Huh

Looks like you manifested a paper arxiv.org/abs/2512.12957

For our last episode of 2025 (and Season 3) we welcome guest Kyle Willcox to talk about Salesforce and Low Code. Also, surf, waves, stingrays, and Plato. Multitudes, baby, multitudes. www.picturemecoding.com/2222783/epis...

We did another tech news roundup for the holiday week, but it's mostly about data centers. We recommend you save it for after the Thanksgiving feast-- it should pair nicely with a food coma and a nice Pinot Noir www.picturemecoding.com/2222783/epis...

Not to talk about a podcast I like randomly but nothing changed my perspective on AI more than the question posed on @picturemecoding.bsky.social "will we have robots running all the marathons now?" I'm pretty sure it was just a joke question, but it really snapped me back to reality.

Building Modern Databases with the FDAP Stack • Andrew Lamb & Olimpiu Pop • GOTO 2025 www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gd-m...

You should join me in writing a compiler, Dec 1-5. dabeaz.com/compiler.html. Why? Does this really need to be explained?

In this episode we talk about CRDTs. If you don't know what those are, you should listen. It might save you from zombies. www.picturemecoding.com/2222783/epis...

BTW I have Mr. Squidler stickers! Come find me if you want one. How could you say no to this lil' guy 😍 #kubecon #kubernetes

Leftover Halloween candy ruins whatever illusions I have about my maturity or self-control

I made this sticker design today when I was trying to debug some gnarly bug adn I have no idea why: picturemecoding.threadless.com/designs/dead... I'm also terrible at designing stuff so it probably looks awful printed. nevertheless, I feel like printing some and graffitiing them around my town...

In this episode we're talking about the Turing Test, thus possibly becoming the first people who've ever needed to study for it. The Turing Test (aka The Imitation Game) just turned 75. Has it been passed? www.picturemecoding.com/2222783/epis...

I realized yesterday that it's possible to be both hopelessly practical and also practically hopeless. Language is fun.

In the latest episode we discuss the late Mark Weiser's ideas about "ubiquitous computing". Did we achieve it, did we forget about it, or did it morph into something less friendly? www.picturemecoding.com/2222783/epis...

The Earthworm project is designed to monitor the heartbeat signals of Kubernetes clusters using eBPF

In our latest episode we talk about regular expressions. What are they, where did they come from, and most importantly: are they evil? www.picturemecoding.com/2222783/epis...

I'm really impressed with how good the LLMs have become. Yesterday GPT5 gave me an answer about an AWS service that was so detailed and confident that it took me almost an hour to realize it was entirely fabricated and unsupported by any AWS documentation.

It's strange how some people think that AI is an existential threat but it doesn't even crack my Top 5 of Things To Worry About

Next week is the start of @db.cs.cmu.edu's latest seminar series: Future Data Systems @samarchdb.bsky.social and I are hosting speakers from leading systems in the datalake / lakehouse space. Mondays @ 4:30pm ET via Zoom. Open to the public. Videos posted to YouTube: db.cs.cmu.edu/seminars/fal...

We're talking about Unix again, especially about what made it successful. Turns out it might be because the developers didn't start off with any particular objective in mind, they just wanted to make it easier to write programs: www.picturemecoding.com/2222783/epis...

This week we're talking about the history of the Unix operating system, focusing on its origins at Bell Labs: www.picturemecoding.com/2222783/epis...

One of said boys is my great friend @erewok.bsky.social

Does anyone else wonder about how many important things would stop working if S3 were suddenly disabled?

For this episode we delve into computational complexity, attempting to build up to Ryan Williams's remarkable recent result regarding space complexity vs time complexity. We are undeterred by not knowing what the hell we're talking about: www.picturemecoding.com/2222783/epis...

SimKube 2.4.0 was released last night! Main new feature is that if you export a trace, objects that are owned by other objects in the trace are discarded. You don't want a situation where your trace contains both a Deployment AND the ReplicaSet that the deployment owns. github.com/acrlabs/simk...

Ok my blog post about my work with Astronomer is public now, go read it! blog.appliedcomputing.io/p/astronomer...

AWS keeps sending me messages for "next generation firewalls", but they abbreviate it as NGFW, and i can't help but see "not gonna fucking work"

This week we talk to our friends Bobak Farzin and Kevin Fahey about their experiences building software with AI tools. While tech-savvy, neither are full-time developers, so they have an interesting perspective on the good and bad parts of vibe coding: www.picturemecoding.com/2222783/epis...

Air travel is the worst thing that I intentionally inflict on myself, and I say that as someone who has trained for and run ultra-marathons

This episode we're talking about databases again, specifically relational databases (or relational database management systems, we're not sure) www.picturemecoding.com/2222783/epis...

I love it when the names of the teams in basketball games make a fun adjective/noun pairing. My current favorites are Thunder Nuggets and Fever Dream, but Jazz Grizzlies has potential.

Assuming that it doesn't wreck your business an AI-caused outage teaches some good lessons

We kick off a series of episodes on database technology with a discussion of the late, great Jim Gray, winner of the 1998 Turing Prize and the person most responsible for the concept of database transactions. www.picturemecoding.com/2222783/epis...

My challenge to you is to talk about it (more). Talk about climate change. Talk about the importance of the scientific infrastructure in the US. Talk about the implications of these cuts on the economy, our health, public safety, the environment, and what this means for the next generation as well.

Been reading a book about the 14th c. I think the takeaway is that just because everything is terrible it doesn't mean things won't get much worse

I wonder if I could get a space contract? I can't build rockets but I can blow stuff up.

David R. Hagen just solved a small mystery that I mentioned 13 years ago in the mouseover text of a comic drhagen.com/blog/the-mis...

I wonder how much electricity is used in converting data from web pages and PDFs back into database records that resemble the database records from which they were created?

Teach a robot to fish and soon you won't remember how to.

LLMs seem good at translating between equivalent SQL (eg turning correlated subquery into join) but not good at translating between SQL dialects (eg Postgres to Spark)

In our latest episode we have a great discussion with Matt Teichman, a lecturer in computer science at U. Chicago, an OCaml programmer, and host of the Elucidations podcast. We cover linguistics, philosophy, functional programming, libraries, and music: www.picturemecoding.com/2222783/epis...

It's been a while since I've written about the innards of @compiler-explorer.com. xania.org/202506/how-c... has the details, some statistics and some fun war stories.

o3 can now synthesize TLA+ specifications from code. Caught between the feelings of "yay more people will use formal methods" and "wait fewer people will hire me to help them use formal methods" zfhuang99.github.io/github%20cop...

Just wanna put it out there: I am definitely NOT worth kidnapping for my Bitcoin

Somebody needs to write "What to Expect When Your Parents Turn 75".

For any North American folks having FOMO about @localfirstconf.com, there’s a new conference on sync engines as app architecture! SF in November syncconf.dev

I posted a thing. Maybe next week I'll post a thing about tech, like I've been promising for a while: blog.appliedcomputing.io/p/the-ennui-...

This week we talk to UX expert Jonathan Whitmire about the scope and meaning of user experience and the relationship between designers and software engineers. www.picturemecoding.com/2222783/epis...