cartero Thursday, August 13, 2026 · No. 25969
SQLite

BlazeDB: a Swift-native embedded database with WAL crash recovery + encrypted persistence

Hey everyone, I’ve been working on BlazeDB, a Swift-native embedded database focused on local app storage and developer tooling workflows. It’s open sourced with a MIT license. Main goals were: \\- Swift-native API surface \\- WAL-backed crash recovery \\- Encrypted persistence (AES-GCM) \\- Custom binary protocol (BlazeBinary) \\- Reactive SwiftUI integration \\- Typed query DSL \\- Local-first/offline-friendly architecture \\- Document Store A lot of the project started because I wante...

Compilers

Aperio Lang

Generative AI

Decoding Dreams with AI

Brain-scanning tools and AI can help sleepers recall their dreams by decoding their content, and possibly guide their mental imagery.

CSS

Moving away from Tailwind, and learning to structure my CSS

Hello! 8 years ago, I wrote excitedly about discovering Tailwind. At that time I really had no idea how to structure my CSS code and given the choice between a pile of complete chaos and Tailwind, I was really happy to choose Tailwind. It helped me make a lot of sites! I spent the last week or so migrating a couple of sites away from Tailwind and towards more semantic HTML + vanilla CSS, and it was SO fun and SO interesting, so here are some things I learned! it turns out Tailwind taught me a...

Privacy

Mayo Clinic is Using AI to Listen to Emergency Room Visits

Mayo Clinic's "Ambient Listening" has been around for a couple of years, but clearly not all patients know their interactions with nurses are being passively recorded and processed by AI.

AI Hardware

The Download: China’s AI drama factory and the WHO’s missing health targets

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. How Chinese short dramas became AI content machines China’s short drama industry is fueled by bite-sized, melodramatic, and smutty shows built for smartphone scrolling. Now, many are being made entirely with…

PostgreSQL

Radim Marek: Welcome to ORDER BY jungle

SQL is fun and not at all boring. The latest article by Markus Winand on Order by Has Come a Long Way sent me on quite a journey. First, set up a table called nums with one integer column and four rows: CREATE TABLE nums (a int); INSERT INTO nums VALUES (0), (1), (2), (3); Try to guess what these two queries return. SELECT -a AS a FROM nums ORDER BY a; SELECT -a AS a FROM nums ORDER BY -a; Most of us would guess the same rows in a different order. The actual answer is that they produce exactl...

Generative AI

How Chinese short dramas became AI content machines

In a dimly lit bedroom, a frightened young woman is thrown onto a bed by a tall, muscular man. He grabs her hand, and flame-like vines crawl across her body, fusing with her flesh. She levitates, then drops. A dragon-shaped tattoo appears across her chest. “Two months,” the man says. “Give me an heir, or…

Artificial Intelligence

Observability and human intuition in an AI world

In this two for one episode recorded at HumanX, Ryan is first joined by Christine Yen, CEO of Honeycomb, to discuss how AI compresses the software development lifecycle, making observability about capturing the right telemetry. Then, Spiros Xanthos, founder and CEO of Resolve AI, shares with us how AI coding increases code volume but decreases human intuition, making production operations harder than ever.

Generative AI

MoZoo:Unleashing Video Diffusion power in animal fur and muscle simulation

arXiv:2605.13857v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The creation of cinematic-quality animal effects necessitates the precise modeling of muscle and fur dynamics, a process that remains both labor-intensive and computationally expensive within traditional production workflows. While generative diffusion models have shown promise in diverse artistic workflows, their capacity for high-fidelity animal simulation remains largely unexploited. We present MoZoo, a generative dynamics solver that bypass...

Embeddings

Image-aware Layout Generation with User Constraints for Poster Design

arXiv:2605.13856v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Graphic layout is essential in poster generation. Professionals often need to design different layouts for a product image, to ensure they meet specific user requirements. This paper focuses on utilizing a deep-learning model to automatically generate image-aware layouts with user-defined constraints, including layout attributes and partial layouts. Layout attribute constraints require generated layouts to include and exclude elements of specif...

Graphics and Rendering

SparseOIT: Improving Order-Independent Transparency 3DGS via Active Set Method

arXiv:2605.13855v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has received tremendous popularity over the past few years due to its photorealistic visual appearance. However, 3DGS uses volumetric rendering that is not suitable for objects with non-lambertian or transparent materials. To remedy this issue, a family of Order-Independent Transparency (OIT) rendering methods propose to remove or modify the depth sorting step in the 3DGS rendering equation. However, the potential o...

Computer Vision

Contrastive Multi-Modal Hypergraph Reasoning for 3D Crowd Mesh Recovery

arXiv:2605.13854v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-person 3D reconstruction is pivotal for real-world interaction analysis, yet remains challenging due to severe occlusions and depth ambiguity. Current approaches typically rely on single-modality inputs, which inherently lack geometric guidance. Furthermore, these methods often reconstruct subjects in isolation, neglecting the collective group context essential for resolving ambiguities in crowded scenes. To address these limitations, we ...

Diffusion Models

FaceParts: Segmentation and Editing of Gaussian Splatting

arXiv:2605.13853v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Facial editing is an important task with applications in entertainment, virtual reality, and digital avatars. Most existing approaches rely on generative models in the 2D image domain, while in 3D the task is typically performed through labor-intensive manual editing. We propose FaceParts, a framework for unsupervised segmentation and editing of Gaussian Splatting avatars. Unlike existing 2D or mesh-assisted methods, our approach operates direc...