There's a persistent belief in the database world that vertical scaling solves all problems. Need more throughput? Add CPUs. Running out of cache? More RAM. Queries hitting disk? Higher IOPS. It's a comforting philosophy because it's simple, and for a surprisingly long time, it works. A single beefy Postgres instance can handle an enormous amount of punishment before collapsing under the strain.But there's a ceiling up there, and it's not made of hardware. Postgres was designed as a single-in...
The previous post on the Linux 7.0 pgbench regression ended with the same instruction every other Postgres performance post ends with: set huge pages. This post is the long version. If you have read the Postgres docs on huge_pages and you’re still not completely sure what /proc/meminfo is t…
Last year’s acquisitions have now shipped products, and for the first time it is possible to compare the Snowflake and Databricks “Postgres-in-the-lakehouse” strategies as real things rather than as marketing decks.
The acquisitions: Snowflake bought Crunchy Data in June 2025 (a…
Alphabetical order delivers our first casualty. archive_cleanup_command is a standby-server knob that exists entirely to tidy up after archive_command, which the alphabet insists on deferring until the next post. So we will describe how to sweep up a party we have not yet thrown.
The briefest-pos…
On Friday, Chinese AI firm DeepSeek released a preview of V4, its long-awaited new flagship model. Notably, the model can process much longer prompts than its last generation, thanks to a new design that helps it handle large amounts of text more efficiently. Like DeepSeek’s previous models, V4 is open source, meaning it is available…
Venture capitalists can't subsidize cheap AI forever, and the hunger for more compute is affecting the labor market, the gadget market, and electricity prices.
Orchestrating Media Workflows Through Strategic CollaborationAuthors: Eric Reinecke, Bhanu SrikanthIntroduction to Content Hub’s Media Production SuiteAt Netflix, we want to provide filmmakers with the tools they need to produce content at a global scale, with quick turnaround and choice from an extraordinary variety of cameras, formats, workflows, and collaborators. Every series or film arrives with its own creative ambitions and technical requirements. To reduce friction and keep product...
Too many experiment metrics can make meaningful changes harder to detect. Learn how Discord used simulations and Principal Component Analysis to maximize signal and reduce noise.
I tested the top 100 Rust crates on crates.io for backwards compatibility. Then I removed every dependency from the TigerBeetle Rust client and backported it to Rust 1.39, from 2019.
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. We’re in a new era of AI-driven scams When ChatGPT was released in late 2022, it showed how easily generative AI could create human-like text. This quickly caught the eye of…
I don’t need to tell you that AI is everywhere. Or that it is being used, increasingly, in hospitals. Doctors are using AI to help them with notetaking. AI-based tools are trawling through patient records, flagging people who may require certain support or treatments. They are also used to interpret medical exam results and X-rays. A…
Ryan is joined on the show by Cult.Repo producers Emma Tracey and Josiah Mcgarvie to discuss making documentaries about open-source software and the people behind the major technologies that uphold the internet.
arXiv:2604.20853v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Retrieval systems are increasingly used in biomedical and clinical natural language processing applications, yet practical guidance for researchers building such systems is limited. In this work, we provide such guidance through an empirical study of how retrieval pipeline design choices affect performance and efficiency at scale.
In particular, we examine retrieval over a variety of existing, public biomedical text datasets, leveraging a var...
arXiv:2604.20852v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Learning to rank (LTR) is one of the core tasks in Machine Learning. Traditional LTR models have made great progress, but nearly all of them are implemented from discriminative perspective. In this paper, we aim at addressing LTR from a novel perspective, i.e., by a deep generative model. Specifically, we propose a novel denoise rank model, DenoiseRank, which noises the relevant labels in the diffusion process and denoises them on the query doc...
arXiv:2604.20851v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Modern video-text retrieval (VTR) models excel on in-distribution benchmarks but are highly vulnerable to real-world query shifts, where the distribution of query data deviates from the training domain, leading to a sharp performance drop. Existing image-focused robustness solutions are inadequate to handle this vulnerability in video, as they fail to address the complex spatio-temporal dynamics inherent in these shifts. To systematically evalu...
