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Mac Mini M6: Retro PC Emulation with 86Box (600MHz PII?!)
Benchmarking cycle-accurate 86Box on an M6 Mac Mini: why one core matters for retro PC emulation, a stable 600MHz Pentium II clock, and how timing accuracy compares to original hardware.
7 min · 1,678 words
Postgres SELECT DISTINCT Does Not Scale
DBOS explains why Postgres SELECT DISTINCT can get surprisingly expensive as datasets grow, what the planner is doing, and how they mitigated it in practice.
5 min · 1,068 words
How Forge Structures Requests for Prompt Cache Reuse
Mohit Ranka explains how Forge, an open-source terminal-first AI IDE, restructures its agent harness requests—stable prefixes, message ordering, history persistence and cache hints—to maximise provider prompt-cache reuse, and how request snapshots plus usage tracking make cache behaviour observable.
6 min · 1,298 words
Packing Binary Is Fun, Actually
Pranav Desai’s hands-on tour of binary packing: why packing bits can be fun, the techniques that matter, and practical patterns for packing denser structures without losing your mind.
22 min · 5,056 words
Hitting a billion tokens per minute on one GPU by combining a query planner and an inference engine
Charles Frye and Shreya on the Modal blog: combining a query planner with an inference engine to push AI-SQL queries past a billion tokens per minute on one GPU—why left-deep joins help KV cache, and how they beat naive vLLM-style serving.
18 min · 4,181 words
Introducing WalShadow: Sub-second Postgres replication to ClickHouse from physical WAL
Today, we’re announcing WalShadow, an open-source engine that replicates Postgres data to ClickHouse directly from physical WAL. In our benchmarks, transactions committed in Postgres became visible in ClickHouse in around 200 ms, while WalShadow sustained 289K rows/sec, effectively keeping pace with the source Postgres instance. Unlike traditional CDC based systems, WalShadow doesn’t use Postgres logical replication. It consumes the same physical WAL stream used by Postgres replicas, decodes…
5 min · 1,059 words
Platform-independent SIMD in Go
Go 1.26 and 1.27 include experimental APIs for Single Instruction Multiple Data SIMD operations. SIMD is a native feature of many modern CPUs that allows software to perform uniform operations across vectors of data very quickly, such as adding 8 pairs of float64 values in a single instruction. It can significantly speed up many computationally-intensive tasks, ranging from cryptography to data processing to AI. In fact, Go’s Green Tea garbage collector/blog/greenteagc even makes use of SIMD to accelerate scanning memory for live objects.
15 min · 3,399 words
Topcoat is pushing the boundary of server applications with Rust
Two monthshttps://tokio.rs/blog/2026-07-22-announcing-topcoat ago, we Julienhttps://github.com/pikaju and Ihttps://github.com/carllerche announced Topcoathttps://github.com/tokio-rs/topcoat, a batteries-included full-stack Rust framework. It includes views, components, mailers, an ORM Toastyhttps://github.com/tokio-rs/toasty, and more. Topcoat aims to make building web apps with Rust as productive as any other language. We have been hard at work shipping features, so it is a good time to talk about what is new.
9 min · 1,958 words
Ten years of tmux, and the 1,495 lines of zsh it cost me
Yogesh Lonkar measured a tmux status bar burning about 15% of a CPU core, then rewrote a decade of forking shell scripts into a leaner setup—and documents what 1,495 lines of zsh had been doing the whole time.
13 min · 2,974 words
How to serve trillions of tokens for trillion-parameter coding agents
Modal explains how it serves coding-agent inference at extreme scale—performance and efficiency techniques for trillion-parameter models generating trillions of tokens, written for teams facing the same workload.
30 min · 6,972 words
SDF vs. MSDF vs. Slug: GPU Text Rendering
Chris Hanson compares SDF, MSDF, Slug, texture atlases, and Rive for GPU text: how signed-distance fields trade sharpness, memory, and shader cost when you draw outlines yourself.
15 min · 3,398 words
ReBarUEFI: Resizable BAR for almost any UEFI systemA DXE driver and tooling to enable Resizable BAR on motherboards that never exposed the option.
Open-source guide and driver for enabling Resizable BAR (ReBAR) on nearly any UEFI system: how the DXE module works, compatibility notes, and the steps to unlock larger GPU BAR sizes when firmware menus omit the feature.
4 min · 880 words
Ember-1 is a new specialized model from Fireworks Research that delivers Kimi K3’s quality with 40% fewer tokens.
6 min · 1,375 words
700 MB/s of Kafka throughput, on Postgres
Profiling Kafgres (Kafka-compatible broker inside Postgres) from ~113 MB/s to ~700 MB/s via cached SPI plans, relaxed commits, separate topic disks, and WaitEventSet socket readiness.
5 min · 1,062 words
Mercury 2.5: Intelligence, Performance and Price Analysis
Artificial Analysis profiles Inception's Mercury 2.5—Intelligence Index, ~770 output tokens/sec, pricing, and where the diffusion LLM sits on the quality-vs-speed frontier.
12 min · 2,677 words
We just shipped support for the ugliest part of HTTP: Vary
Cloudflare Cache Rules now support HTTP Vary on every plan—normalize negotiation headers, pass exact values to origin, or bypass cache when variance is too wild.
12 min · 2,727 words
Better prompt caching for GPT-6
OpenAI explains GPT-6 prompt-caching improvements: higher cache hit rates, new diagnostics, explicit breakpoints, and controls aimed at cutting latency and inference cost.
3 min · 623 words
Making the MiniMax H3 Video VAE 2x Faster
The MiniMax H3 video VAE now encodes up to ~2.2x faster and decodes ~1.4 2.7x faster. Together that can roughly halve the time a video workflow spends in the VAE: a 1344x768, 129 frame encode and decode round trip drops from 24.3 to 12.7 seconds. What changed, the technical details A fused encoder kernel, on by default. Between convolutions the encoder normalized each frame, applied an activation and padded the edges, each one a separate pass over hundreds of megabytes.
2 min · 454 words
Linebender ships fearless_simd 1.0: safe Rust SIMD that covers autovectorization, portable abstractions, and intrinsics access—reflecting on design goals after eight years from the original prototype.
4 min · 999 words
Tailscale performance updates cut memory use, raise throughput, and speed startup via multi-queue, writev, and netmap caching—how the team measured and shipped the gains.
7 min · 1,640 words