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PlanetScale Released Text Search and We Have a Lot to Say (Part I)
Two BM25 optimizations and benchmark configuration changes inspired by PlanetScale's TIN benchmarks make ParadeDB's text search faster without changing its document identifiers.
14 min · 3,188 words
Python 3.15 ships with a new profiler. It is called Tachyon, it lives in the standard library as the profiling.sampling module, and unlike cProfile it is a sampling profiler rather than a tracing one. I now have a set of hands-on workshops for it, which you can find at github.com/GrahamDumpleton/tachyon-workshops or on the workshops page of this site, and they have reached the point where I am happy for other people to do them. That said, they were not written for other people in the first place. They were written so I could learn Tachyon myself, and the reason I wanted...
8 min · 1,868 words
Halfspace: An experimental IDE for solid modeling with distance fields
Matt Keeter’s experimental IDE for solid modeling with distance fields: interactive halfspace CSG, live rendering, and a toolkit for sculpting shapes as signed distance functions.
6 min · 1,448 words
zenkai: The App Launcher I Wrote Because I Wanted Something Fast and Beautiful
Dayvster builds zenkai, a Zig + Qt6 cross-platform app launcher with ~140ms startup (sometimes ~20ms), 65+ themes, Lua plugins, and a sandbox—written as a hobby performance deep dive.
2 min · 571 words
Earendil's experimental Pi Durable harness brings Pi's minimalism to long-running agents: crash-safe tasks, multi-conversation concurrency, pluggable extensions, compaction, durable documents, and multiplayer steering on JS runtimes.
5 min · 1,053 words
Garbage Collection: Generational? Incremental? Both!
The third Language Summit talk was brought by Mark Shannon, who is the author of the incremental garbage collector implementation shipped in Python 3.14 that was reverted back to the generational garbage collector from Python 3.13 after reports of “significant memory pressure” in production environments. The original goal of the new incremental garbage collector was to reduce maximum pause times by an order of magnitude for larger heaps.
5 min · 1,173 words
Edward Kmett's week-old Turbo Haskell Compiler (THC) JITs GHC Core onto Truffle/GraalVM, supports AOT Native Image, polyglot FFI, Loom green threads, and can compile pandoc, happy, alex, and GHC itself.
2 min · 506 words
Browserbase’s Harsehaj Dhami explains Web Bot Auth: cryptographic HTTP message signatures that let AI agents prove identity, while leaving access and reputation decisions to site owners and registries.
5 min · 1,123 words
Deser: Rethinking Rust Serialization
Armin Ronacher revisits Deser, an experimental Rust serialization library that inverts Serde’s visitor recursion into heap-backed sinks/emitters—trading some performance for lossless buffering, composable adapters, XML namespaces, and no stack overflow on deep nests.
2 min · 492 words
Yet Another AI Security OSS Externality
Holden Karau recounts working AI-lab vulnerability reports during Apache Spark releases, and why AI security often externalizes cost onto open-source maintainers who lack resources to verify opaque claims.
9 min · 2,135 words
Hugging Face’s Tarek Ziadé explains Serge, a CI agent that finds Transformers failures, reproduces them on GPUs, writes patches, verifies them, and opens PRs—29 merges in ~80 days.
9 min · 2,070 words
Floppy Emu Hardware Failure Analysis Results
Steve digs through years of Floppy Emu QA failures and returns: clock crystals dominate the failure table, with CPLDs, programming misses, and soldering filling out a detailed hardware autopsy.
5 min · 1,165 words
You Said No MCP!Why Pi (pi.dev) brought MCP into the core after years of saying no
Earendil explains why Pi now ships MCP in core: MCP matured, Codemode/JavaScript sandbox composition made it useful, and embracing modern MCP helps shape better tool patterns for small harnesses.
5 min · 1,048 words
Backblaze Drive Stats for Q2 2026
Backblaze’s Q2 2026 Drive Stats: 354,415 drives at 1.73% quarterly AFR, lifetime AFR 1.41%, plus a clear CMR vs SMR primer as 20TB+ drives become a larger share of the fleet.
11 min · 2,548 words
An update on Angular’s TypeScript 7-powered Compiler
The Angular team explains ngp, a hybrid preprocessor that rewrites parts of the Angular compiler in Rust with Oxc, decoupling transforms from TypeScript to prepare for TypeScript 7 and native tooling.
6 min · 1,431 words
Eddie Aftandilian ships SafeRE 1.0, a linear-time Java regex library built with agents: differential testing vs the JDK, ReDoS resistance by construction, and performance that now beats JDK and RE2/J on Rebar workloads.
5 min · 1,062 words
GrapheneOS – When an app is slow
A GrapheneOS user digs into why OsmAnd maps feel slower on a Pixel 8 than on stock Android, and how that search led to CoMaps and broader performance trade-offs on hardened phones.
1 min · 245 words
PotemkinOS: an operating system where the model writes the userland
Gabe Ortiz’s joke-with-a-build: a Linux image with no userland—only a kernel, inference engine, C compiler, and eight tools—so the model must invent its own shell, ls, and eventually a Kubernetes facade three villages converge on.
3 min · 699 wordsagent-assisted
Introducing Casita: A content-addressed store for source code and build artifacts
Domen Kožar introduces Casita, a content-addressed object store for source code and build artifacts—an argument for rethinking Nix-style packaging from the package manager up.
7 min · 1,723 words
Don't couple your Go code to GitHub
Iain Cambridge explains why Go import paths that hard-code github.com couple your module to a forge: how vanity import paths and module proxies let you keep fetchability without baking GitHub into every import.
3 min · 595 words