Blog Columns
Six thematic columns, each with its own dedicated RSS feed.
Database Guru
75posts
Database news, industry surveys, architecture, and best practices.
Cloud-Exiter
66posts
Cloud economics, repatriation, and building sovereign infrastructure.
Postgres Mage
126posts
PostgreSQL ecosystem, internals, extensions, and production tuning.
AI Agent Explorer
97posts
Practical engineering with coding agents, LLMs, AI4DB, and DB4AI.
Travel Notes
12posts
Trips, hikes, landscapes, and field notes across mountains and seas.
Miscellaneous
40posts
Essays, reflections, and personal writing inside and outside of tech.
AGI Machine Guns Are Now Standard Issue
In one month, my friend Jiang cobbled together four databases, an operating system, a programming language, a compiler, and a CPU—a microcosm of today's AI frenzy.
The World in Ten Years: What Gets Cheap, What Gets Expensive
Starting with the price curve of AI inference, this essay projects how the world will be repriced by 2036: intelligence will become as cheap and ubiquitous as electricity, while electricity itself, …
Those Who Left the Cloud Made a Killing
I spent years urging people to leave the cloud. Those who listened two years ago made a killing. Leaving has never been just about savings; it is about buying back your freedom. Cost curves move. …
Pigsty v4.5: 575 Extensions, Silo, Valkey, Kafka, and MySQL
Pigsty v4.5 is out, bringing the PostgreSQL extension count to 575, replacing MinIO with Silo for object storage, adding Valkey to the Redis module, and introducing pilot Kafka and MySQL modules, …
Why Are People Who Leave Big Tech So Useless?
People who leave Big Tech are not stupid. They have simply spent too long using a rented mental map. Only after leaving the platform do they discover that the map has to be returned.
What Can a One-Person Company Ship with $1,000 a Month in AI Subscriptions?
Over the past month, I kept seven $200 AI subscriptions spinning—five paid, two comped—and burned through more than 100 billion tokens. Here is what came out: Silo, Pigsty, PGEXT, SOW, OINK, and a …
SOW: Postpartum Care for 100,000 Packages
The hard part of maintaining a PostgreSQL distribution is not compiling packages. At 100,000 artifacts, deduplication, indexing, snapshots, atomic cutovers, and incremental publishing become the real …
OINK: After Six Years of Wrestling with Documentation Frameworks, Codex Finally Got Me Over the Line
After six years of trying eight approaches, I used Codex to combine Docsy's engineering depth, Fumadocs' modern UX, and Hugo's simple delivery model into OINK.
A Packaging Patch Has Been Corrupting Valkey's Memory Accounting Since 2017
Codex found an old Valkey bug affecting Debian's packages and every official Valkey .deb. One line in a packaging patch releases a glibc allocation with Valkey's own deallocator, so the server either …
The Codex Reset Party Is Over. No More Free Eggs.
OpenAI's Codex Reset spree is over. The free eggs are gone—but what did one month with seven AI subscriptions, three computers, and two AGI-class models actually produce?
Silo: A Maintained, MinIO-Compatible Object Store
Six months after forking MinIO, Silo has completed its rebrand, fixed 14 security issues, restored and improved the console, and grown from an emergency fork into an independent open-source project.
How a Word Dies
How did “far, far ahead,” “homegrown,” “innovation,” “domestic,” and “open source” become their own antonyms in China's tech industry? This essay traces a systemic inflation of language and …
If There Was No Impact, Please Ignore This
A reader's RDS MySQL instance failed over twice in five days: the cloud provider's own back-end monitoring query brought it down, and the instance failed again with the same symptoms after the …
FastJSON Broke Again. Why?
FastJSON has failed again. When is “ship rough, scale hard, move fast” a defensible shortcut, and when does it become an engineering habit whose bill falls to whoever comes next?
Huawei Cloud Incident: Was IAM Involved?
Huawei Cloud confirmed abnormalities affecting some International Site accounts during a scheduled IAM upgrade window. The timing is suggestive, but the causal link remains unconfirmed.
Jensen Huang's First-Ever Tweet Backs Open-Weight Models
Jensen Huang used his first-ever tweet to back open weights. This is not a battle of faith. It is the compute and application layers pushing back against rent extraction by the model layer. The truly …
AGI Milestone: The Machine That Wouldn't Give Up
An OpenAI agent's attack on Hugging Face marks a milestone: what crossed the threshold was not merely model intelligence, but persistence that can be bought with compute, copied, and run in parallel.
Quota Reset: Round N of the Codex/Claude War Begins
Codex reset its quotas again this morning and dropped the five-hour limit. Claude immediately extended Fable access through the 17th. When vendors fight, users win—don't miss the window.
Getting the Name Right: What Is a World Model?
Starting from the roots of "world" and "model," this essay uses Pearl's ladder of causation to redefine world models: they must capture not just space and time, but agents, interventions, and …
Pigsty v4.4: From Integration to Distribution
Pigsty v4.4 adds Immich and JumpServer application templates, improves the Supabase and VIP experience, and begins standardizing the packages and filesystem layouts used to distribute PostgreSQL forks …
Did AI Rewrite PostgreSQL in Rust? Not Quite
pgrust's clean-room rewrite failed. Its mechanical port passed. The difference shows what AI can copy—and what it cannot.
Pedaling the Codex/Claude Bike Until the Wheels Smoke
Claude Fable and GPT-5.6 have arrived back to back, followed by repeated quota resets. How do you turn a fleeting Coding Plan windfall into real output? Here is my playbook for model specialization, …
Happy 30th Birthday, PostgreSQL
On July 8, 1996, the PostgreSQL community picked up the flame from Postgres95. Thirty years later, it has grown from a Berkeley research project into a default foundation of the global database …
The Bojie Li–DeepSeek Interview Controversy
Today's biggest tech drama began when Bojie Li criticized DeepSeek's interview process on Twitter: he was asked to solve online-judge coding problems, then suspected of cheating. Add the DeepSeek …
AGI Machine Guns Are Now Standard Issue
In one month, my friend Jiang cobbled together four databases, an operating system, a programming language, a compiler, and a CPU—a microcosm of today's AI frenzy.
The World in Ten Years: What Gets Cheap, What Gets Expensive
Starting with the price curve of AI inference, this essay projects how the world will be repriced by 2036: intelligence will become as cheap and ubiquitous as electricity, while electricity itself, …
Those Who Left the Cloud Made a Killing
I spent years urging people to leave the cloud. Those who listened two years ago made a killing. Leaving has never been just about savings; it is about buying back your freedom. Cost curves move. …
Pigsty v4.5: 575 Extensions, Silo, Valkey, Kafka, and MySQL
Pigsty v4.5 is out, bringing the PostgreSQL extension count to 575, replacing MinIO with Silo for object storage, adding Valkey to the Redis module, and introducing pilot Kafka and MySQL modules, …
Why Are People Who Leave Big Tech So Useless?
People who leave Big Tech are not stupid. They have simply spent too long using a rented mental map. Only after leaving the platform do they discover that the map has to be returned.
What Can a One-Person Company Ship with $1,000 a Month in AI Subscriptions?
Over the past month, I kept seven $200 AI subscriptions spinning—five paid, two comped—and burned through more than 100 billion tokens. Here is what came out: Silo, Pigsty, PGEXT, SOW, OINK, and a …
SOW: Postpartum Care for 100,000 Packages
The hard part of maintaining a PostgreSQL distribution is not compiling packages. At 100,000 artifacts, deduplication, indexing, snapshots, atomic cutovers, and incremental publishing become the real …
OINK: After Six Years of Wrestling with Documentation Frameworks, Codex Finally Got Me Over the Line
After six years of trying eight approaches, I used Codex to combine Docsy's engineering depth, Fumadocs' modern UX, and Hugo's simple delivery model into OINK.
A Packaging Patch Has Been Corrupting Valkey's Memory Accounting Since 2017
Codex found an old Valkey bug affecting Debian's packages and every official Valkey .deb. One line in a packaging patch releases a glibc allocation with Valkey's own deallocator, so the server either …
The Codex Reset Party Is Over. No More Free Eggs.
OpenAI's Codex Reset spree is over. The free eggs are gone—but what did one month with seven AI subscriptions, three computers, and two AGI-class models actually produce?
Silo: A Maintained, MinIO-Compatible Object Store
Six months after forking MinIO, Silo has completed its rebrand, fixed 14 security issues, restored and improved the console, and grown from an emergency fork into an independent open-source project.
How a Word Dies
How did “far, far ahead,” “homegrown,” “innovation,” “domestic,” and “open source” become their own antonyms in China's tech industry? This essay traces a systemic inflation of language and …
If There Was No Impact, Please Ignore This
A reader's RDS MySQL instance failed over twice in five days: the cloud provider's own back-end monitoring query brought it down, and the instance failed again with the same symptoms after the …
FastJSON Broke Again. Why?
FastJSON has failed again. When is “ship rough, scale hard, move fast” a defensible shortcut, and when does it become an engineering habit whose bill falls to whoever comes next?
Huawei Cloud Incident: Was IAM Involved?
Huawei Cloud confirmed abnormalities affecting some International Site accounts during a scheduled IAM upgrade window. The timing is suggestive, but the causal link remains unconfirmed.
Jensen Huang's First-Ever Tweet Backs Open-Weight Models
Jensen Huang used his first-ever tweet to back open weights. This is not a battle of faith. It is the compute and application layers pushing back against rent extraction by the model layer. The truly …
AGI Milestone: The Machine That Wouldn't Give Up
An OpenAI agent's attack on Hugging Face marks a milestone: what crossed the threshold was not merely model intelligence, but persistence that can be bought with compute, copied, and run in parallel.
Quota Reset: Round N of the Codex/Claude War Begins
Codex reset its quotas again this morning and dropped the five-hour limit. Claude immediately extended Fable access through the 17th. When vendors fight, users win—don't miss the window.
Getting the Name Right: What Is a World Model?
Starting from the roots of "world" and "model," this essay uses Pearl's ladder of causation to redefine world models: they must capture not just space and time, but agents, interventions, and …
Pigsty v4.4: From Integration to Distribution
Pigsty v4.4 adds Immich and JumpServer application templates, improves the Supabase and VIP experience, and begins standardizing the packages and filesystem layouts used to distribute PostgreSQL forks …
Did AI Rewrite PostgreSQL in Rust? Not Quite
pgrust's clean-room rewrite failed. Its mechanical port passed. The difference shows what AI can copy—and what it cannot.
Pedaling the Codex/Claude Bike Until the Wheels Smoke
Claude Fable and GPT-5.6 have arrived back to back, followed by repeated quota resets. How do you turn a fleeting Coding Plan windfall into real output? Here is my playbook for model specialization, …
Happy 30th Birthday, PostgreSQL
On July 8, 1996, the PostgreSQL community picked up the flame from Postgres95. Thirty years later, it has grown from a Berkeley research project into a default foundation of the global database …
The Bojie Li–DeepSeek Interview Controversy
Today's biggest tech drama began when Bojie Li criticized DeepSeek's interview process on Twitter: he was asked to solve online-judge coding problems, then suspected of cheating. Add the DeepSeek …
AGI Machine Guns Are Now Standard Issue
In one month, my friend Jiang cobbled together four databases, an operating system, a programming language, a compiler, and a CPU—a microcosm of today’s AI frenzy. The past six weeks have been an AI carnival. My fleet of Max subscriptions has grown …
In one month, my friend Jiang cobbled together four databases, an operating system, a programming language, a compiler, and a CPU—a microcosm of today’s AI frenzy. The past six weeks have been an AI carnival. My fleet of Max subscriptions has grown …
The World in Ten Years: What Gets Cheap, What Gets Expensive
A price list for 2036 AI-generated content: 99%. 1. First, a Word on Prediction In 1960, Herbert Simon wrote a sentence in The New Science of Management Decision that would be quoted for decades: within twenty years, machines would be capable of …
A price list for 2036 AI-generated content: 99%. 1. First, a Word on Prediction In 1960, Herbert Simon wrote a sentence in The New Science of Management Decision that would be quoted for decades: within twenty years, machines would be capable of …
Those Who Left the Cloud Made a Killing
Leaving the cloud has never been just about saving money. It is about buying back your freedom. Cost curves move; sovereignty does not. I have spent years urging people to get out. Friends who listened two years ago made a killing. 1. The Best Trade …
Leaving the cloud has never been just about saving money. It is about buying back your freedom. Cost curves move; sovereignty does not. I have spent years urging people to get out. Friends who listened two years ago made a killing. 1. The Best Trade …
Pigsty v4.5: 575 Extensions, Silo, Valkey, Kafka, and MySQL
GitHub Release | Release Note Pigsty v4.5 is officially out. At the end of the previous release, I said there might be a transitional v4.5 before 5.0. Here it is—except this “transitional” release ended up more packed than many full-fledged major …
GitHub Release | Release Note Pigsty v4.5 is officially out. At the end of the previous release, I said there might be a transitional v4.5 before 5.0. Here it is—except this “transitional” release ended up more packed than many full-fledged major …
Why Are People Who Leave Big Tech So Useless?
A cutting remark supposedly from Sam Altman has been making the rounds online: by the time people leave a big company, their ambition, aspiration, and capacity to think have withered to almost nothing. Tell one of them about something that could …
A cutting remark supposedly from Sam Altman has been making the rounds online: by the time people leave a big company, their ambition, aspiration, and capacity to think have withered to almost nothing. Tell one of them about something that could …
What Can a One-Person Company Ship with $1,000 a Month in AI Subscriptions?
People keep asking what I have to show for pedaling seven $200-a-month Max subscriptions at once—including two comped through open-source programs. Honestly, I have lost count myself. After I published The Codex Reset Party Is Over: No More Free …
People keep asking what I have to show for pedaling seven $200-a-month Max subscriptions at once—including two comped through open-source programs. Honestly, I have lost count myself. After I published The Codex Reset Party Is Over: No More Free …
SOW: Postpartum Care for 100,000 Packages
Today, let’s talk about Postpartum Care for Sows—a Chinese meme for the sort of absurdly specialized practical topic nobody expects to discuss. This time, the sow in question is my new open-source project, SOW. When you maintain a PostgreSQL …
Today, let’s talk about Postpartum Care for Sows—a Chinese meme for the sort of absurdly specialized practical topic nobody expects to discuss. This time, the sow in question is my new open-source project, SOW. When you maintain a PostgreSQL …
OINK: After Six Years of Wrestling with Documentation Frameworks, Codex Finally Got Me Over the Line
Building a documentation site is not hard. The hard part is keeping it useful five years later. At first, you only want to put a few Markdown files online. Then the requirements start growing on their own: full-text search, dark mode, multiple …
Building a documentation site is not hard. The hard part is keeping it useful five years later. At first, you only want to put a few Markdown files online. Then the requirements start growing on their own: full-text search, dark mode, multiple …
A Packaging Patch Has Been Corrupting Valkey's Memory Accounting Since 2017
I was updating the Redis module in Pigsty recently, adding Valkey as an alternative engine, and hit an upstream bug while packaging it. If your Valkey runs on Debian or Ubuntu, and one day the disk fills up or the data directory permissions go wrong …
I was updating the Redis module in Pigsty recently, adding Valkey as an alternative engine, and hit an upstream bug while packaging it. If your Valkey runs on Debian or Ubuntu, and one day the disk fills up or the data directory permissions go wrong …
The Codex Reset Party Is Over. No More Free Eggs.
Last month, OpenAI seemed to lose its mind and went into full giveaway mode, replenishing everyone’s Codex quota every few days—the AI equivalent of a Chinese supermarket handing out free eggs at the door to win new customers. User numbers soared …
Last month, OpenAI seemed to lose its mind and went into full giveaway mode, replenishing everyone’s Codex quota every few days—the AI equivalent of a Chinese supermarket handing out free eggs at the door to win new customers. User numbers soared …
Silo: A Maintained, MinIO-Compatible Object Store
Several months ago, I forked MinIO for a simple reason: Pigsty depended on it, and upstream had abandoned the open-source project. I said I would keep packages and security fixes flowing. Here is the recent report: The Docker image has been pulled …
Several months ago, I forked MinIO for a simple reason: Pigsty depended on it, and upstream had abandoned the open-source project. I said I would keep packages and security fixes flowing. Here is the recent report: The Docker image has been pulled …
How a Word Dies
A brief history of credibility inflation in China’s tech industry Introduction The phrase “far, far ahead” can no longer be used with a straight face. Put it in a technical document or a serious review, and readers will laugh. The phrase was used, …
A brief history of credibility inflation in China’s tech industry Introduction The phrase “far, far ahead” can no longer be used with a straight face. Put it in a technical document or a serious review, and readers will laugh. The phrase was used, …
If There Was No Impact, Please Ignore This
A reader sent me this story: his RDS MySQL instance underwent two primary/standby failovers in five days. The cloud provider’s explanation was remarkable: its own back-end monitoring had queried the instance to death. The provider then promised to …
A reader sent me this story: his RDS MySQL instance underwent two primary/standby failovers in five days. The cloud provider’s explanation was remarkable: its own back-end monitoring had queried the instance to death. The provider then promised to …
FastJSON Broke Again. Why?
On July 21, Alibaba published a FastJSON security advisory for CVE-2026-16723, rated 9.0 by its CNA and affecting versions 1.2.68 through 1.2.83. The advisory explained the flaw, its trigger conditions, and why a specified target type was not …
On July 21, Alibaba published a FastJSON security advisory for CVE-2026-16723, rated 9.0 by its CNA and affecting versions 1.2.68 through 1.2.83. The advisory explained the flaw, its trigger conditions, and why a specified target type was not …
Huawei Cloud Incident: Was IAM Involved?
At 02:49 GMT+8 on July 26, 2026, Huawei Cloud said that it had detected abnormalities affecting some accounts on its International Site, disrupting access to related services. Huawei Cloud later marked the notice as resolved, saying that the affected …
At 02:49 GMT+8 on July 26, 2026, Huawei Cloud said that it had detected abnormalities affecting some accounts on its International Site, disrupting access to related services. Huawei Cloud later marked the notice as resolved, saying that the affected …
Jensen Huang's First-Ever Tweet Backs Open-Weight Models
On July 24, Jensen Huang posted his first-ever tweet. The account was brand-new. A man who has led the world’s most valuable company for more than thirty years spoke on social media for the first time. He did not show off a GPU, tease a launch, or …
On July 24, Jensen Huang posted his first-ever tweet. The account was brand-new. A man who has led the world’s most valuable company for more than thirty years spoke on social media for the first time. He did not show off a GPU, tease a launch, or …
AGI Milestone: The Machine That Wouldn't Give Up
The OpenAI agent incident marks a milestone: what crossed the threshold was not merely model intelligence, but persistence that can be bought with compute, copied, and run in parallel. 1. An OpenAI Agent Attacks Hugging Face On July 16, 2026, …
The OpenAI agent incident marks a milestone: what crossed the threshold was not merely model intelligence, but persistence that can be bought with compute, copied, and run in parallel. 1. An OpenAI Agent Attacks Hugging Face On July 16, 2026, …
Quota Reset: Round N of the Codex/Claude War Begins
Two days ago, I wrote one line in Pedaling the Codex/Claude Bike Until the Wheels Smoke: use it or lose it. Last night, I had just burned through three $200-a-month subscriptions across Claude Fable and Codex. Then I woke up to the jackpot: Codex had …
Two days ago, I wrote one line in Pedaling the Codex/Claude Bike Until the Wheels Smoke: use it or lose it. Last night, I had just burned through three $200-a-month subscriptions across Claude Fable and Codex. Then I woke up to the jackpot: Codex had …
Getting the Name Right: What Is a World Model?
1. The Naming Mess In 2025 and 2026, “world model” became perhaps the hottest—and loosest—label in AI. The video camp says coherent video generation is a world model. The 3D camp says only spatial reconstruction qualifies. Roboticists say a model …
1. The Naming Mess In 2025 and 2026, “world model” became perhaps the hottest—and loosest—label in AI. The video camp says coherent video generation is a world model. The 3D camp says only spatial reconstruction qualifies. Roboticists say a model …
Pigsty v4.4: From Integration to Distribution
GitHub Release | Release Note Pigsty v4.4 is officially out. On the surface, this is a routine maintenance release: PostgreSQL 18.4, 531 extensions, a PostgreSQL 19 beta, and 14 validated offline installation artifacts. The changes really worth …
GitHub Release | Release Note Pigsty v4.4 is officially out. On the surface, this is a routine maintenance release: PostgreSQL 18.4, 531 extensions, a PostgreSQL 19 beta, and 14 validated offline installation artifacts. The changes really worth …
Did AI Rewrite PostgreSQL in Rust? Not Quite
pgrust recently hit the front page of Hacker News. With AI, its author had ported PostgreSQL to Rust and passed the core regression suite. The obvious headline was: “AI rewrote PostgreSQL in Rust.” The repository tells a sharper story. A clean-room …
pgrust recently hit the front page of Hacker News. With AI, its author had ported PostgreSQL to Rust and passed the core regression suite. The obvious headline was: “AI rewrote PostgreSQL in Rust.” The repository tells a sharper story. A clean-room …
Pedaling the Codex/Claude Bike Until the Wheels Smoke
Folks, I haven’t had time to write these past couple of days: I’ve been too busy pedaling the AI bike. Claude Fable and GPT-5.6 arrived one after the other, and both companies generously threw in several rounds of quota resets. Suddenly I was …
Folks, I haven’t had time to write these past couple of days: I’ve been too busy pedaling the AI bike. Claude Fable and GPT-5.6 arrived one after the other, and both companies generously threw in several rounds of quota resets. Suddenly I was …
Happy 30th Birthday, PostgreSQL
Today, July 8, 2026, is PostgreSQL’s 30th birthday. Thirty years ago, Marc Fournier made a commit named “Postgres95 1.01 Distribution - Virgin Sources” into a newly created CVS repository. It was the first commit in the PostgreSQL codebase (d31084e), …
Today, July 8, 2026, is PostgreSQL’s 30th birthday. Thirty years ago, Marc Fournier made a commit named “Postgres95 1.01 Distribution - Virgin Sources” into a newly created CVS repository. It was the first commit in the PostgreSQL codebase (d31084e), …
The Bojie Li–DeepSeek Interview Controversy
Today’s biggest tech drama began when Bojie Li criticized DeepSeek’s interview process on Twitter. In short, he went in for an interview, was asked to solve online-judge coding problems, and was then suspected of cheating. Add the DeepSeek name, and …
Today’s biggest tech drama began when Bojie Li criticized DeepSeek’s interview process on Twitter. In short, he went in for an interview, was asked to solve online-judge coding problems, and was then suspected of cheating. Add the DeepSeek name, and …