We just crossed it. Yay! Congrats everyone and Happy Halloween!

Full lineup and schedule for @syncconf.bsky.social in SF on Nov 12. Link in the 🧵 below 👇

The company is officially called "SO-YOU-DONT-HAVE-TO INCORPORATED'); DROP TABLE companies; --". A lot of websites and the IRS don't like that name though. We will announce more about it later this year. You can sign up to be on the waitlist: sydht.ai

I can't understate how good of a job the @inkandswitch.com folks did at this Automerge website. Wow, holy shit automerge.org And the fact that you can *interact* with the visual demo at the top? This is the new high bar for a technical website. Holy moly.

atmosphere devs! 🧑‍🚀 just published a protocol checkin: docs.bsky.app/blog/protoco... tl;dr expect to see a lot of updates from us in the next few months. we're hard at work on making AT easier to build on & ensuring the network remains a resilient foundation for the future of open social

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.

We have a shiny new website courtesy of @spiralganglion.com and @seaofclouds.com 🙌 🚀 Check it out: automerge.org

Okay, for the folks who asked: here's the majority AI view, writing up the reasonable, thoughtful view on AI that the vast majority of people in tech hold, that gets overshadowed by the bluster and hype of the tycoons trying to shill their nonsense. anildash.com/2025/10/17/t... Please share!

Announcing ATmosphereConf 2026, coming to Vancouver March 26th to 29th. We've got the full announcement and future news and updates on our new site news.atmosphereconf.org/3m3cwwz4mpk2j

Anyone know why you can’t take coconuts, spices, or umbrellas on the plane?

I got to go to India for the first time for my brother’s wedding. What a magical experience! And a nice opportunity to wear some colourful Indian outfits 😊

Vibe coding is irresponsibly building software through dice rolls, not caring what code is produced What about when engineers at the top of their game use AI tools responsibly to accelerate their work? I propose "vibe engineering"! simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/7/v...

It was agonizing to choose from among the 34 excellent submissions, but here are the four talks selected from our CFP process!

put another way: i don't want your data—not just from an ideological "users should be in control" perspective, but from a pragmatic "this makes my app harder and more expensive to run" perspective we've been so focused on making it easy to scale up that we've accidentally made it hard to scale down

[new blog post] The Invisible Curriculum of Research muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2025/10/the-...

It took almost two years…! The Fugue paper that @mweidner.bsky.social and I wrote about interleaving in collaborative text editing algorithms was finally accepted by IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems paywalled: ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/111... free: arxiv.org/abs/2305.00583

I made a guest post on @powersync.com's blog: powersync.com/blog/collabo... It describes a demo we made of collaborative text editing on top of PowerSync's DB sync engine, using character IDs & totally-ordered updates in a DB table (w/o CRDTs).

This is my 1st time catching my pet archer fish, Legolas, spitting on camera. Archerfish use modified jaw and tongue bones to fire a jet of water to knock down bugs from over hanging vegetation. Here Legolas is shooting down a fruit fly 🪰 🐠🧪

Imagine the hubris required to burst into the largest socio-technical system on earth and just start yanking out wires, thinking you are genius. Mass-emailing insulting messages and thinking people will welcome your help. Destroying careers, killing kids in Africa, and thinking you're the hero.

Our department @cst.cam.ac.uk is recruiting for a permanent position in Algorithms and Complexity (exceptional applicants from all areas of Computer Science will be considered) www.cam.ac.uk/jobs/univers...

Just learnt that “syzygy” is a real English word

It's pretty cool that Ink & Switch is contributing to this big ARIA programme now. We get two big things out of it: funding (obviously) but also a community of fascinating creators and problems to connect with. I'm learning all about the UK power grid this week. www.inkandswitch.com/newsletter/d...

Hosting a website on a disposable vape bogdanthegeek.github.io/blog/project...

Did you know your MacBook has a sensor that knows the exact angle of the screen hinge? It’s not exposed as a public API, but I figured out a way to read it and make it sound like an old wooden door.

☁️ Beyond the cloud = local-first software. On today’s #GOTOpodcast, @expede.wtf & @julianwood.com dive into apps that run on your device, sync seamlessly, stay private & empower devs. 🎧 gotopia.tech/podcast

I've long thought there wasn't a good definition of what makes a language "declarative". But then I stumbled across this 12-year-old blog post by my colleague Neel Krishnaswami, who has a surprisingly elegant and useful definition semantic-domain.blogspot.com/2013/07/what...

Returning JSON from SQL queries, by Jamie Brandon. The syntax is bad but I guess it works www.scattered-thoughts.net/writing/sql-...

OK! Today's the day! Kicking off the home for the #PrivateDataWG in the new @atprotocol.dev hosted Discourse forum Thanks to @ngerakines.me for spinning up the infra, including login with ATProto powered by AIP If you're interested in Private Data, login and introduce yourself.

This paper is pretty exciting. Near-zero-carbon steel production costs only 36% more than steel from a blast furnace (under reasonable electricity price assumptions); a carbon tax like the one in the EU is already enough to make it cost-competitive. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

I keep getting into conversations with engineers where I talk about how desperately I want my database to support materialized views with incremental updates and too often I get a blank stare in response. so I wrote a new post about why you should care! sophiebits.com/2025/08/22/m...

Post is now translated into English and available without ads and tracking: jhauser.de/once-upon-a-... With digressions into Cold War era spy balloons and the first Soviet photos from the far side of the moon, this is a fun read!

Stumbled across some old photos of the first computer I built myself, circa 1998. I installed it in a metal tool box into which I cut some holes. The handle was very convenient for carrying the computer to LAN parties.

Notion's new offline support is based on our rich text CRDT research x.com/ivanhzhao/st...

I started a substack! I wrote about how batteries are already cost competitive with diesel for data center backup power in many scenarios today, and how the magnitude of AI's demand for energy makes this increasingly true, you can read it here camillefassett.substack.com/p/how-batter...

Sync Conf is a boutique conference on the future of real-time, collaborative, agentic software development. Tickets are on sale now: syncconf.dev

My friend Johannes made a device to transmit a HDMI signal via sound through a garden hose as an art project: video.golem.de/software-ent... Low-res, black/white, and 0.125 fps, but it works! Article explaining the setup (German): www.golem.de/news/hdmi-au...

i have compiled a list of free image resources inspired by our conversation about this last week. livelaugh.blog/posts/non-ai...

The Ink & Switch team is coming through London and we're having a social to share some recent news and research from the lab, and catch up with people in London interested in local first, malleable software, and other similar areas of making better computing. Aug 16th, 6pm in London

When people call for “censorship resistance” in social networks, I’m not sure they realise how unpleasant a social network without filtering and takedowns would be

If you speak two languages well, have you tried counting to 10 in alternating languages? I found it surprisingly mind-bending.

The role of LLMs in academic reviewing, by Vijay Chidambaram www.sigarch.org/the-role-of-...

Our new Philips egg cooker came with no textual instructions, only pictorial ones. How many people without a chemistry degree are likely to figure out what “4% AcOH” means? (Spoiler: it means “vinegar”)

Interesting, but also the funniest bit is the deadpan “the trigger for the CPU spikes both times was our CEO logging in. We re-deployed to get a clean start, permanently banned him from the service, and moved on.”

📄✨ New paper! Emilie Ma (kewbi.sh) and I looked at the problem of users of end-to-end encrypted apps recovering their private keys if their device is lost, broken, or stolen. We found a cryptographic approach that is decentralised and resilient against social engineering arxiv.org/abs/2507.21122

Please don't plug keyboards or other devices into random USB ports, ok?

Nice that the Bluesky firehose is now becoming a live dataset on which to demo streaming databases

Monthly @automerge.org community calls start on 20 August, hosted by @patternist.xyz and @expede.wtf lu.ma/zv6tpuu4

“Just sing out a Te Deum / when you see that ICBM” is one of my favourite rhymes of all time R.I.P. Tom Lehrer