Atoms
Multimedia particles in the style of a tweet, also serving as a changelog to consolidate changes elsewhere in the site. Cross-posted to an atom feed. Frequently off topic.
Added a link to the bottom of all my articles to the site’s human policy:
All content certified human. LLMs are used for proofreading and corrections, but never to generate prose.
As I find myself falling off articles that I suspect are LLM-generated, I suspect these sorts of attestations are going to be increasingly important for the few of us left still readng and writing blogs in the LLM age.
Published fragment A couple tiny Codex TUI features, on three hiding in plain sight: copying the last answer, toggling raw Markdown, and disabling Escape as an interrupt.
Published fragment 15 years later, a day without Tmux, on reevaluating one of the oldest and dearest tools in my kit.
Published fragment Does anyone run Postgres without PgBouncer?, on how nearly every notable managed Postgres provider bundles a connection pooler, giving us a strong hint that connection management is a product problem rather than a user problem.
Published Migration fatigue, and how LLMs help us avoid it, on how we used an LLM to optimize a core query in active job rescue. The optimized version ran up to 130x faster compared to baseline, and prevented exasperated users knocking on our doors with pitchforks by avoiding a new database migration.
Published fragment River binaries will get 10 kB lighter, on removing accidental test-only transitive dependencies that added about 10 kB to every Go binary built with River.
River v0.41 now supports Turso, a ground-up rewrite of SQLite in Rust that aims for full SQLite compatibility.
Published fragment pgtestdb’s template cloning approach to testing is fast, on how Postgres template databases enable database-per-test isolation in around 100 ms, within spitting distance of River’s schema-based approach.
Published fragment I used to add links by hand, on how LLMs now drive most of this blog’s workflows, replacing what used to be a lot of small, manual edits.
We shipped active job rescue, a new River Pro feature that uses queue heartbeats to quickly recover jobs orphaned by crashed clients. (If you’re on Pro, try it today! No configuration or schema change required.)
Published fragment The paradox of free time, on how a long stretch of open, contiguous time makes you … less (?) productive.
Updated now, on moving to Austin, working on River, and life after Stainless.
Published sequence 111, Ladyslipper.
Bunches of ladyslippers in the Wagner Natural Area near St. Albert/Edmonton. Here we show a few of the hundreds just a few feet off trail. The flowers were nice but they’d better be – thousands of mosquitoes feasted on us as we made the walk. My kill count was in the hundreds and I still took dozens of bites by the end.
Published sequence 110, Bull Creek Hills.
A mountain meadow along a hike up into Bull Creek Hills via Marston Creek, in Kananaskis Country, Alberta. Walked this one with my parents’ hiking groups, The Ramblers, and experienced a catastrophic failure of my 25-year-old hiking boots midway through.
Published sequence 109, Monolith.
This building is called the “Marie-Elisabeth-Lüders-Haus”, near the Bundestag. I’ve never been inside, but its website says it provides “scientific services”, and houses the parliamentary library and archives. It’s one of my favorite buildings in Berlin – an enormous, imposing monolith towering up and over the Spree. Very Berlin.
