cartero Saturday, August 15, 2026 · No. 26075
AI Agents

Building agent-first governance and security

As AI agents increasingly work alongside humans across organizations, companies could be inadvertently opening a new attack surface. Insecure agents can be manipulated to access sensitive systems and proprietary data, increasing enterprise risk. In some modern enterprises, non-human identities (NHI) are outpacing human identities, and that trend will explode with agentic AI. Solid governance and…

Observability

Building a fault-tolerant metrics storage system at Airbnb

How we built a storage system that ingests 50 million samples per second and stores 2.5 petabytes of logical time series data.By: Rishabh KumarModern observability practice encourages instrumenting every meaningful code path. Over the past 15 years, open-source observability SDKs like Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, and StatsD have made deep instrumentation nearly ubiquitous. These days, most software — open-source or custom — can be made observable by default, assuming you actually ...

AWS

Real-time analytics: Oldcastle integrates Infor with Amazon Aurora and Amazon Quick Sight

This post explores how Oldcastle used AWS services to transform their analytics and AI capabilities by integrating Infor ERP with Amazon Aurora and Amazon Quick Sight. We discuss how they overcame the limitations of traditional cloud ERP reporting to deploy real-time dashboards and build a scalable analytics system. This practical, enterprise-grade approach offers a blueprint that organizations can adapt when extending ERP capabilities with cloud-native analytics and AI.

RAG

Modernizing the Facebook Groups Search to Unlock the Power of Community Knowledge

We’ve fundamentally transformed Facebook Groups Search to help people more reliably discover, sort through, and validate community content that’s most relevant to them. We’ve adopted a new hybrid retrieval architecture and implemented automated model-based evaluation to address the major friction points people experience when searching community content. Under this new framework, we’ve made tangible improvements [...] Read More... The post Modernizing the Facebook Groups Search to Unl...

AI Coding Tools

Fragments: April 21

Last week Thoughtworks released the 34th volume of our Technology Radar. This radar is our biannual survey of our experience of the technology scene, highlighting tools, techniques, platforms, and languages that we’ve used or otherwise caught our eye. This edition contains 118 blips, each briefly describing our impressions of one of these elements. As we would expect, the radar is dominated by AI-oriented topics. Part of this is revisiting familiar ground with LLM-assisted eyes: An int...

PostgreSQL

Antony Pegg: How to Use the pgEdge Control Plane: From Zero to Multi-Master and Beyond

A couple of months back, the CEO challenged product and marketing to revamp the developer experience on our website in three weeks. I vibe-coded a proof of concept full of "try it now" buttons and interactive guides, the CEO loved it, and then I had to deal with almost every one of those interactive guides being a placeholder card. Engineering was fully booked, and the Control Plane product I needed to write guides for was one I knew inside out at the architecture level but had never personal...

Programming Language Theory

Slava's Monoid Zoo

Authentication

Moving past bots vs. humans

As AI assistants and privacy proxies challenge the capabilities of traditional bot detection, the Web needs new models for accountability. We believe that control should remain with the client, and that an open ecosystem of anonymous credentials is key to preserving user privacy while protecting origins from abuse.

PostgreSQL

Christophe Pettus: Hints, Part 3: Advice, Not Orders

Robert Haas’s pg_plan_advice patch set, proposed for PostgreSQL 19, is where the twenty-year argument from Part 2 has landed — or is trying to. It is not pg_hint_plan brought into core. It is a different thing, with different mechanics, a different scope, and a different answer to the &ldqu…

Artificial Intelligence

Announcing: Navigating the AI Shift

For a lot of people, AI started out as a net negative. You’re reviewing documents someone couldn’t be bothered to write themselves. You’re having your time wasted by PRs generated by someone who never tried to understand the problem. The efficiency gains everyone keeps talking about haven’t really shown up in your week – but […]

Meta

The Download: turning down human noise, and LA’s stunning subway upgrade

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. The noise we make is hurting animals. Can we learn to shut up? As human society has expanded, animals have started struggling to hear one another. For many birds, the noise…

PostgreSQL

Hubert 'depesz' Lubaczewski: Waiting for PostgreSQL 19 – Add CONCURRENTLY option to REPACK

On 6th of April 2026, Álvaro Herrera committed patch: Add CONCURRENTLY option to REPACK   When this flag is specified, REPACK no longer acquires access-exclusive lock while the new copy of the table is being created; instead, it creates the initial copy under share-update-exclusive lock only (same as vacuum, etc), and it follows an MVCC … Continue reading "Waiting for PostgreSQL 19 – Add CONCURRENTLY option to REPACK"

Business Intelligence

Grafana 13

Developer Tools

We still need developer communities

Ryan welcomes Mike Swift, co-founder and CEO of Major League Hacking, to the show to chat about the never-ending need for software developer communities and entry points into programming; MHL’s recent acquisition of DEV and how they’re creating a place for shared knowledge, building, and publishing; and why now is the best time to be both an artisan and a builder in a world with AI software development tools.

Artificial Intelligence

Bias-constrained multimodal intelligence for equitable and reliable clinical AI

arXiv:2604.16884v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The integration of medical imaging and clinical text has enabled the emergence of generalist artificial intelligence (AI) systems for healthcare. However, pervasive biases, such as imbalanced disease prevalence, skewed anatomical region distributions, heterogeneous imaging protocols, and demographic disparities, pose significant challenges to the fairness and reliability of vision-language systems in real-world clinical settings. Here we presen...

AI Inference

SinkRouter: Sink-Aware Routing for Efficient Long-Context Decoding in Large Language and Multimodal Models

arXiv:2604.16883v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In long-context decoding for LLMs and LMMs, attention becomes increasingly memory-bound because each decoding step must load a large amount of KV-cache data from GPU memory. Existing acceleration strategies often trade efficiency for accuracy by relying on heuristic pruning that may discard useful information. At a deeper level, they also tend to indiscriminately preserve all high-scoring tokens, treat early tokens as indispensable anchors, or ...

Fine-tuning and PEFT

Incentivizing Parametric Knowledge via Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards for Cross-Cultural Entity Translation

arXiv:2604.16881v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Cross-cultural entity translation remains challenging for large language models (LLMs) as literal or phonetic renderings are usually yielded instead of culturally appropriate translations in context. However, relevant knowledge may already be encoded in model parameters during large-scale pre-training. To incentivize the effective use of parametric knowledge, we propose EA-RLVR (Entity-Anchored Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards), a...