and why most real processes end up using both.
- automation
- ai-agents
- rpa
- business
3 min read
18Mar 17
Human-in-the-Loop Design Under Automation Bias
Why review steps where people only confirm machine output tend to fail, and what works better: calibrated escalation, reviewers who decide, and random audit samples.
- human-in-the-loop
- automation-bias
- human-factors
- quality-control
11 min read
19Mar 06
A Failure Taxonomy for Robotic Process Automation
Six classes of RPA failure, and why silent semantic failure carries the largest remaining risk: it passes every standard monitor a bot already has.
- rpa
- automation
- reliability
- failure-analysis
11 min read

February 2026

20Feb 24
Where to Start with Automation
How to pick the first process to automate, measure it before you change anything, and avoid the mistakes that stall most first projects.
- automation
- workflow
- business-process
- guide
3 min read
21Feb 13
Little's Law and the Waiting-Time Fallacy in Business Processes
Most lead time in a business process is waiting. Little's Law, the utilisation cliff, and why a WIP limit usually helps more than making each task faster.
- queueing-theory
- operations
- littles-law
- business-process
11 min read
22Feb 05
Process Mining as an Epistemic Prerequisite for Automation
Why the event log should come before the automation: the gap between the designed, described and executed process, the minimum log you need, and when to watch the work in person before instrumenting it.
- process-mining
- automation
- business-process
- research
11 min read

January 2026

23Jan 27
The Cost of Quality in Short-Run Production: A Defect-Escape Model
Classical cost-of-quality reasoning assumes prevention spending is spread over a long run. When every unit is bespoke, a defect-escape model shows where the quality budget should go instead.
- quality-control
- cost-of-quality
- manufacturing
- economics
11 min read
24Jan 17
Automated QC Catches What Humans Can't
After a few hours on the line, human inspectors can drop to 60% accuracy. Automated QC checks every unit to the same standard. This post explains how it works and where it pays off.
- quality-control
- automation
- manufacturing
- ai
3 min read
25Jan 09
Statistical Process Control and Machine Vision: Revisiting the Sampling Compromise
Statistical process control was built on the assumption that inspection is expensive. When machine vision drives that cost toward zero, the constraint moves from detection to specification.
- quality-control
- statistical-process-control
- computer-vision
- manufacturing
10 min read

Rendering Performance Budgets for Atmospheric Interfaces

August 2026

Privacy by Design for On-Device AI

Attention Scarcity and Dunbar's Number in Personal Relationship Management

Dynamic Pricing as a Game Mechanic in Hospitality

July 2026

Replay Entropy: Quantifying Variety in Finite Card Sets

The Probability Structure of Social Deduction

Localisation Is Not Translation: Cultural Rewriting for Multi-Market Games

June 2026

Tension Curves and Power Reversal in Social Games

Content Rotation and the Forgetting Curve: Novelty as a Retention Mechanism

Participation Architecture: Designing Against Social Withdrawal in Party Games

May 2026

Data Contracts and Idempotency: Two Reliability Primitives for Pipelines

Perceptual Colour Tolerancing: From Delta E to Press-Ready Files

Modeling Automation ROI Under Uncertainty

April 2026

Orchestration Patterns for Multi-Agent Workflows

Retrieval-Augmented Generation as an Architectural Discipline

Evaluating Language-Model Systems in Production: Beyond Benchmark Scores

March 2026

RPA vs AI Agents: Scripts vs Decision-Makers

Human-in-the-Loop Design Under Automation Bias

A Failure Taxonomy for Robotic Process Automation

February 2026

Where to Start with Automation

Little's Law and the Waiting-Time Fallacy in Business Processes

Process Mining as an Epistemic Prerequisite for Automation

January 2026

The Cost of Quality in Short-Run Production: A Defect-Escape Model

Automated QC Catches What Humans Can't

Statistical Process Control and Machine Vision: Revisiting the Sampling Compromise