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.
Cyber Dao De Jing: Design Structure, Not Behavior
Part 2 of the Cyber Dharma series, using AI agent architecture to unpack religious philosophy and ancient wisdom to inform engineering: Cyber Daoism.
Cancel Claude, Switch to Codex
When my $200 Claude Code Max subscription expired, I canceled it and moved my primary workflow to Codex. The only way to know which one is better is to put it to work.
100x Traffic in Three Months: What Web Traffic Looks Like in the Agent Era
Over the past three months, monthly page views on Pigsty.io have grown roughly 100x.
I Asked AI to Prove That Eating Garlic Prevents Middle Ear Infections
I asked AI to find real papers supporting the absurd claim that eating garlic prevents middle ear infections. The result shows how AI is degrading citations as a credibility signal at scale.
The pgBackRest Rescue and Open Source's Forced Price Discovery
Seven days after pgBackRest was archived, David Steele said a coalition of sponsors was nearly in place and the project would probably live on. This was not just a heartwarming community story. It was …
AI Is Bringing Down the Scaffolding of Trust
The most dangerous change in the AI era is not that machines can write articles, draw images, or generate video. It is that content itself is losing its standing as evidence.
Pigsty v4.3: 510 Extensions & Ubuntu 26
Pigsty v4.3 adds 50 PostgreSQL extensions, bringing the total to 510. It also adds Ubuntu 26.04 x86_64/arm64 support, refreshes Supabase, pgEdge, PolarDB, Grafana, MinIO, and a batch of infra …
pgBackRest is No Longer Maintained
Its maintainer, under pressure to make a living, has formally archived pgBackRest, the PostgreSQL ecosystem's most important backup tool. The entire PostgreSQL community needs to think seriously about …
Give DBA Agents a Body
Today's models are smart enough. What they lack is a body: a deterministic runtime that is observable, controllable, and reversible. Pigsty is evolving from a PostgreSQL distribution into an Agent …
A Busy Few Days in Infrastructure and AI
Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, Qwen3.6-27B, ChatGPT Images 2.0, Privacy Filter, Anthropic Mythos, and the Claude Pro controversy all landed in quick succession. Here are the infrastructure and AI developments …
MySQL 9.7: Same Old Leftovers, Reheated
MySQL 9.7 is the first LTS release in the 9.x line. Its vector support is still all show, its years-late optimizer is disabled by default, and three years of Innovation Releases have produced …
Pigsty Hits 5,000 GitHub Stars: A One-Man PostgreSQL Distribution
Pigsty crossed 5,000 GitHub stars today.
The Three-Way Endgame: Why Agent Memory Frameworks Are a Dead End
A cold shower for the red-hot agent memory market—not because agents do not need memory, but because memory is the endgame moat. That moat belongs to models, harnesses, and databases, not today's …
Two Hemispheres: Transformer, Diffusion, and the Boundary of Intelligence
A dialogue about intelligence: its foundations may lie not in language or vision, but in two irreducible computational paradigms—symbolic reasoning and field-state intuition—kept distinct and mutually …
Two months into maintaining a MinIO fork
Two months after forking MinIO, pgsty/minio ships patches for four CVEs and related security issues. No new features — just working builds, a restored console, and timely security fixes.
Cyber Dharma: A New Engineering Answer to Ancient Questions
A project manifesto: why build Cyber Dharma, and what it is not.
Burning Hundreds of Millions of Tokens a Day. Then What?
Once token burn turns from usage exhaust into a KPI and leaderboard, it quickly mutates into theater. Don't post fuel burn. Post where you got to.
504 Extensions: Expand the PostgreSQL Landscape
One GitHub issue turned into an extension sprint. 32 new additions, 504 in total, say a lot about where PostgreSQL is headed.
Why PostgreSQL Won in the AI Era
Boring technology won the wildest era. A look at extensibility, agent choice, database cloning, and the future of the DBA.
The Data Sovereignty Manifesto
As data becomes the most important means of production in the AI age, platform lock-in and cloud dependence are rebuilding digital feudalism. This manifesto calls on us to reclaim control through open …
AGI Is Here. Do You Have a Ticket?
When the strongest AI is not expensive but simply unavailable, the world starts converging on digital feudalism. And the window to act is narrowing.
Can You Distill an Expert?
Polanyi's tacit knowledge explains the 70% ceiling of AI agents: real intuition, feel, and judgment do not serialize cleanly. They grow, if at all, through practice.
Yes, I Use AI to Write
AI is a multiplier. It amplifies depth and mediocrity alike. In an age where answers are cheap, questions are the real currency. There is nothing to hide about writing with AI.
Local AI's Inflection Point: 2027
When subsidies fade, hardware catches up, and open models mature, all three lines cross in 2027. "Build your own AI" goes from idea to reality.
Cyber Dao De Jing: Design Structure, Not Behavior
Part 2 of the Cyber Dharma series, using AI agent architecture to unpack religious philosophy and ancient wisdom to inform engineering: Cyber Daoism.
Cancel Claude, Switch to Codex
When my $200 Claude Code Max subscription expired, I canceled it and moved my primary workflow to Codex. The only way to know which one is better is to put it to work.
100x Traffic in Three Months: What Web Traffic Looks Like in the Agent Era
Over the past three months, monthly page views on Pigsty.io have grown roughly 100x.
I Asked AI to Prove That Eating Garlic Prevents Middle Ear Infections
I asked AI to find real papers supporting the absurd claim that eating garlic prevents middle ear infections. The result shows how AI is degrading citations as a credibility signal at scale.
The pgBackRest Rescue and Open Source's Forced Price Discovery
Seven days after pgBackRest was archived, David Steele said a coalition of sponsors was nearly in place and the project would probably live on. This was not just a heartwarming community story. It was …
AI Is Bringing Down the Scaffolding of Trust
The most dangerous change in the AI era is not that machines can write articles, draw images, or generate video. It is that content itself is losing its standing as evidence.
Pigsty v4.3: 510 Extensions & Ubuntu 26
Pigsty v4.3 adds 50 PostgreSQL extensions, bringing the total to 510. It also adds Ubuntu 26.04 x86_64/arm64 support, refreshes Supabase, pgEdge, PolarDB, Grafana, MinIO, and a batch of infra …
pgBackRest is No Longer Maintained
Its maintainer, under pressure to make a living, has formally archived pgBackRest, the PostgreSQL ecosystem's most important backup tool. The entire PostgreSQL community needs to think seriously about …
Give DBA Agents a Body
Today's models are smart enough. What they lack is a body: a deterministic runtime that is observable, controllable, and reversible. Pigsty is evolving from a PostgreSQL distribution into an Agent …
A Busy Few Days in Infrastructure and AI
Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, Qwen3.6-27B, ChatGPT Images 2.0, Privacy Filter, Anthropic Mythos, and the Claude Pro controversy all landed in quick succession. Here are the infrastructure and AI developments …
MySQL 9.7: Same Old Leftovers, Reheated
MySQL 9.7 is the first LTS release in the 9.x line. Its vector support is still all show, its years-late optimizer is disabled by default, and three years of Innovation Releases have produced …
Pigsty Hits 5,000 GitHub Stars: A One-Man PostgreSQL Distribution
Pigsty crossed 5,000 GitHub stars today.
The Three-Way Endgame: Why Agent Memory Frameworks Are a Dead End
A cold shower for the red-hot agent memory market—not because agents do not need memory, but because memory is the endgame moat. That moat belongs to models, harnesses, and databases, not today's …
Two Hemispheres: Transformer, Diffusion, and the Boundary of Intelligence
A dialogue about intelligence: its foundations may lie not in language or vision, but in two irreducible computational paradigms—symbolic reasoning and field-state intuition—kept distinct and mutually …
Two months into maintaining a MinIO fork
Two months after forking MinIO, pgsty/minio ships patches for four CVEs and related security issues. No new features — just working builds, a restored console, and timely security fixes.
Cyber Dharma: A New Engineering Answer to Ancient Questions
A project manifesto: why build Cyber Dharma, and what it is not.
Burning Hundreds of Millions of Tokens a Day. Then What?
Once token burn turns from usage exhaust into a KPI and leaderboard, it quickly mutates into theater. Don't post fuel burn. Post where you got to.
504 Extensions: Expand the PostgreSQL Landscape
One GitHub issue turned into an extension sprint. 32 new additions, 504 in total, say a lot about where PostgreSQL is headed.
Why PostgreSQL Won in the AI Era
Boring technology won the wildest era. A look at extensibility, agent choice, database cloning, and the future of the DBA.
The Data Sovereignty Manifesto
As data becomes the most important means of production in the AI age, platform lock-in and cloud dependence are rebuilding digital feudalism. This manifesto calls on us to reclaim control through open …
AGI Is Here. Do You Have a Ticket?
When the strongest AI is not expensive but simply unavailable, the world starts converging on digital feudalism. And the window to act is narrowing.
Can You Distill an Expert?
Polanyi's tacit knowledge explains the 70% ceiling of AI agents: real intuition, feel, and judgment do not serialize cleanly. They grow, if at all, through practice.
Yes, I Use AI to Write
AI is a multiplier. It amplifies depth and mediocrity alike. In an age where answers are cheap, questions are the real currency. There is nothing to hide about writing with AI.
Local AI's Inflection Point: 2027
When subsidies fade, hardware catches up, and open models mature, all three lines cross in 2027. "Build your own AI" goes from idea to reality.
Cyber Dao De Jing: Design Structure, Not Behavior
Part of the Cyber Dharma series: using AI agents to unpack religious philosophy, and ancient wisdom to illuminate modern engineering. This is the second essay in the series—Cyber Daoism. All paths lead back to computation—seven structural mappings …
Part of the Cyber Dharma series: using AI agents to unpack religious philosophy, and ancient wisdom to illuminate modern engineering. This is the second essay in the series—Cyber Daoism. All paths lead back to computation—seven structural mappings …
Cancel Claude, Switch to Codex
I have written several pieces about Claude Code before. Over the past few months, though, I have used it less and less. Codex is now my primary tool. A few days ago, my $200 Claude Code Max subscription came up for renewal, so I canceled it and kept …
I have written several pieces about Claude Code before. Over the past few months, though, I have used it less and less. Codex is now my primary tool. A few days ago, my $200 Claude Code Max subscription came up for renewal, so I canceled it and kept …
100x Traffic in Three Months: What Web Traffic Looks Like in the Agent Era
Over the past three months, monthly page views on Pigsty.io have grown roughly 100x. Monthly request counts tell the story: 840,000 in January, 10 million in February, 34 million in March, and well past 100 million in April. I find myself opening the …
Over the past three months, monthly page views on Pigsty.io have grown roughly 100x. Monthly request counts tell the story: 840,000 in January, 10 million in February, 34 million in March, and well past 100 million in April. I find myself opening the …
I Asked AI to Prove That Eating Garlic Prevents Middle Ear Infections
Last month, my old friend Ma roasted me in our group chat for using ChatGPT every day to churn out grand-sounding, LinkedIn-style aphorisms with no basis in experience. He said, “You can make up any theory you want—say, that eating garlic reduces the …
Last month, my old friend Ma roasted me in our group chat for using ChatGPT every day to churn out grand-sounding, LinkedIn-style aphorisms with no basis in experience. He said, “You can make up any theory you want—say, that eating garlic reduces the …
The pgBackRest Rescue and Open Source's Forced Price Discovery
A few days ago, pgBackRest, the PostgreSQL ecosystem’s leading open-source backup tool, was archived. Pigsty uses pgBackRest too, but I was not especially worried. A component this important was never going to be allowed to die for real—not by the …
A few days ago, pgBackRest, the PostgreSQL ecosystem’s leading open-source backup tool, was archived. Pigsty uses pgBackRest too, but I was not especially worried. A component this important was never going to be allowed to die for real—not by the …
AI Is Bringing Down the Scaffolding of Trust
The most dangerous change in the AI era is not that machines can write articles, draw images, or generate video. The real danger is that content itself is losing its standing as evidence. For a long time, people assumed that media artifacts carried …
The most dangerous change in the AI era is not that machines can write articles, draw images, or generate video. The real danger is that content itself is losing its standing as evidence. For a long time, people assumed that media artifacts carried …
Pigsty v4.3: 510 Extensions & Ubuntu 26
Pigsty v4.3 is out. If v4.2 was about “twelve kernels”, v4.3 is about extension density. This release takes the supported PostgreSQL extension count from 460 to 510, a new high-water mark for Pigsty. Ubuntu 26.04 enters the support matrix, while …
Pigsty v4.3 is out. If v4.2 was about “twelve kernels”, v4.3 is about extension density. This release takes the supported PostgreSQL extension count from 460 to 510, a new high-water mark for Pigsty. Ubuntu 26.04 enters the support matrix, while …
pgBackRest is No Longer Maintained
On April 27, David Steele formally archived pgBackRest, the most important backup tool in the PostgreSQL ecosystem. The announcement appeared on GitHub and LinkedIn. It was brief and direct: The End-of-Maintenance Announcement TL;DR: pgBackRest is no …
On April 27, David Steele formally archived pgBackRest, the most important backup tool in the PostgreSQL ecosystem. The announcement appeared on GitHub and LinkedIn. It was brief and direct: The End-of-Maintenance Announcement TL;DR: pgBackRest is no …
Give DBA Agents a Body
HOW 2026 keynote: Give DBA Agents a Body Part I: Opening—An Absurd Phenomenon 1. Cover Hello, everyone. I’m Ruohang Feng, the organizer of this tools track. This is a PostgreSQL tools session, but today I don’t want to talk about how many new …
HOW 2026 keynote: Give DBA Agents a Body Part I: Opening—An Absurd Phenomenon 1. Cover Hello, everyone. I’m Ruohang Feng, the organizer of this tools track. This is a PostgreSQL tools session, but today I don’t want to talk about how many new …
A Busy Few Days in Infrastructure and AI
The past couple of days have been unusually busy for the infrastructure crowd. Ubuntu released its biennial LTS today. Alibaba’s Qwen team dropped a 27B dense model yesterday that beats its own previous 397B MoE flagship. The day before that, OpenAI …
The past couple of days have been unusually busy for the infrastructure crowd. Ubuntu released its biennial LTS today. Alibaba’s Qwen team dropped a 27B dense model yesterday that beats its own previous 397B MoE flagship. The day before that, OpenAI …
MySQL 9.7: Same Old Leftovers, Reheated
Two years ago, I wrote MySQL Is Dead, Long Live PostgreSQL. MySQL 9.0 had just shipped, and Oracle had unveiled a VECTOR data type with great fanfare, billing it as “MySQL for the AI era.” One look was enough: it was a BLOB in a cheap disguise. No …
Two years ago, I wrote MySQL Is Dead, Long Live PostgreSQL. MySQL 9.0 had just shipped, and Oracle had unveiled a VECTOR data type with great fanfare, billing it as “MySQL for the AI era.” One look was enough: it was a BLOB in a cheap disguise. No …
Pigsty Hits 5,000 GitHub Stars: A One-Man PostgreSQL Distribution
Pigsty crossed 5,000 GitHub stars today. I wrote the first line of code six years ago and went full-time on the project four years ago. Getting here has been a long road. In China’s open-source PostgreSQL ecosystem, Pigsty is the only project to …
Pigsty crossed 5,000 GitHub stars today. I wrote the first line of code six years ago and went full-time on the project four years ago. Getting here has been a long road. In China’s open-source PostgreSQL ecosystem, Pigsty is the only project to …
The Three-Way Endgame: Why Agent Memory Frameworks Are a Dead End
A few months ago, I wrote The OS Moment for AI Agents. I made a prediction there: the next frenzy in agent infrastructure would be memory. Startups and open-source projects would swarm around the question of how agents should remember things. Capital …
A few months ago, I wrote The OS Moment for AI Agents. I made a prediction there: the next frenzy in agent infrastructure would be memory. Startups and open-source projects would swarm around the question of how agents should remember things. Capital …
Two Hemispheres: Transformer, Diffusion, and the Boundary of Intelligence
A friend recently wrote an essay titled “Vision Is the Foundation of the World, Not a Plugin for Language.” It prompted a conversation with Claude, which I have edited into the Socratic dialogue below. Language as the Foundation, Vision as an Add-On? …
A friend recently wrote an essay titled “Vision Is the Foundation of the World, Not a Plugin for Language.” It prompted a conversation with Claude, which I have edited into the Socratic dialogue below. Language as the Foundation, Vision as an Add-On? …
Two months into maintaining a MinIO fork
Two months ago in “MinIO is Dead, Long Live MinIO,” I promised I’d keep the MinIO fork patched. The recurring objection on HN is fair: can one person actually maintain something like this? The real answer isn’t clicking fork. It’s what happens when …
Two months ago in “MinIO is Dead, Long Live MinIO,” I promised I’d keep the MinIO fork patched. The recurring objection on HN is fair: can one person actually maintain something like this? The real answer isn’t clicking fork. It’s what happens when …
Cyber Dharma: A New Engineering Answer to Ancient Questions
Have you ever noticed that writing a System Prompt for AI, something as simple as “You are Claude, a helpful AI assistant” is structurally the same act as the line in Genesis, “Let there be light”? Both use language to bring an entity into being. …
Have you ever noticed that writing a System Prompt for AI, something as simple as “You are Claude, a helpful AI assistant” is structurally the same act as the line in Genesis, “Let there be light”? Both use language to bring an entity into being. …
Burning Hundreds of Millions of Tokens a Day. Then What?
My friend Jiang recently got obsessed with flexing in group chat about burning hundreds of millions of tokens a day. What was he doing with them? One minute it was some ontology database, the next he had an agent rebuilding Pigsty in Go under the …
My friend Jiang recently got obsessed with flexing in group chat about burning hundreds of millions of tokens a day. What was he doing with them? One minute it was some ontology database, the next he had an agent rebuilding Pigsty in Go under the …
504 Extensions: Expand the PostgreSQL Landscape
A GitHub issue turned into an extension sprint. 32 new additions say a lot about where PostgreSQL is headed. It Started with a Chemistry Extension Two days ago, a user opened a GitHub issue: he was using RDKit, the de facto standard library in …
A GitHub issue turned into an extension sprint. 32 new additions say a lot about where PostgreSQL is headed. It Started with a Chemistry Extension Two days ago, a user opened a GitHub issue: he was using RDKit, the de facto standard library in …
Why PostgreSQL Won in the AI Era
I recently did a recorded livestream on PostgreSQL and AI. The host asked a lot of good questions, and I gave some answers. The recording goes out Tuesday night. I am publishing the fuller written version of my views here, including quite a bit I did …
I recently did a recorded livestream on PostgreSQL and AI. The host asked a lot of good questions, and I gave some answers. The recording goes out Tuesday night. I am publishing the fuller written version of my views here, including quite a bit I did …
The Data Sovereignty Manifesto
A specter is haunting the digital world—the specter of feudalism. A thousand years ago, a farmer was born on his lord’s estate, tilled his lord’s land, paid his lord’s rents and taxes, and lived his entire life in his lord’s shadow. He was never …
A specter is haunting the digital world—the specter of feudalism. A thousand years ago, a farmer was born on his lord’s estate, tilled his lord’s land, paid his lord’s rents and taxes, and lived his entire life in his lord’s shadow. He was never …
AGI Is Here. Do You Have a Ticket?
On April 8, 2026, Marc Andreessen posted a tweet that, translated loosely, said: The latest AGI pricing is out: if you are one of 11 specific companies, the price is negative $9 million. Otherwise, the price is infinity. Negative $9 million means not …
On April 8, 2026, Marc Andreessen posted a tweet that, translated loosely, said: The latest AGI pricing is out: if you are one of 11 specific companies, the price is negative $9 million. Otherwise, the price is infinity. Negative $9 million means not …
Can You Distill an Expert?
Polanyi’s tacit knowledge explains the 70% ceiling of AI agents: real intuition, feel, and judgment do not serialize cleanly. They grow, if at all, through practice. 1. Distilling Employees A popular idea lately is to “distill” employee knowledge …
Polanyi’s tacit knowledge explains the 70% ceiling of AI agents: real intuition, feel, and judgment do not serialize cleanly. They grow, if at all, through practice. 1. Distilling Employees A popular idea lately is to “distill” employee knowledge …
Yes, I Use AI to Write
People often leave the same short comment under my posts: “AI wrote this.” Correct. I use AI, and I use it heavily. I do not think there is anything to hide there. But the topic itself is worth addressing seriously at least once: how should a person …
People often leave the same short comment under my posts: “AI wrote this.” Correct. I use AI, and I use it heavily. I do not think there is anything to hide there. But the topic itself is worth addressing seriously at least once: how should a person …
Local AI's Inflection Point: 2027
When subsidies fade, hardware catches up, and open models mature, all three lines cross in 2027. “Build your own AI” goes from idea to reality. A Thought Triggered by a Group Chat A friend in a group chat said the other day that “self-hosting” is …
When subsidies fade, hardware catches up, and open models mature, all three lines cross in 2027. “Build your own AI” goes from idea to reality. A Thought Triggered by a Group Chat A friend in a group chat said the other day that “self-hosting” is …