Locks in PostgreSQL
We’ve already discussed some object-level locks (specifically, relation-level locks), as well as row-level locks with their connection to object-level locks and also explored wait queues, which are not always fair. We have a hodgepodge this time. We’ll start with deadlocks (actually, I planned to discuss them last time, but that article was excessively long in […]
Scala 3 slowed us down?
Is this clickbait? Not really. Is this the fault of the language or the compiler? Definitely not. Rather, it was part of a rushed migration. Sharing the lessons learned in the process. I was refreshing one of our services. Part of this process was to migrate codebase from Scala 2.13 to Scala 3. I’ve done […]
Dollar-stores overcharge cash-strapped customers while promising low prices
On a cloudy winter day, a state government inspector named Ryan Coffield walked into a Family Dollar store in Windsor, North Carolina, carrying a scanner gun and a laptop. Inside the store, which sits along a three-lane road in a county of peanut growers and poultry workers, Coffield scanned 300 items and recorded their shelf […]
Goodbye, Microsoft: Schleswig-Holstein Relies on Open Source and Saves Millions
(Bild: Imilian/Shutterstock.com) Schleswig-Holstein saves 15 million euros in license costs by migrating from Microsoft to free software. The conversion is significantly cheaper. The state administration of Schleswig-Holstein is making a remarkable U-turn in its IT strategy and consistently relying on open source [1]. After the migration from proprietary Microsoft software to free solutions was initially accompanied […]
At least 50 hallucinated citations found in ICLR 2026 submissions
Title Average Review Rating Paper Link Citation Check Scan Link Example of Verified Hallucination Comment TamperTok: Forensics-Driven Tokenized Autoregressive Framework for Image Tampering Localization 8.0 TamperTok: Forensics-Driven Tokenized Autoregressive Framework for Image Tampering Localization | OpenReview https://app.gptzero.me/documents/4645494f-70eb-40bb-aea7-0007e13f7179/share Chong Zou, Zhipeng Wang, Ziyu Li, Nan Wu, Yuling Cai, Shan Shi, Jiawei Wei, Xia Sun, Jian Wang, […]
The Anatomy of a macOS App
Programs running in windowing environments, applications as we used to know them, have more complicated requirements than those run from a command line. Rather than embed all the resources they require for windows, menus and the rest in a single file, Mac OS broke new ground by putting those into resources stored in the app’s […]
Google Titans architecture, helping AI have long-term memory
The Transformer architecture revolutionized sequence modeling with its introduction of attention, a mechanism by which models look back at earlier inputs to prioritize relevant input data. However, computational cost increases drastically with sequence length, which limits the ability to scale Transformer-based models to extremely long contexts, such as those required for full-document understanding or genomic […]
Java Hello World, LLVM Edition
After exploring Java bytecode in previous years (2022, 2023, 2024), this year we’ll take an unexpected detour for a Java advent: instead of generating Java bytecode, we’ll use Java to build and execute LLVM IR, the intermediate language behind compilers like clang. Using Java’s Foreign Function & Memory (FFM) API, we’ll call the LLVM C […]
Discovering the indieweb with calm tech
Blog Home When social media first entered my life, it came with a promise of connection. Facebook connected college-aged adults in a way that was previously impossible, helping to shape our digital generation. Social media was our super-power and we wielded it to great effect. Yet social media today is a noisy, needy, mental health […]
Z2 – Lithographically fabricated IC in a garage fab
Homemade 1000+ transistor array chip In 2018 I made the first lithographically fabricated integrated circuits in my garage fab. I was a senior in high school when I made the Z1 amplifier, and now I’m a senior in college so there are some long overdue improvements to the amateur silicon process.The Z1 had 6 transistors and was a great […]