This week on the blog! By request of the ACOUP Senate (that is, patrons on Patreon at the patres et matres conscripti level), a very brief introduction to the Late Bronze Age Collapse, a collapse even more severe than the fall of the Roman Empire in the west! acoup.blog/2026/01/30/c...

Norwegian death metal band The Udder Ones new album 𝘔𝘰𝘰𝘦𝘥 𝘔𝘶𝘴𝘪𝘤 drops next Friday, featuring the single “Pasture Prime.”

[new blog post] CockroachDB Serverless: Sub-second Scaling from Zero with Multi-region Cluster Virtualization muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2026/01/cock...

My friend and I climbed TimeWave Zero yesterday in Mexico, 22 pitches of climbing and 22 rappels!

I gave a Zen talk about AI, although it's mostly math and only a little bit of Zen. What is an LLM? How does it work? Is it conscious? emptysqua.re/blog/ai-omg/

[new blog post] Rethinking the University in the Age of AI muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2026/01/reth...

I've finally completed my review of "Knowledge and Common Knowledge in a Distributed Environment", a beautiful paper about logic and networked computers. In the final episode, clock skew meets epistemic knowledge, a battle to the death! emptysqua.re/blog/review-...

We're living in a time of unprecedented possibilities for minimum-viable-product code.

ETrade's hold music is (they say) original compositions by ETrade employees. This is superb, every company should do this.

[new blog post] Cloudspecs: Cloud Hardware Evolution Through the Looking Glass muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2026/01/clou...

Okay let’s talk about Richard Norman Shaw, who gave us this delightful mess and spearheaded an entire revolution in English domestic architecture

Metamora, Indiana. 12/26/25. #photography

This was an interesting 2023 paper about some Raft speedups, but it made a couple mistakes in my opinion. The worst was because of ... you guessed it, they used YCSB, which is a flawed benchmark. emptysqua.re/blog/review-...

Couldn’t you run a bunch of YCSB clients to fix this? Also, we have a modified version of YCSB that replays traces and support open-loop replay (though our validation tests focused more on the replay accuracy than on evaluating the limits of the open loop implementation). github.com/disel-espol/...

That's a wrap!

YCSB is obsolete. It's a closed loop benchmark that doesn't generate realistic load, and it can't push a system past its limit. Same goes for the TPC benchmarks, and even the new KVBench. We've known about the inaccuracies of these closed loop benchmarks for years. emptysqua.re/blog/ycsb-is...

time to pull out the seasonal favorites

Raft has a real problem guaranteeing Read Your Writes, because there might be two leaders serving reads at once. In theory, you could use a timed lease to ensure there's only one leader.

We introduce LeaseGuard: a Raft-specific lease protocol with a precise spec and fast recovery after crashes. Paper + Implementation linked in our joint (w Jesse @emptysqua.re) blog post below. muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2025/12/leas...

"It is evident that there must be changes in typography as long as our social habits are open to variation." --announcement of Times New Roman in 1932.

I’m running for Congress because we need leaders who will fight, not fold. I recognize this moment, and I’m ready to meet it. #FightDontFold #LanderForNYC #LanderForCongress

Last newsletter of the year! This one's light and just covers a few of the Fun Facts I know about software. Happy holidays and enjoy! buttondown.com/hillelwayne/...

Once AI matches human artistic creativity, will we still value human art? Back in 1935, Walter Benjamin misforecast the effect of technology on art. I try to learn from his mistake and make a better prediction. emptysqua.re/blog/work-of...

New blog post! ✨ I argue that AI will make formal verification go mainstream. martin.kleppmann.com/2025/12/08/a... Three reasons for this: 1. LLMs are getting increasingly good at writing proofs using proof assistants. This will make formal verification vastly cheaper than it's been to date.

I Will Follow You Into The Dark is a Christmas song because only Rudolph could illuminate the nose on the vacancy signs.

I made a Zotero plugin that fills in papers' missing metadata, and I wrote about How I Write a Related Work Section with Zotero and Overleaf emptysqua.re/blog/writing...

This week on the blog: hoplites! In particular, hoplite equipment! We talk shields, helmets, armor, weight and mobility. Was the hoplite an over-encumbered battlefield turtle incapable of fighting outside of the phalanx? (No) Was he actually a good skirmisher? (Also no) acoup.blog/2025/11/21/c...

The scavengers have been busy with this deer carcass, it's almost down to the bones after 6 days.

I tried vibe-coding and learned some things. It's a skill! emptysqua.re/blog/first-t...

Killed by a car, presumably, and then pulled apart and picked clean by local black vultures, turkey vultures, and crows.

Good times with friends in the Gunks.

The first mechanical calculator, from 1642, introduced by a flamboyant Frenchman. www.christies.com/en/stories/b...

A quick photo shoot in the Gunks.

iOS ads based on your phone conversation

Been too long since I did a big silly ancient history 🧵so let's bring an old one back over from the Bad Place: It's time for ::air horn:: Publius Ventidius Bassus, the coolest Roman you have never heard of and the only person to walk in a triumph first as captive, then as triumphing general. 1/

✅ Space Invaders, 5.10d, I finally sent it today. One of the two hardest trad leads I've sent so far.

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.