At long last, @chris.blue and I have submitted the final manuscript of Designing Data-Intensive Applications, second edition, to the publisher. There is always more that could be improved but at some point we just have to call it done. Now it goes into production; probably shipping in ~4 months.

A poem for the morning

The richest family in history were the Fuckers of Augsberg. The spelling was later changed to Fugger, but for historical accuracy we should use the original authentic spelling, "Fucker." When Hans Fucker first moved to Augsberg, the tax clerk wrote in Latin, "Fucker advenit": Fucker showed up.

The first episode of "Alien: Earth" is a complete hot mess. There are 3 kinds of human-seeming non-humans (2 of them new to the canon), several new aliens, a Rutger Hauer-looking guy delivers a totally unmotivated soliloquy about "humans are food"...

1. Social media is now 5% following friends and 95% watching videos made by strangers. 2. Every podcast is turning into a YouTube show. 3. AI companies can't stop building TikTok clones. Everything is becoming television. I wrote about why that matters. www.derekthompson.org/p/why-everyt...

Excellent biography of the radical, brave, batty, mercurial, brilliant, mystical 19th-C. feminist Victoria Woodhull: www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/mary-...

Kelsey Roman performing with aerial silks hanging from the West Trapps cliff in the Gunks, at sunset and moonrise. emptysqua.re/blog/aerial-...

My review of a classic of Argentine sci-fi comics, now a Netflix series in Spanish. emptysqua.re/blog/the-ete...

Went apple picking today. You never know where you’ll find unpatched OpenSSL in the wild.

Victoria Woodhull Armstrong Davis, our Chinese hamster.

Sunset in the Mohonk Preserve.

Rock Rift Crevices trail in Mohonk Preserve.

[ASPLOS'25] Fusion: An Analytics Object Store Optimized for Query Pushdown www.cs.princeton.edu... Tightly integrating an Iceberg catalog with an object store means that one could make file-format aware erasure coding decisions, to permit pushing down filters and aggregations.

Chris climbing Ridicullissima, a tall classic 5.10d in the Gunks. I photographed him while hanging from a rope anchored at the top. I experimented with anchoring the other end to the ground. It was awkward; I have a lot to learn. At least having two attachments prevented me from spinning.

Me climbing Directissima (5.9) in the Gunks today.

My little temple New Paltz Zen Center had an Eye Opening ceremony and now we're an official Zen temple. Here's Jo An Sensei opening the eyes of the bodhisattva on the altar. emptysqua.re/blog/npzc-ey...

Dustin Portzline's "Falling and Commitment" clinic in the Gunks

I finally cobbled together a way to belay with prescription glasses: YY Vertical Clip-Ups, but superglue the rubber tips on so they don't slide off, and replace the flimsy carrying case with a beefy OneTigris case. Here's everything I used: emptysqua.re/blog/how-to-...

Saint Pancras. Is it a train station? A castle? An organ under the liver?

Today I learned that Yahoo! is an independent company with over 8000 employees in 2025. I wonder what they all do?

I stumbled into a right-wing rally in London.

Eiffel Tower from a bateau mouche.

New ship of Theseus just dropped, but now it has conscious thought

That’s right, I’ve found it. The holy grail, the one feed to rule them all, the aggregator for your whole Internet. None of these walled-garden rent-seeking websites want you to have it, but I’ll share it with you. emptysqua.re/blog/how-to-...

VLDB just published my friend Aleksey Charapko's paper on a new consensus algorithm.

Vol:18 No:8 → HoliPaxos: Towards More Predictable Performance in State Machine Replication 👥 Authors: Zhiying Liang, Vahab Jabrayilov, Abutalib Aghayev, Aleksey Charapko 📄 PDF: https://www.vldb.org/pvldb/vol18/p2505-charapko.pdf

VLDB has published my colleagues' terrific paper MongoDB distributed transactions: how they work, how we checked them with TLA+, how we checked that our code conforms to our TLA+ spec.

Vol:18 No:12 → Design and Modular Verification of Distributed Transactions in MongoDB 👥 Authors: William Schultz, Murat Demirbas 📄 PDF: https://www.vldb.org/pvldb/vol18/p5045-schultz.pdf

John Kruk on the person who invented the clock

Some topics seem off-limits in Zen: What's the goal of meditation? How do I get better at it? I talk about my doubts and break some silences: emptysqua.re/blog/speak-u...

She doesn’t need a hero, she is the hero we need. 🤩

[new blog post] Vive la Difference: Practical Diff Testing of Stateful Applications (VLDB'25) muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2025/08/vive... Safe rollouts of stateful apps. Instantly branches Postgres DBs, replays prod-like requests on old & new versions, and shows 3-way diffs of outputs + DB state.

I'm beginning an epic journey to understand the 1990 paper "Knowledge and Common Knowledge in a Distributed Environment" emptysqua.re/blog/review-...

new blog post] Neurosymbolic AI: Why, What, and How muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2025/08/neur...

News to the British Empire.

Crux footage of my first clean ascent of Star Action in the Gunks. It's one of the harder trad climbs I've sent at 5.10b or 5.10c, and the beginning of my personal project to send most of the climbs on the Mac Wall.

Holy shit, they did it. They wrote the headline.

Optimizing a Meditation Retreat with a SAT Solver emptysqua.re/blog/optimiz...

Kelsey Roman performing with aerial silks suspended from the Nectar Vector climb on Millbrook, a cliff in the Gunks. emptysqua.re/blog/aerial-...

A handsome black vulture I met on Millbrook this weekend.

Hello my baby, Hello my honey, Visit my OnlyFans! Send me BitCoin by wire My newest vids are fire 🔥 But if you say I Was made by an AI Then you'll be left alone Oh baby unlock your iPhone, tell me I'm your own!

I woke up this morning with a map thought in my head, and here it is:

New episode: articlesofinterest.substack.com/p/sunglasses

I've read a few of John J. Lennon's pieces before, this one is especially good: www.nytimes.com/2025/07/16/m...

Yeah — 🎨 Bruce Eric Kaplan

RIP, Sojourner Truth Armstrong Davis. emptysqua.re/blog/rip-soj...

My colleagues Will Schultz and Siyuan Zhou wrote about a Raft enhancement they prototyped in TLA+, it's now how MongoDB actually adds and removes servers: www.mongodb.com/blog/post/te...

New Newsletter: 'AI is a gamechanger for TLA+ users'. Contains all of my notes on what LLMs were good and bad at in using TLA+. In short: they are good at a LOT. So much so that they radically lower the barrier to entry for writing formal specifications. buttondown.com/hillelwayne/...

How I progressed from Python programmer to distributed systems researcher in 10 years without a PhD: emptysqua.re/blog/from-py...

I'm exhibiting some of my photos of climbing and religion at the Center for Photography in Woodstock (actually in Kingston), as part of the Project Salon group show. I made a book too!