cartero Wednesday, August 12, 2026 · No. 25921
Testing

Trust Factory

Query Planning

Christophe Pettus: How the Other Half Plans

Query planning is a two-job problem: rewrite your SQL into a better shape, then search billions of possible join orders for the cheapest one.

Database Administration and Tooling

Dave Page: Inside the pgEdge AI DBA Workbench: How Ellie Actually Works

TL;DR: The pgEdge AI DBA Workbench is four services on a shared Postgres datastore: a collector, a server, an alerter, and a React client that renders the dashboards and the chat panel where Ellie lives. Ellie is an agentic loop that drives any LLM you choose (Claude, ChatGPT, Ollama, or anything OpenAI-compatible) through a fixed set of database-aware tool calls. The model never queries Postgres directly, which is rather the point. Anomaly detection runs three tiers: z-score baselines, pgvec...

Artificial Intelligence

From Manhattan to Genesis

The Genesis Mission aims to connect 17 U.S. national laboratories, their supercomputers, datasets, and a growing layer of AI models and agents into one system for researchers.

Defense Tech

The Download: soccer’s data renaissance and China’s big nuclear plans

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. Inside soccer’s data renaissance Imagine tuning in to the opening kickoff of a World Cup match and seeing a player intentionally kick the ball out of bounds. You may question the…

Google DeepMind

Google DeepMind is worried about what happens when millions of agents start to interact

Google DeepMind is funding research into the potential dangers of millions of different AI agents interacting with each other online. According to Rohin Shah, who directs the company’s AGI safety and alignment research, the mass-market arrival of agents that can carry out tasks without human oversight and follow instructions given to them by other agents creates…

Space Tech

Why China is betting on big nuclear reactors

It’s a tale of two nuclear industries. In China, large reactors are coming together at a stunning pace. The country has nearly doubled its nuclear fleet since 2016, reaching nearly 60 gigawatts of total power capacity. The new facilities are nearly all gigawatt-scale pressurized-water reactors. Meanwhile, the US has built just two reactors in that…

Artificial Intelligence

Inside soccer’s data renaissance

Imagine tuning in to the opening kickoff of a World Cup match and seeing a player intentionally send the ball all the way down the pitch and right out of bounds on the opponent’s end. Casual fans might scratch their heads. Where’s the logic in surrendering possession seconds into a game? If you were Jesse…

Google DeepMind

Job titles of the future: Nature’s drug designer

In 2018, after nearly two decades working in Big Pharma, chemist Tim Cernak was ready to put his skills to a new use.  For Merck, he’d developed precision therapies for cancer, HIV, and diabetes that could target disease while minimizing harm to healthy cells. But as a lifelong nature lover, he was increasingly concerned about…