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Improving site performance by shipping more CSS
GitHub’s Primer team recounts fully migrating github.com off CSS-in-JS to CSS Modules—feature flags, sx-prop cleanup, theming, and the performance wins along the way.
3 min · 723 words
Arm & SoftBank: Part 1 — Masa comes calling, bearing gifts
Today, something a little different: a joint post in the form of a conversation between Jon Metzler and Babbage.
11 min · 2,555 words
Crazy as it sounds to say this, since it’s all anybody’s been able to talk about for over a year, but the impact of AI on computing hasn’t yet sunk in.
6 min · 1,349 words
Friday Facts #447 - Factorio that you can touch
Factorio’s Friday Facts #447 covers a physical Factorio experience: how a playtesting event snowballed into a touchable factory build players can visit, with design notes from the Wube team.
10 min · 2,235 words
When to choose x86-64 vs aarch64
Not all cloud vCPUs are created equal. When you create a PlanetScale Postgres or Neki database, you have to choose between `aarch64` (ARM) and `x86-64`. Two clusters on different architectures can have the same vCPU count and RAM, yet perform very differently. It's worth understanding the implications, since you can't easily switch the CPU architecture on your cluster later. x86 grew up on the desktop, prioritizing backward compatibility and performance. It began at Intel in 1978 and IBM’s…
6 min · 1,326 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
mitxela builds a FLIP fluid simulation on salvaged Hanover flipdot panels for EMF2026—drive electronics, power, eight-panel install, and the pun that started it.
2 min · 377 words
One CPU Atomic Instruction, One Packaging Infinite Loop: The Story of the Lost Update on LA664
Jie Ge documents a Loongson LA664 erratum where an atomic instruction can lose updates, how it surfaced as an infinite packaging loop, the root cause analysis, and what it means for correctness on that CPU.
14 min · 3,163 words
From Thin Air to Bootable Images: The tine Build System
Martin Pitt and Daan De Meyer introduce tine: reproducible builds of RPM, Go, and Rust components into bootable images from minimal host requirements.
21 min · 4,850 words
It is with great sadness that we share the news of the passing of Johannes Doerfert, on September 17, 2026, at the age of 36, after a battle with cancer. Johannes was one of the most prolific and respected contributors to the LLVM compiler project, and his loss will be deeply felt.
5 min · 1,239 words
A Type Stronger than the Sum of its Components
Richard Schneeman walks through a Ruby type design that becomes more powerful than the sum of its parts—how carefully composed types can encode invariants that ad-hoc checks miss.
4 min · 946 words
Agentic Hacks, Real Proofs: Inside Google's PageBreak Project
Google's Michał Bentkowski details PageBreak, an agentic AI web security scanner that pairs LLM findings with real proof-of-concept validation to cut AI-slop noise in vulnerability reports.
5 min · 1,157 words
Is Structured Human Input the Missing Link in Agentic Work?
Long-running agents pause unpredictably for human input. Ben Greenberg argues A2A’s input-required state needs a schema contract—not free-form text—so pauses become reliable handoffs.
3 min · 801 words
Thomas Ptacek digs into VS Code's remote SSH agent flow—why LLM coding forks lean on it, how the protocol actually works, and what's bananas about the design.
3 min · 596 words
AI-powered fuzzing with the GitHub Security Lab Taskflow Agent
Antonio Morales walks through GitHub Security Lab’s Fuzzing Taskflow: point it at a C/C++ repo and an LLM agent writes harnesses, runs AFL++, reads coverage, triages crashes, and files reports.
9 min · 2,147 words
Meet Compass: Wealthsimple’s AI Teammate
Wealthsimple’s engineering team introduces Compass, an AI teammate that lives in Slack—what it does today, how they built it, and how it is becoming a fast friend for the company.
4 min · 846 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
Retry vs Circuit Breaker vs Fallback
Retries, circuit breakers, and fallbacks solve different failure modes in backend integrations. Using the wrong one can amplify outages—here is when each pattern helps and when it hurts.
6 min · 1,469 words