cartero Thursday, August 13, 2026 · No. 25966
DuckDB

DuckDB 1.5.3: Not an Ordinary Patch Release

We are releasing DuckDB version v1.5.3. Despite being a “patch release”, it ships a ton of features through its extensions, starting with Quack, which is now available as a core extension, support for Quack in DuckLake, and several new features for Iceberg, AWS and HTTPS.

PostgreSQL

Jan Wieremjewicz: Keeping pgBackRest Open, Healthy, and Community Driven

When the future of pgBackRest suddenly became uncertain, the PostgreSQL ecosystem reacted quickly.At Percona, we believed the most important question was not: what replaces it? but: how do we ensure pgBackRest remains healthy, sustainable, and open for everyone? That distinction matters. pgBackRest is critical infrastructure used by enterprises around the world to protect some of their most important data. When projects like this face maintainership or sustainability challenges, organizat...

Infrastructure as Code

Pack your agentic stack in Slack

Ryan welcomes Jaime DeLanghe, chief product officer at Slack, to chat about how they’re preparing to integrate everybody’s agents in their chat application.

RAG

STAR: Semantic-Tuned and Tail-Adaptive Retriever for Graph-Augmented Generation

arXiv:2605.18765v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: To augment Large Language Models (LLMs) for multi-hop question answering, a mainstream solution within Graph Retrieval Augmented Generation (GraphRAG) leverages lightweight retrievers to efficiently extract information from a given Knowledge Graph (KG). However, existing methods often overlook the inherent challenge of sparse semantic information in graphs. Specifically, our experiments reveal that these methods produce biased retrieval Semanti...

Artificial Intelligence

From Intent to AI Pipelines: A Controlled Agentic Framework for Non-AI Expert Scientists

arXiv:2605.18764v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Artificial Intelligence (AI) pipelines have become integral to modern research, supporting fields such as Medical Sciences, Agriculture, and Social Sciences, and enabling large-scale data analysis, predictive modeling, and the automation of complex tasks. However, designing and implementing AI solutions remains challenging for many researchers due to the expertise required in the design and development of end-to-end AI systems. To address this ...

Graph Databases

Query-Conditioned Graph Retrieval for Contextualized LLM Reasoning in Personalized Wearable Data

arXiv:2605.18763v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly applied to analyzing wearable sensing data, which are long-term, multimodal, and highly personalized. A key challenge is context selection: providing insufficient context limits reasoning, while including all available data leads to inefficiency and degraded generation quality. We propose Wearable As Graph (WAG), a graph-based context retrieval framework that enables query-adaptive reasoning over we...

RAG

ALDEN: Boosting Private Data Extraction from Retrieval-Augmented Generation Systems via Active Learning and Distribution Estimation

arXiv:2605.18762v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is widely used to augment large language models with external knowledge retrieval to improve reliability and generalization. However, recent studies have shown that RAG systems remain vulnerable to data extraction attacks, where adversaries can extract private data by embedding malicious commands into user queries. Despite their feasibility, existing attacks typically suffer from low data extraction rates an...

Embeddings

Balancing Teacher and Student Agency: Co-Orchestration Tool Design Supporting Real-Time Dynamic Pairing

arXiv:2605.18761v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In human-AI interaction, respecting user agency is essential for fostering trust and sustaining effective use of technology. In educational settings, dynamically integrating individual and collaborative learning offers pedagogical value by supporting personalized, self-paced learning experiences. Prior research has demonstrated the feasibility of this approach through intelligent tutoring systems and human-AI co-orchestration tools. However, ho...

RAG

DOTRAG: Retrieval-Time Reasoning Along Paths

arXiv:2605.18760v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation (GraphRAG) is dominated by a retrieve-then-reason paradigm, where context is retrieved using heuristics and then reasoned over. Such methods struggle to adapt to the query-specific logic required for complex multi-hop tasks, often accumulating irrelevant context or missing correct relational paths. We propose DotRAG, a training-free GraphRAG framework that reformulates retrieval as a reasoning process over p...

AI Psychosis

Interoceptive Divergence in Aesthetic Evaluation and Implications for Human-AI Alignment

arXiv:2605.18759v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Artificial intelligence (AI), exemplified by large language models (LLMs), is rapidly approaching and in some cases surpassing human performance across a wide range of cognitive tasks. However, human nature is not limited to intelligence alone; it also encompasses sensibility, including the capacity to perceive and experience beauty in visual scenes. This raises a fundamental question: how humans and AI systems converge or diverge in such aesth...

Artificial Intelligence

OmniGUI: Benchmarking GUI Agents in Omni-Modal Smartphone Environments

arXiv:2605.18758v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Current benchmarks for graphical user interface (GUI) agents predominantly rely on static screenshots. However, real-world smartphone interaction routinely requires agents to process transient audio cues and temporal video dynamics that are tightly coupled with the moment of action. To bridge this gap, we introduce OmniGUI, the first step-level benchmark designed to evaluate GUI agents in omni-modal smartphone environments. OmniGUI provides con...

Computational Complexity

Cypher is Turing-Complete: A Formal Proof via 2-Counter Machine Simulation

arXiv:2605.18757v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We prove that Cypher 25, the graph query language of Neo4j, is Turing-complete. The proof shows that a single RETURN statement using reduce(), CASE expressions, and list comprehensions can simulate any 2-counter machine (Minsky 1967). We address the bounded-step objection via two complementary resolutions and present a third graph-native simulation using quantified path patterns (QPP) with allReduce. All three constructions were verified on a l...

Kubernetes

Operational Memory Architecture for Kubernetes:Preserving Causal Context Across the Evidence Horizon

arXiv:2605.18755v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Kubernetes clusters generate rich operational events during pod lifecycle transitions, yet the platform's native event retention model discards the most diagnostically valuable context. The LastTerminationState field, which records a container's last failure, is overwritten shortly after a pod restart. We define this as the evidence horizon. During high-frequency crash loops, this horizon may be crossed multiple times before inspection, permane...

Parquet and columnar formats

Christophe Pettus: All Your GUCs in a Row: bytea_output

PostgreSQL's `bytea_output` parameter controls how binary data is formatted when sent to clients: the modern `hex` format (default since 9.0) or the legacy…

xAI

Roundtables: Inside the Musk v. Altman Trial

Listen to the session or watch below Elon Musk lost his suit against OpenAI, in which he alleged CEO Sam Altman and President Greg Brockman had deceived him over the company’s non-profit status. Watch as AI reporter and attorney Michelle Kim, who covered the trial for MIT Technology Review, joins in conversation with editor in…

Artificial Intelligence

Why the Best Model Won’t Save You

We're still mostly measuring search the way we measured it when humans were the consumers.