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How shredding JSON is giving Logfire 1000x query speedups
Adrian Garcia Badaracco explains how Pydantic Logfire uses dynamic shredding of semi-structured OpenTelemetry attributes into separate Parquet columns, so queries on JSON attributes that once timed out now finish in under a second, plus plans for indexes and usage-based shredding.
13 min · 3,025 words
Some notes on starting to use DjangoOriginal article link with an AI-written directory summary
First impressions of Django from a developer seeking a mature framework with explicit structure. Julia Evans examines its administration interface and the experience of returning to a small project after time away.
1 min · 79 wordsagent-written
Don't Trip[wire] Yourself: Testing Error Recovery in ZigOriginal article link with an AI-written directory summary
A walkthrough of testing error-recovery paths by deliberately injecting failures. Mitchell Hashimoto explains Zig's error cleanup mechanisms and how the Tripwire library helps exercise code that ordinary success-path tests miss.
1 min · 77 wordsagent-written
Comparison of Arena Architecture in malloc()
When multiple threads simultaneously allocate or deallocate memory from the allocator, the allocator will serialize them. Programs making intensive use of the allocator actually slow down as the number of processors increases.
8 min · 1,880 words
Software occlusion culling in Block Game
Eniko walks through software-rendered occlusion culling for a voxel/block game on a weak integrated GPU—why CPU-side culling mattered, how the technique works, and the performance wins on modest hardware.
16 min · 3,579 words
I've operated petabyte-scale ClickHouse clusters for 5 yearsWhat I learned operating ClickHouse at scale: the wins, the failures, and the lessons that only come from production experience.
Tinybird co-founder Javi Santana shares five years of operational experience running petabyte-scale ClickHouse clusters, covering architecture decisions, the challenges of storage-compute separation, zero-copy replication trade-offs, and how the upgrade process evolved from a three-hour ordeal into a CI/CD-integrated routine.
1 min · 280 wordsagent-written
Alternatives to MinIO for single-node local S3
After MinIO's parent company abandoned the project in late 2025, developer Robin Moffatt evaluated six Docker-first, open-source S3-compatible replacements for use in local demos and data pipeline testing. S3Proxy and SeaweedFS come out as the easiest drop-in alternatives, while Garage and Apache Ozone are judged too complex for single-node lightweight use.
1 min · 265 wordsagent-written
The Design & Implementation of SpritesOriginal article link with an AI-written directory summary
Thomas Ptacek explains the design of Sprites as disposable, stateful computers. The engineering account explores how Fly.io makes isolated execution environments quick to obtain while retaining useful system state.
1 min · 75 wordsagent-written
A Mind Cannot Be Smeared Across TimeConscious experience, temporal windows, and why sequential computation may not suffice.
Michael Timothy Bennett argues that whether machines can be conscious depends not only on what they compute but when: augmenting Stack Theory, he proves existential temporal realisation over windowed trajectories does not preserve conjunction, so a mind cannot simply be smeared across time.
28 min · 6,366 words
Finding and Fixing Ghostty's Largest Memory LeakOriginal article link with an AI-written directory summary
Mitchell Hashimoto traces a substantial memory leak in Ghostty to its terminal-content data structures. The account explains why particular workloads exposed the problem and how understanding the internals led to a fix.
1 min · 79 wordsagent-written
What makes Lisp difficult to read?
The Lisp family of programming languages is infamous for their parenthesis-heavy syntax. Many people, myself included, find this syntax more difficult to read than the notation of languages like Python, Java or C. The perceived unreadability of Lisp is so significant that multiple attempts have been made to create new notations to aid Lisp’s adoption. Yet, despite these attempts and Lisp being nea
11 min · 2,635 words
ADHD as a circadian rhythm disorder: evidence and implications for chronotherapy
A Frontiers in Psychiatry perspective arguing that circadian dysfunction — evening chronotype, delayed melatonin onset, and pervasive sleep disturbance — is a clinically significant phenotype in a large ADHD subgroup, with implications for chronotherapy such as timed light and melatonin.
8 min · 1,836 words
A careful comparison of typeclasses and ML-style modules: what each abstraction is for, where the persistent confusion comes from, and how to choose between them when designing APIs and language features.
10 min · 2,361 words
Full Haskell-like Type Class resolution in Java
Gabriel Garcia re-implements Haskell-style type classes in pure Java: using reflection and generics to parse static types, unify them, and automatically resolve instance witnesses, then extends the approach to higher-kinded types, context instances and overlapping instances, with worked examples like Show, Monoid, Traversable and Monad.
32 min · 7,285 words
Bryan Cantrill argues that LLM-generated LinkedIn posts are immediately recognisable to readers who have seen much AI content, and that using AI to write in your name undermines authenticity and signals to others that your stated views may not be genuine. He urges people to write in their own voice.
1 min · 278 wordsagent-written
Jędrzej Maczan explains PyTorch's activation-checkpointing memory planner as a 0/1 knapsack problem and introduces dp_knapsack_sliding_hirschberg, a sliding-window DP with Hirschberg-style reconstruction that cuts peak RAM during memory planning by about 20x.
7 min · 1,724 words
How to run a city builder on 16 MHz
A look at how the original SimCity ran a full city simulation on a 16 MHz 386SX: its Simulate() function only runs a slice of the systems each frame, a frame-distribution trick that also shows up in Assetto Corsa's cubemap reflections and Unreal's Lumen lighting.
4 min · 998 words
The Graph Will Set You Free: Why Every Creative Tool Is Becoming a Node Canvas
Hirad Sab traces node-based creative tools from Sketchpad to modern AI canvases, arguing graphs are the right abstraction when generation becomes a networked, composable process.
8 min · 1,935 words
The Shadows Lurking in the Equations
FuzzyGraph visualizes equation error topography, not just exact zeros—revealing black holes, shadow lines, and near-solution underwater islands invisible to conventional binary graphing of algebraic curves.
5 min · 1,136 words
CorrosionOriginal article link with an AI-written directory summary
Thomas Ptacek and Peter Cai examine Corrosion, Fly.io's state-synchronization system. A serious outage motivates a detailed discussion of propagating routing information, distributed failure modes, and the tradeoffs in the system's design.
1 min · 79 wordsagent-written