cartero Thursday, August 13, 2026 · No. 25961
Nix

TIL: Symlinking NixOS Dotfiles

The standard answer to managing dotfiles on NixOS is home-manager. I've never used it, due to two aesthetic and one practical objection:

PostgreSQL

Cornelia Biacsics: Contributions for week 19, 2026

On 12 May, 2026 the San Francisco Bay Area PostgreSQL Meetup Group met virtually, organized by Katharine Saar, Stacey Haysler and Christophe Pettus. Alex Yarotsky spoke at the event. The Swiss PGDay Program Committee met to finalize the schedule: Marion Baumgartner Tobias Bussmann Andreas Geppert Johannes Graën Stefan Keller Michelle Willen Community Blog Post: Boriss Mejias about They are blinded by a flag. Are we too?

PostgreSQL

Lætitia AVROT: ORDER BY coalesce(x, 0): there is no x

I was reading Markus Winand’s latest post on ORDER BY history last week. If you haven’t read it yet, go read it. Markus is one of the best writers on SQL standards, and this post is no exception. One line stopped me cold. The compatibility table for “expressions on selected columns.” Postgres: partial. PostgreSQL 18: still partial. That itch needed scratching. What the standard says 🔗SQL:1999 lifted a restriction from the original ORDER BY clause.

Artificial Intelligence

Roundtables: Can AI Learn to Understand the World?

Listen to the session or watch below AI companies want to build systems that understand the external world and overcome the limitations of LLMs. Recent developments have brought world models to the forefront of the AI discussion. Watch a conversation with editor in chief Mat Honan, senior AI editor Will Douglas Heaven, and AI reporter…

Computational Complexity

In Memoriam: Michael O. Rabin

ACM Turing Award laureate Michael Rabin's professional contributions touch nearly every aspect of computing.

Artificial Intelligence

Scaling creativity in the age of AI

Storytelling is core to humanity’s DNA, stemming from our impulse to express ideals, warnings, hopes, and experiences. Technology has always been woven through the medium and the distribution: from early humans’ innovation of natural pigments and charcoals for cave paintings to literal representation by the camera. The landscape of storytelling continues to shift under our…

Space Tech

Space-Based Solar Power Is On Its Way

Entrepreneurs and nation-states and working to make space-based solar power economically and technically possible.

AI Psychosis

Listening

It's much easier to craft attractive offers to your customers by learning to listen well.

Streaming Analytics

Making User-Sequence Data More Cost-Efficient, Faster, and Easier to Use

Authors (listed alphabetically)Ads Feature Engineering Infra team: Ajay Venkatakrishnan, Le ZhangCore ML Infra team: Eric Shang, Pihui WeiML Data team: Connor Votroubek, Yi HeUser Understanding team: Camilo Munoz, Simin LiIf you work on ranking, retrieval, or recommendation systems, you’ve probably asked for some version of the same thing: “Give me the last N meaningful actions this user took, with the right enrichments, in a format that’s easy to train and serve ML models.”On paper...

PostgreSQL

Christophe Pettus: Patch Today: CVE-2026-6473

A critical integer wraparound bug lets unprivileged SQL users trigger heap corruption with potential arbitrary code execution.

PostgreSQL

Jan Wieremjewicz: Backrest's back, alright!

Events unfolded quickly over the course of a couple of weeks starting on 27 April 2026, when a message appeared on the pgBackRest project announcing: that the repository would be archived and active maintenance would stop. For many in the PostgreSQL ecosystem, this landed like a shock. pgBackRest is one of the most widely used backup and recovery tools for PostgreSQL, deeply embedded in production environments across enterprises large and small. Now it was suddenly described as “...

Anthropic

Anthropic’s Code with Claude showed off coding’s future—whether you like it or not

The vibes were strong at Code with Claude, Anthropic’s two-day event for software developers in London that kicked off on May 19, the same day as Google’s I/O in Palo Alto. (A coincidence, not a flex, Anthropic staffers assured me.) “Who here has shipped a pull request in the last week that was completely written…

AI Coding Tools

Coding agents are giving everyone decision fatigue

With much of a software engineer’s time moving from writing code to structuring prompts and reviewing code, the workday is getting denser and more intense. Can AI solve the problems it's causing?