I've posted my latest recap of the world of databases: www.cs.cmu.edu/~pavlo/blog/... All the hot topics from the last year: • More Postgres action! • MCP for everyone! • MongoDB gets litigious with FerretDB! • File formats! • Market movements! • The richest person in the history of the world!

Greatest first line of a song ever. The lyrics contain a lot of what I think of as "teased rhymes" even if that's not strictly what they are. Every time I hear it, I'm thinking ...a werewolf drinking a Pina Colada at Trader Vic's, and his hair was purple. Huh! I'd like to meet James Taylor.

The most accessible explanation of quantum physics I ever heard was from @robertjsawyer.com at his science fiction writing course at Ryerson. Of course, he's since explored that area further in Quantum Night. Interested to hear what his latest thinking is!

Happy 48th Anniversary to the greatest outtake in television history. Tim Conway's Elephant Story from The Carol Burnett Show.

There are a bazillion Unicode codepoints where if an email contains one of them, it's 100% guaranteed a phishing attempt or spam trying to evade filters. You would think the anti-spam folks could do more with this knowledge. (E.g. render suspicious characters as boxes or question marks like BITD.)

🟡 M4.8 #earthquake detected 3 km ESE of Berkeley, California at 9/22/2025 2:56:12 AM PDT This reflects data from the U.S. Geological Survey that is subject to change. Visit the USGS page linked below for the latest #quake information

I can level a continent. But Where. Are. My. PANTS! (I'm just teasing Galactus. I thought he would have been a better Big Bad than Thanos in the Avengers.)

Come hear the first-ever reading of my next novel at Dragon Con! Sunday at 11:30 a.m., Learning Center Hyatt [Lower Level 1, Atrium Tower — see map below]:

Today is the new semester for @db.cs.cmu.edu's Intro to Database Systems! We're going harder into material than before. More challenging projects but you can use LLMs to help. We also have 10min talks each Wed from leading DB companies: 15445.courses.cs.cmu.edu/fall2025

Oh no. Just the other day I was saying, you know, Tom Lehrer is still alive at almost 100 and living in Santa Cruz. variety.com/2025/music/n...

This happens to me so often that I've set up automation to remove such stuff. On Mac, copy the URL, then: pbpaste | <unix command to search-replace-remove the particular cruft for that site> | pbcopy Now what's on the clipboard is the bare URL.

TIL: vim has a :args command that opens a new buffer for every pathname passed as an argument. Say you have a script that runs 'vi file1 file2 file3'. Running ':! my_script' inside vim starts a whole new session. Better to make the script print file1 file2 file3 and run ':args `my_script`.

Basketball, huh. I am 6' 3", I live walking distance from UC Berkeley, and I'm feeling like I could use some continuing education.

I was reminded recently about fzf and immediately started finding uses for it. TL;DR - you choose from an interactive menu, with items defined by lines of input. Including shell integration to choose from all files in a directory tree. Here are some more use cases from b0rk. jvns.ca/til/fzf-prev...

delighted to announce that my new zine "The Secret Rules of the Terminal" is out today!! You can get it for $12 USD here: wizardzines.com/zines/terminal

it's happening! "The Secret Rules of the Terminal" is coming out tomorrow! here's the table of contents:

TIL: If there's a Mac drive that seems to be completely bricked and can't be mounted or even erased, there's a non-obvious "Show all devices" control in Disk Utility. That will show the container device of the drive and you might be able to reformat that. apple.stackexchange.com/questions/12...

I told you we’d be back

SF Bay Area residents, whether you felt this evening’s #earthquake or not, please complete the “Did you feel it?” survey earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/...

TIL: there's a name for the wild-looking stratigraphic layers of rock that you see along the "gorge" sections of Rennie's River in Newfoundland: "flysch". (Must try that in Scrabble some time.) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flysch

Shot (from #Snowflake Summit 2025)

As someone who was told this urban legend from earliest times, there's a lot I could say about this.

TIL: the $BASH_REMATCH array variable in bash lets you do the Pythonic operation: match a regex using ( ) groups, then retrieve the value of group 1, group 2, ... As Python evolves more towards numeric analysis, I'm using bash more and more for string processing use cases. medium.com/@linuxadminh...

Potatoes trending as fuel for athletes? About time! wapo.st/4dihulG

When I was growing up in eastern Canada, some people had a strong affinity for New York, others for Boston. I always wondered what the factors were. (More English ancestry = Boston, Irish = New York?) My granddad worked construction on the Empire State Building, which puts me in the New York camp.

TIL: Peter Weller got his PhD in Italian renaissance art history. Not that long ago either. That's in character for Buckaroo Banzai, not so much for RoboCop. escholarship.org/uc/item/0dm8...

Am I the only one who, given an address or a neighborhood in Manhattan, visualizes it in terms of what Peter Parker did or who Spider-Man fought there?

TIL: in vi, q/ to bring up a menu of recent searches that you can cursor through, edit, and run again. vi, always a new surprise waiting somewhere.

This is a new image from #JWST. The bright points with spikes are stars in the Milky Way. Everything else is a galaxy. Everything. Else. Is. A. Galaxy.

I check the little screen, I check the big screen, I check the watch screen, I check the tablet screen. I check the screen that reminds me of the good times, I check the screen that reminds me of the better times.

Holy shit I just found out that “You Make Me Feel Like Dancing,” by Leo Sayer, is basically a Steely Dan song. Drums: Steve Gadd and Jeff Porcaro Bass: Chuck Rainey Guitar: Larry Carlton - youtu.be/ex96q32A6UU

terminal escape codes wizardzines.com/comics/escap...

TIL: I usually use normal! in vi/vim to simulate sending keystrokes for movement etc. I didn't see a way to do the equivalent of Ctrl-R followed by a register letter, to insert the contents of a register. Solution: the feedkeys() function: let @a="hello" call feedkeys("i\<c-r>a\<esc>")

47 years ago today, the same day Steve Martin debuted King Tut, the Blues Brothers made their first official appearance.

types of terminal programs wizardzines.com/comics/types...

I revived a Thunderbolt monitor, 2011 vintage. Which I thought might be defunct. But actually, I just went through a few generations of Apple products without Thunderbolt capability, while the monitor was gathering dust.

TIL: You don't need to stick to stdin, stdout, and stderr file descriptors (numbers 0-2) in shell scripting. You can use 3-255 also. Gotta take care, e.g. with temp files or named pipes, to keep the fd from closing too soon. (This is in the context of finding bash 3 workarounds to avoid array code.)

Wishing you all a peaceful holiday Sunday filled with joy & love rather than nightmares & trauma. 🐰 🥚 🐰 🥚🐰 🥚🐰 🥚🐰 🥚🐰 🥚🐰 🥚🐰 🥚🐰 🥚🐰 #HappyEaster

I use the Homebrew bash on macOS because between v3 and v4, bash gained a lot of array features. E.g. foo="one two three four" bar=($foo) # Now each word from $foo is an array element echo ${bar[0]} one IFS=$'\n' bar=($foo) # Now each line from $foo is an array element echo ${bar[1]} three four

OH: "That’s a super weird one" ChatGPT just said that to me!

every core unix command I use

happy 30th birthday to A Goofy Movie which debuted April 7 1995, half a year behind schedule due to a single pixel on a single monitor

When Homebrew creates a shellscript wrapper, e.g. for vidir in the moreutils package, it hardcodes the #! line pointing to /bin/bash. Which gives an error if your shell config file has code using associative arrays. Not supported in built-in macOS bash, but works with Homebrew's more recent bash.

TIL: In vi, :b <substring><tab><tab><tab> cycles auto-complete style through whichever open files have that substring in their filename (or pathname, if you specified a whole path). Instead of :e <number>. Lately I'm opening a lot more files simultaneously and doing a lot more with buffers.

This #TrilobiteTuesday, here's Gravicalymene bakeri: an Ordovician #trilobite from Tasmania, named after Tom Baker - AKA Doctor Who! It was named after #DoctorWho by the author, as the Doctor inspired him to study #science and time. Very cool. 😁 Image: tinyurl.com/4b8mnbkd

From time to time, I wake up and realize, hey the mayor of Branson MO is my cousin. Not some fifth cousin twice removed - my first cousin. (Since the term ends in April, this might be my last chance to mention that.) www.bransonmo.gov/538/Larry-Mi...

Hugo Award nominating ends this Friday night, March 14. A polite reminder that my novel THE DOWNLOADED (Shadowpaw Press) is eligible. • Starred review in PUBLISHERS WEEKLY • “Sure to be an award-winner” —AMAZING STORIES • “One of the best SF novels I've read in years” —Allen Steele