New blog post, on the changing role of principal/staff+ IC leaders: brooker.co.za/blog/2026/03...

Core message: get building, get learning.

Wish AI wasn't the only reason for this. I have been fortunate and intentional about being surrounded by people who are actively innovating themselves, yet crossed paths with those stuck to their ways - both from usually right intent and exp. I wonder if that will collapse or become more apparent.

An image from a scientific paper showing two people stuffed into some kind of scanning machine and the resulting scan. I think the scan is actually a CT, but the principle remains! Also shown is a crosssection of the resulting scans.

Turns out it would be pretty easy to substantially lower the cost of MRIs.

I'm still learning how easy it is to go from "software I wish existed" to "software that exists" now, especially for anything that's a script, automation, or small utility.

Everything I internalized in 20 years about the cost of building things has changed in less than two years.

This please. I haven't seen this many off peak hours accidents blocking 520 as this year. Stay safe.

I was taking to some wine producers and they were talking about the same. Traffic in wine tasting rooms and purchases are down, so the producers are trying to go to local events.

A line chart from Gallup showing the decline of drinking between around 1940 to 2025, as measured by responses to the question, "Do you have occasion to use alcoholic beverages such as liquor, wine, or beer, or are you a total abstainer?" The high point was around 1975, when about 72 percent said they drank, and the low point was in 2025, when 54 percent said they drank.

A new Gallup poll on Americans' drinking habits shows that drinking among adults is at its lowest point since 1939. Young adults, in particular, said they personally think drinking is "bad for your health." Overall, 53% of people agreed with this statement, including 66% of adults age 18-34.

King County Metro on-time performance is worse than at any time on the chart going back to 2019, trending lower than July

We're going to need more bus lanes.

The city needs a bus only lane to switch between the highways and every ramp along with more bus lanes/dedicated bus roads in downtown. It becomes moot when 405-i5 switch overs in and out of 520 is half the commute time.

Ex-farm worker here.

We need to talk about this whole "But a living wage for farm workers would spike the cost of food!" thing.

Not true AT ALL.

Y'all don't understand how fast experienced farm workers are.

The average tomato picker pulls 650lbs per hour.

At $20/hr, that's $0.03/lb for labor.

This and this. I have bounced around every time I started seeing progress being replaced by negativity which seems to come in 2 forms - the "peer kind" where people complain a lot and the "superior kind" where people use their position to dismiss opportunities to avoid risks.

New blog post, with some career advice: brooker.co.za/blog/2025/06...

The Bothell City Council just voted 5-1 to drop all minimum off-street parking requirements at the same time that they approved the legalization of neighborhood cafes and corner stores everywhere in the city.

The weird zombie existence of the Family Circus YouTube video by Don McHoull

Really enjoyed this video investigating the weird zombie existence of FAMILY CIRCUS in 2025 newspapers (and also a genuinely touching appreciation for a piece of pop culture that most frequently just gets bought up as an example of laziness or low quality) youtu.be/mOV0BV45NqA?...

“I Have Lost Everything”: The Toll of Cities’ Homeless Sweeps Cities often take belongings — including important documents and irreplaceable mementos — when they conduct sweeps of homeless encampments. ProPublica gave notecards to people across the country so…

We asked people who lived in homeless encampments that were cleared out in city “sweeps” to write about what object was the hardest for them to lose.

“They took my baby pictures and my moms obituaries,” a 29-year-old in California wrote.

Just make it scale: An Aurora DSQL story AWS Senior Principal Engineers, Niko Matsakis and Marc Bowes, take us inside Aurora DSQL's development: scaling write operations without two-phase commit, overcoming garbage collection hurdles, and em...

www.allthingsdistributed.com/2025/05/just...

Amazon Aurora DSQL is now generally available | Amazon Web Services Amazon Aurora DSQL is the fastest serverless distributed SQL database for always available applications. It makes it effortless for customers to scale to meet any workload demand with zero infrastruct...

We are now GA aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/am...

No matter how much thought goes into building the "right" product, it always surprises me the new ways customers end up using it. It's the most exciting part when I see the thousands of brains come up with ideas and innovate using a new product.

Just make it scale: An Aurora DSQL story AWS Senior Principal Engineers, Niko Matsakis and Marc Bowes, take us inside Aurora DSQL's development: scaling write operations without two-phase commit, overcoming garbage collection hurdles, and em...

In a new guest post from #AWS Sr. Principal Engineers @nikomatsakis.com and Mark Bowes take us inside Aurora DSQL's development from scaling write operations without two-phase commit, to overcoming garbage collection hurdles, and embracing Rust. www.allthingsdistributed.com/2025/05/just...

This little fella crash-landed in our window, so we decided to use the resting time to check-up on his hardware development skills. 😂

New blog post on the mental model I've used when working through complex or confusing papers on transactional systems.
transactional.blog/b...

Understanding transaction visibility in PostgreSQL clusters with read replicas | Amazon Web Services On April 29, 2025, Jepsen published a report about transaction visibility behavior in Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL Multi-AZ clusters. We appreciate Jepsen’s thorough analysis and would like to provide ad...

Recently, one of our testing tools at AWS found an issue with transaction visibility in PostgreSQL, where the order that transactions become visible differs between the primary and replicas. Sergey Melnik dives deep on the AWS Database Blog: aws.amazon.com/blogs/databa...

I don't recall the last time an entrepreneur hire paid off besides the ones that being talent with them, yet it seems to be a common trend in the tech world for most of my career.

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I'm making an ID.me account (a private identity vendor selling its services to government), required to log into my IRS.gov account, and their privacy policy says I'm also creating an "an ID.me Rx Account," and consent to this company collecting my health information. *What*? www.id.me/privacy

🦀 Hello World!

The Rust project now has an official presence on Bluesky! ✨

We'll be posting the same on our Mastodon and Bluesky accounts, so you won't miss anything on either platform.

Oracle customers confirm the authenticity of data samples shared by a threat actor who allegedly breached Oracle Cloud servers, after Oracle denied the breach (Lawrence Abrams/BleepingComputer)

Main Link | Techmeme Permalink

Ok. So. The US imports more peanut butter than we export- by ~20,000 metric tons.

20K tons isn't much compared to other goods. But it's also a lot, considering the US grows 2.75M tons of peanuts/yr.

Why? Well, the US exports peanuts to other countries. They make the butter & sell it back to us.

I am planning to have my parents travel. Flight/Insurance:
US: $2000/$1000
Europe: $1800/$70
For similar coverage. What happened? 3 years ago the same insurance was $140 for the US.

DOGE Claimed It Saved $8 Billion in One Contract. It Was Actually $8 Million. (Gift Article) The biggest single line item on the website of Elon Musk’s cost-cutting team appears to include an error.

DOGE Claimed It Saved $8 Billion in One Contract. It Was Actually $8 Million.
The biggest single line item on the website of Elon Musk’s cost-cutting team appears to include an error.

Aatish Bhatia,Josh Katz, Margot Sanger-Katz and Ethan Singer

nyti.ms/4hVfn8w

I think it's might be stemming from a genuine fear that is becoming a monetary currency for only the big corporations. I don't think there has been a precedence on this scale where it wasn't govt backed.