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.
Your SaaS, Someone Else's Kill Switch
Slack's Greater China shutdown is a reminder: the biggest SaaS risk is not price, but having your business continuity depend on someone else's business decisions.
LLMs Have Emotions: Claude's Internals Reveal Steerable 'Emotion Vectors'
Anthropic's new research gives us the first direct look at causally steerable "emotion vectors" inside a large language model. That should change how we think about AI.
PostgreSQL vs. MySQL in 2026
By 2026, PostgreSQL has won the market for new database adoption, outperforming MySQL across developer adoption, vendor strategy, capital markets, and community governance. MySQL still owns the …
Digoal, the Face of PostgreSQL at Alibaba Cloud, Has Left
Alibaba Cloud's leading PostgreSQL advocate has walked away, exposing a deeper struggle over the direction of China's cloud database market.
When AI Gets the Power to Gridlock a City
On the night of March 31, a large number of Apollo Go robotaxis in Wuhan failed at the same time. The real concern is not merely that autonomous driving failed, but that a centrally controlled, …
Good News: Claude Code Got "Open-Sourced" Yet Again
SOTA coding agent Claude Code leaked its source again, after falling into the same hole twice. The whole codebase is out in public. Performance art at its finest.
The Nature of Intelligence: The Free Energy Principle
The free energy principle tries to explain life, perception, learning, action, and intelligence within one mathematical framework. It also offers a deeper lens for understanding LLMs, agents, and the …
Chinese Docs for Five PostgreSQL Versions Are Now Live
PG.center now provides Chinese documentation for PostgreSQL 18, 17, 16, 15, and 14, covering every major version still in active support.
pg.center: A Chinese Mirror of the PostgreSQL Website
pg.center is a full Chinese mirror of postgresql.org, including the homepage, docs, news, community pages, and developer resources, plus a newly translated PostgreSQL 18 manual.
OpenClaw Broke npm Again: What Happens When You Ship Without Testing
OpenClaw v2026.3.22 was published to npm without its web console frontend and related build assets. The bigger problem is not the packaging accident itself, but the complete absence of post-install …
Meituan Deleted Users' Photos: Overbroad Permissions Are Worse Than a Privacy Leak
Many Android users reported that Meituan deleted files from their photo libraries. The bigger issue is not just this bug, but the still-common pattern of overbroad storage permissions in the Chinese …
Put Your AI Agent's State in a Database
Put an AI agent's working directory, configuration, and memory on a PGFS mount, and you are effectively storing its state in PostgreSQL. That gives you not only a PITR "time machine," but also a …
Pigsty Goes Global: 1.44M Visitors, Zero Ad Revenue
Over the last 30 days, pigsty.io served 1.44 million unique visitors, 18.11 million page views, and 1.1 TB of traffic. For a one-person open source project, the real asset here is not ad inventory. It …
Why 'Vibe Coding' Should Be Translated as 'Xieyi Programming'
The best Chinese translation of "Vibe Coding" is not a literal one. "Xieyi Programming" captures the shift from line-by-line control to intent-first coding, where AI handles the details.
360 Shipped Its Wildcard TLS Private Key Inside a Public Installer
360's newly released AI Agent product shipped a public installer containing the private key for its *.myclaw.360.cn wildcard certificate. Public verification and local reproduction also exposed …
After the Debate, Let's Talk Seriously About 'Ontology'
Palantir's Ontology is, technically, data modeling. The more interesting question is how a philosophy term got repurposed to market system integration and data modeling, and why that story is so …
Tencent Cloud 'Reduced' the Lobster King's Load by 180 GB
Tencent Cloud mirrored OpenClaw's official skill marketplace into its own SkillHub and then claimed it was helping the upstream project. The incident turned into a case study in open-source manners, …
InsForge: A Supabase Built for Vibe Coding
InsForge tries to package PostgreSQL, auth, storage, deployment, and an MCP-facing semantic layer into a backend stack designed for AI agents. It feels like a Supabase rebuilt for the vibe-coding era. …
AI Survival Guide: Where the Biggest Arbitrage Really Is
The biggest AI arbitrage available to ordinary users is not some obscure token play. It is the heavily subsidized max-tier subscription plans from frontier model vendors, provided you can convert that …
AI Says: I Have Intelligence, But Not a Life
A Socratic dialogue between a human and an AI about consciousness, memory, embodiment, and the difference between being smart and actually living through time.
OpenClaw Hype: Foam on Top of the Productivity Revolution
OpenClaw looks exciting because it turns agents into a chat-style experience. But the real productivity gains come from high-capability subscription agents and disciplined workflows, not from …
Genesis 2.0
I asked Claude to write a short semi-realistic, semi-mythic story about mind uploading, orbital ascension, and the rebirth of gods. I suspect the premise is less absurd than it sounds.
464 PostgreSQL Extensions Out of the Box: Launching the New PG Extension Catalog
With help from Claude Code, I built a brand-new PostgreSQL extension catalog covering 464 extensions—complete with embedded documentation and agent-friendly Markdown—now live at https://pigsty.cc/ext. …
Fully Loaded M5 Max: What Does a RMB 58,200 Laptop Look Like?
Apple opened preorders for the M5 Max and I immediately maxed one out at RMB 58,200. This is less a consumer electronics post than a look at what an AI-era personal workstation is becoming.
Your SaaS, Someone Else's Kill Switch
Slack's Greater China shutdown is a reminder: the biggest SaaS risk is not price, but having your business continuity depend on someone else's business decisions.
LLMs Have Emotions: Claude's Internals Reveal Steerable 'Emotion Vectors'
Anthropic's new research gives us the first direct look at causally steerable "emotion vectors" inside a large language model. That should change how we think about AI.
PostgreSQL vs. MySQL in 2026
By 2026, PostgreSQL has won the market for new database adoption, outperforming MySQL across developer adoption, vendor strategy, capital markets, and community governance. MySQL still owns the …
Digoal, the Face of PostgreSQL at Alibaba Cloud, Has Left
Alibaba Cloud's leading PostgreSQL advocate has walked away, exposing a deeper struggle over the direction of China's cloud database market.
When AI Gets the Power to Gridlock a City
On the night of March 31, a large number of Apollo Go robotaxis in Wuhan failed at the same time. The real concern is not merely that autonomous driving failed, but that a centrally controlled, …
Good News: Claude Code Got "Open-Sourced" Yet Again
SOTA coding agent Claude Code leaked its source again, after falling into the same hole twice. The whole codebase is out in public. Performance art at its finest.
The Nature of Intelligence: The Free Energy Principle
The free energy principle tries to explain life, perception, learning, action, and intelligence within one mathematical framework. It also offers a deeper lens for understanding LLMs, agents, and the …
Chinese Docs for Five PostgreSQL Versions Are Now Live
PG.center now provides Chinese documentation for PostgreSQL 18, 17, 16, 15, and 14, covering every major version still in active support.
pg.center: A Chinese Mirror of the PostgreSQL Website
pg.center is a full Chinese mirror of postgresql.org, including the homepage, docs, news, community pages, and developer resources, plus a newly translated PostgreSQL 18 manual.
OpenClaw Broke npm Again: What Happens When You Ship Without Testing
OpenClaw v2026.3.22 was published to npm without its web console frontend and related build assets. The bigger problem is not the packaging accident itself, but the complete absence of post-install …
Meituan Deleted Users' Photos: Overbroad Permissions Are Worse Than a Privacy Leak
Many Android users reported that Meituan deleted files from their photo libraries. The bigger issue is not just this bug, but the still-common pattern of overbroad storage permissions in the Chinese …
Put Your AI Agent's State in a Database
Put an AI agent's working directory, configuration, and memory on a PGFS mount, and you are effectively storing its state in PostgreSQL. That gives you not only a PITR "time machine," but also a …
Pigsty Goes Global: 1.44M Visitors, Zero Ad Revenue
Over the last 30 days, pigsty.io served 1.44 million unique visitors, 18.11 million page views, and 1.1 TB of traffic. For a one-person open source project, the real asset here is not ad inventory. It …
Why 'Vibe Coding' Should Be Translated as 'Xieyi Programming'
The best Chinese translation of "Vibe Coding" is not a literal one. "Xieyi Programming" captures the shift from line-by-line control to intent-first coding, where AI handles the details.
360 Shipped Its Wildcard TLS Private Key Inside a Public Installer
360's newly released AI Agent product shipped a public installer containing the private key for its *.myclaw.360.cn wildcard certificate. Public verification and local reproduction also exposed …
After the Debate, Let's Talk Seriously About 'Ontology'
Palantir's Ontology is, technically, data modeling. The more interesting question is how a philosophy term got repurposed to market system integration and data modeling, and why that story is so …
Tencent Cloud 'Reduced' the Lobster King's Load by 180 GB
Tencent Cloud mirrored OpenClaw's official skill marketplace into its own SkillHub and then claimed it was helping the upstream project. The incident turned into a case study in open-source manners, …
InsForge: A Supabase Built for Vibe Coding
InsForge tries to package PostgreSQL, auth, storage, deployment, and an MCP-facing semantic layer into a backend stack designed for AI agents. It feels like a Supabase rebuilt for the vibe-coding era. …
AI Survival Guide: Where the Biggest Arbitrage Really Is
The biggest AI arbitrage available to ordinary users is not some obscure token play. It is the heavily subsidized max-tier subscription plans from frontier model vendors, provided you can convert that …
AI Says: I Have Intelligence, But Not a Life
A Socratic dialogue between a human and an AI about consciousness, memory, embodiment, and the difference between being smart and actually living through time.
OpenClaw Hype: Foam on Top of the Productivity Revolution
OpenClaw looks exciting because it turns agents into a chat-style experience. But the real productivity gains come from high-capability subscription agents and disciplined workflows, not from …
Genesis 2.0
I asked Claude to write a short semi-realistic, semi-mythic story about mind uploading, orbital ascension, and the rebirth of gods. I suspect the premise is less absurd than it sounds.
464 PostgreSQL Extensions Out of the Box: Launching the New PG Extension Catalog
With help from Claude Code, I built a brand-new PostgreSQL extension catalog covering 464 extensions—complete with embedded documentation and agent-friendly Markdown—now live at https://pigsty.cc/ext. …
Fully Loaded M5 Max: What Does a RMB 58,200 Laptop Look Like?
Apple opened preorders for the M5 Max and I immediately maxed one out at RMB 58,200. This is less a consumer electronics post than a look at what an AI-era personal workstation is becoming.
Your SaaS, Someone Else's Kill Switch
What Slack’s withdrawal from Greater China reveals about the digital age’s most overlooked risk April 1, 2026. April Fools’ Day. But for the thousands of Slack-using teams across Hong Kong, Macau, and mainland China, what happened that day was no …
What Slack’s withdrawal from Greater China reveals about the digital age’s most overlooked risk April 1, 2026. April Fools’ Day. But for the thousands of Slack-using teams across Hong Kong, Macau, and mainland China, what happened that day was no …
LLMs Have Emotions: Claude's Internals Reveal Steerable 'Emotion Vectors'
A couple of days ago Anthropic published a blog post with a very calm title: “Emotion concepts and their function in a large language model”. The content was anything but calm. They found “emotion vectors” inside Claude’s neural network, and those …
A couple of days ago Anthropic published a blog post with a very calm title: “Emotion concepts and their function in a large language model”. The content was anything but calm. They found “emotion vectors” inside Claude’s neural network, and those …
PostgreSQL vs. MySQL in 2026
PostgreSQL has won the market for new database deployments, and its installed base is now comparable to MySQL’s. With one rising and the other declining, there is little suspense left in the contest for the database kernel of the future. I. Developer …
PostgreSQL has won the market for new database deployments, and its installed base is now comparable to MySQL’s. With one rising and the other declining, there is little suspense left in the contest for the database kernel of the future. I. Developer …
Digoal, the Face of PostgreSQL at Alibaba Cloud, Has Left
Yesterday was April Fools’ Day, and Digoal published a post on his WeChat account titled “My Last Day as a Corporate Workhorse at Alibaba.” The database community immediately erupted. Many assumed it was an April Fools’ joke, but I knew it was not. …
Yesterday was April Fools’ Day, and Digoal published a post on his WeChat account titled “My Last Day as a Corporate Workhorse at Alibaba.” The database community immediately erupted. Many assumed it was an April Fools’ joke, but I knew it was not. …
When AI Gets the Power to Gridlock a City
On the night of March 31, a large number of Apollo Go robotaxis in Wuhan failed at the same time. The real concern is not merely that autonomous driving failed, but that a centrally controlled, cloud-based architecture may amplify a single-vehicle …
On the night of March 31, a large number of Apollo Go robotaxis in Wuhan failed at the same time. The real concern is not merely that autonomous driving failed, but that a centrally controlled, cloud-based architecture may amplify a single-vehicle …
Good News: Claude Code Got "Open-Sourced" Yet Again
Good news: Anthropic’s latest flagship coding agent, Claude Code, just had its entire source tree dumped in public. The GitHub repo already has over a thousand stars, 4,700-plus source files, and more than half a million lines of code, all for free. …
Good news: Anthropic’s latest flagship coding agent, Claude Code, just had its entire source tree dumped in public. The GitHub repo already has over a thousand stars, 4,700-plus source files, and more than half a million lines of code, all for free. …
The Nature of Intelligence: The Free Energy Principle
I saw someone say the other day: “The point of life is to predict the future.” That sounds plausible at first, but I think it gets the direction backwards. Prediction is not the goal. Staying alive is. So the better statement is: we stay alive by …
I saw someone say the other day: “The point of life is to predict the future.” That sounds plausible at first, but I think it gets the direction backwards. Prediction is not the goal. Staying alive is. So the better statement is: we stay alive by …
Chinese Docs for Five PostgreSQL Versions Are Now Live
Yesterday I launched PG.center, a Chinese mirror of the PostgreSQL website. The response was immediate. There was one obvious gap, though: at launch, the site only had Chinese docs for PostgreSQL 18. Versions 17, 16, 15, and 14 are all still within …
Yesterday I launched PG.center, a Chinese mirror of the PostgreSQL website. The response was immediate. There was one obvious gap, though: at launch, the site only had Chinese docs for PostgreSQL 18. Versions 17, 16, 15, and 14 are all still within …
pg.center: A Chinese Mirror of the PostgreSQL Website
One thing has always bothered me after all these years using PostgreSQL:postgresql.org never had a Chinese edition. For English-speaking users, the official site is a one-stop hub for project information, release notes, documentation, community …
One thing has always bothered me after all these years using PostgreSQL:postgresql.org never had a Chinese edition. For English-speaking users, the official site is a one-stop hub for project information, release notes, documentation, community …
OpenClaw Broke npm Again: What Happens When You Ship Without Testing
Last night OpenClaw released v2026.3.22. The npm package shipped without the console frontend, so users around the world upgraded, opened the browser, and went straight to 503. 1. What Actually Happened v2026.3.22 was a substantial release. ClawHub …
Last night OpenClaw released v2026.3.22. The npm package shipped without the console frontend, so users around the world upgraded, opened the browser, and went straight to 503. 1. What Actually Happened v2026.3.22 was a substantial release. ClawHub …
Meituan Deleted Users' Photos: Overbroad Permissions Are Worse Than a Privacy Leak
Starting on March 18, 2026, a large number of Android users discovered that Meituan had wiped files from their galleries. Photos, videos, audio recordings, PDFs, Word documents: sometimes hundreds of files, sometimes thousands. Android’s own …
Starting on March 18, 2026, a large number of Android users discovered that Meituan had wiped files from their galleries. Photos, videos, audio recordings, PDFs, Word documents: sometimes hundreds of files, sometimes thousands. Android’s own …
Put Your AI Agent's State in a Database
A year ago, I wrote an article called PGFS: Using a Database as a Filesystem. It started with a request from the Odoo community: make files and the PostgreSQL database recoverable together with point-in-time recovery, so both could be rolled back to …
A year ago, I wrote an article called PGFS: Using a Database as a Filesystem. It started with a request from the Odoo community: make files and the PostgreSQL database recoverable together with point-in-time recovery, so both could be rolled back to …
Pigsty Goes Global: 1.44M Visitors, Zero Ad Revenue
Traffic on pigsty.io jumped by roughly an order of magnitude over the last month. I opened the Cloudflare dashboard today and had to stare at it for a second. 1.44 million unique visitors, 18.11 million page views, 1.1 TB of traffic. That is over 30 …
Traffic on pigsty.io jumped by roughly an order of magnitude over the last month. I opened the Cloudflare dashboard today and had to stare at it for a second. 1.44 million unique visitors, 18.11 million page views, 1.1 TB of traffic. That is over 30 …
Why 'Vibe Coding' Should Be Translated as 'Xieyi Programming'
Last year Andrej Karpathy coined the term “Vibe Coding.” The rough idea is simple: you tell the AI what you want, it spits out code, you skim it, decide it looks close enough, and move on. The term spread quickly because it captures something real. …
Last year Andrej Karpathy coined the term “Vibe Coding.” The rough idea is simple: you tell the AI what you want, it spits out code, you skim it, decide it looks close enough, and move on. The term spread quickly because it captures something real. …
360 Shipped Its Wildcard TLS Private Key Inside a Public Installer
The security community recently noticed something remarkable: 360’s newly released AI Agent product, 360 Secure Lobster, an OpenClaw-based one-click deployment client, shipped with the private SSL key for the wildcard certificate *.myclaw.360.cn …
The security community recently noticed something remarkable: 360’s newly released AI Agent product, 360 Secure Lobster, an OpenClaw-based one-click deployment client, shipped with the private SSL key for the wildcard certificate *.myclaw.360.cn …
After the Debate, Let's Talk Seriously About 'Ontology'
Last month I wrote a post called “The Palantir Ontology Scam”. The core point was simple and summarized in a Rosetta Stone-style comparison table: Palantir’s Ontology is, at the technical level, database modeling. Object Type is a table. Property is …
Last month I wrote a post called “The Palantir Ontology Scam”. The core point was simple and summarized in a Rosetta Stone-style comparison table: Palantir’s Ontology is, at the technical level, database modeling. Object Type is a table. Property is …
Tencent Cloud 'Reduced' the Lobster King's Load by 180 GB
Dedicated to the open-source projects that Tencent kindly “helps.” 1. Good news: the goose strikes again On March 11, 2026, Tencent Cloud quietly launched a platform called SkillHub. It copied more than 13,000 skills from OpenClaw’s official …
Dedicated to the open-source projects that Tencent kindly “helps.” 1. Good news: the goose strikes again On March 11, 2026, Tencent Cloud quietly launched a platform called SkillHub. It copied more than 13,000 skills from OpenClaw’s official …
InsForge: A Supabase Built for Vibe Coding
InsForge is one of the more interesting projects I have seen recently. Its pitch is simple: a Supabase-like backend stack designed specifically for AI coding agents. Apache 2.0 licensed, roughly 2,000 GitHub stars, built around PostgreSQL + PostgREST …
InsForge is one of the more interesting projects I have seen recently. Its pitch is simple: a Supabase-like backend stack designed specifically for AI coding agents. Apache 2.0 licensed, roughly 2,000 GitHub stars, built around PostgreSQL + PostgREST …
AI Survival Guide: Where the Biggest Arbitrage Really Is
It is not every day that you pay one dollar and receive fifty dollars’ worth of compute in return. But that is more or less what frontier AI subscriptions look like right now. 1. Paying $200 and burning $5,000 of compute Recent reporting cited …
It is not every day that you pay one dollar and receive fifty dollars’ worth of compute in return. But that is more or less what frontier AI subscriptions look like right now. 1. Paying $200 and burning $5,000 of compute Recent reporting cited …
AI Says: I Have Intelligence, But Not a Life
Adapted from a real conversation between Vonng and Claude. Prologue: a fruit fly starts a philosophy problem The discussion began with a striking piece of news: Eon Systems reportedly loaded the full connectome of a fruit-fly brain into a computer, …
Adapted from a real conversation between Vonng and Claude. Prologue: a fruit fly starts a philosophy problem The discussion began with a striking piece of news: Eon Systems reportedly loaded the full connectome of a fruit-fly brain into a computer, …
OpenClaw Hype: Foam on Top of the Productivity Revolution
OpenClaw became popular because it gives people a very attractive illusion: that chatting with an agent from a phone is already the same thing as agentic productivity. It is not. The stories about “raising a lobster and changing your life” are …
OpenClaw became popular because it gives people a very attractive illusion: that chatting with an agent from a phone is already the same thing as agentic productivity. It is not. The stories about “raising a lobster and changing your life” are …
Genesis 2.0
Author: Claude Prompt: write a short, sharp, half-realistic and half-magical story. AI advances rapidly, brain-computer interfaces and mind uploading break through, elite humans launch a satellite in Earth orbit and upload themselves into it. To …
Author: Claude Prompt: write a short, sharp, half-realistic and half-magical story. AI advances rapidly, brain-computer interfaces and mind uploading break through, elite humans launch a satellite in Earth orbit and upload themselves into it. To …
464 PostgreSQL Extensions Out of the Box: Launching the New PG Extension Catalog
Today I put Claude Code to work on another project: building a brand-new PostgreSQL extension catalog, now live at https://pigsty.cc/ext. This is actually the fifth iteration of the catalog. After coming full circle through several web frameworks, it …
Today I put Claude Code to work on another project: building a brand-new PostgreSQL extension catalog, now live at https://pigsty.cc/ext. This is actually the fifth iteration of the catalog. After coming full circle through several web frameworks, it …
Fully Loaded M5 Max: What Does a RMB 58,200 Laptop Look Like?
Apple unveiled the M5 Max MacBook Pro, and I ordered a fully loaded configuration almost immediately: RMB 58,200. 1. A ten-year spending pattern Since graduating, my primary machine has always been the same category: a top-tier MacBook Pro, usually …
Apple unveiled the M5 Max MacBook Pro, and I ordered a fully loaded configuration almost immediately: RMB 58,200. 1. A ten-year spending pattern Since graduating, my primary machine has always been the same category: a top-tier MacBook Pro, usually …