Kicking off Planet Nix with Kelsey Hightower and Ron Efroni talking about how the industry is changing with AI and what it means for technologies like Nix.

First time taking a Southwest flight with reserved seats and it feels really strange to go to just one seat.

Writing Crystalized Thinking At Amazon. Is AI Muddying It? Amazon’s famously writing-centric culture is being aided by generative AI. What does that say about the company’s culture, priorities, and future?

Planning in software development has had artifacts and ceremonies that serve a purpose. This is a great summary of strain from AI-generated artifacts and pressure to adopt AI and what it does to erode a long-time carefully constructed culture of writing 6-pagers at Amazon.

I love stories like this one from Gladys West who helped with the foundations of the mathematics of GPS. The story was told so much later, similar to the movie "Hidden Figures." or “The Imitation Game”. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/27/s...

Using XDP for Egress Traffic XDP only works for ingress. We found a loophole that lets it work for egress. Here's how we did the impossible.

I just learned that Loophole Labs found a clever way to dramatically increase Linux container network bandwidth by over 12x. I ❤️ seeing innovation at low levels of the infrastructure stack with big payoffs! loopholelabs.io/blog/xdp-for...

How to optimize Amazon RDS and Amazon Aurora database costs/performance with AWS Compute Optimizer | Amazon Web Services In this post, we dive deeper into database optimization for your Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), exploring how you can use AWS Compute Optimizer recommendations to make cost-aware res...

aws.amazon.com/blogs/databa...

...it's pretty clear that arm64 should be the default instance type choice for RDS or Aurora on AWS.

(slightly less if you're using Graviton3 which is not discounted quite as much as Graviton2). So unless you have great data saying that your x64 database instance is better on price/performance or there is a compatibility issue in an extension you want to use...

I've had an open tab for a few weeks (link in comment) that AWS added RDS and Aurora instance type recommendations to the AWS Compute Optimizer. It's pretty wild that you can save somewhere around 10% across a big variety of database instance types.

Used Electrify America L3 charger for the first time and wow is that nice. Usually we charge at home, but this was fast, convenient, and not very expensive while we were far from home.

Opening up ‘Zero-Knowledge Proof’ technology to promote privacy in age assurance Today, we open sourced our Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP) libraries, fulfilling a promise and building on our partnership with Sparkasse to support EU age assurance.

Long-term, I want to see US lawmakers prioritize a national privacy law. This announcement is a step in the right direction.

blog.google/technology/s...

Quoting from the post: "In layperson’s terms, ZKP makes it possible for people to prove that something about them is true without exchanging any other data. So, for example, a person visiting a website can verifiably prove he or she is over 18, without sharing anything else at all."

I believe in user-controlled privacy. I'm very disappointed in the lack of privacy laws in the United States. I love seeing this update from Google that they have open sourced a Zero Knowledge Proof library that can be used in support of technology standards that preserve privacy.

Containers are available in public beta for simple, global, and programmable compute Cloudflare Containers are now available in public beta. Deploy simple, global, and programmable containers alongside your Workers.

blog.cloudflare.com/containers-a...

Serverless compute offerings have ongoing innovation and Cloudflare is looking more like a PaaS all the time.

Last week Cloudflare launched Containers, which is a significant update to their serverless compute offerings. Cloudflare Workers support is limited to JavaScript and WASM, and this new Containers offering let's you bring a container to their global compute runtime.

I tried Wispr (wisprflow.ai) as a voice input method today on my Mac and it works really well. I really like the UX. They've done a nice job with it. MacOS Dictation also works decently so they'll have to be a lot better than that for it to really catch on.

Citing your sources is so important. I researched cloud network pricing and ChatGPT confidently told me that Azure charges from cross-AZ traffic within a Virtual Network. I thought changed, so I checked. Azure made cross-AZ traffic free in May 2024! Check the citations of these chatbots!

VLT Captures Most Detailed Image Ever of NGC 253 | Sci.News Astronomers using the Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) have observed the active starburst (star-forming) galaxy NGC 253 in thousands of colors si...

You can read about it here: www.sci.news/astronomy/vl...

And get downloads of the images in various wallpaper sizes here: www.eso.org/public/image...

There are some amazing new images of a galaxy named NGC 253 that is 11.5m lightyears away that is generated from data captured with with the Very Large Telescope.

A Year in EMS My experience working as an EMT in LA County.

An Incredible read from my former colleague Jack about his experiences trying an alternative job to engineering after being on the HashiCorp rocketship from the beginning.

A Year in EMS www.jackpearkes.com/posts/a-year...

‎Hidden Bar ‎Hidden lets you hide menu bar items to give your Mac a cleaner look. Features: - Launch at login - Auto-hide after 5/10/15/30/60 seconds - Show/hide with global shortcut - Full menu bar mode - ...

Some tips, after installing, configure it to start when your machine starts. I had to restart the OS before the | icon showed, which enables you to configure which icons you want to hide.

apps.apple.com/us/app/hidde...

Want to hide annoying cluttered menu-bar icons in MacOS? Hidden Bar is a simple, free, and OSS utility that hides menu bar items behind a simple expander. When you don't need to use the icons, they are hidden from view. youtu.be/Y8OmjbySFao

FinOps Personas The FinOps discipline covers many different personas. Understand more about them, their roles, and requirements.

Yes, the lens is very finance-centric, but I found it super helpful as a base set of personas that are applicable across many aspects of cloud. Kudos to the FinOps org for putting this together and sharing it. www.finops.org/framework/pe...

Ever needed to describe personas and roles involved in cloud decisions? I met the FinOps.org team at a conference and after looking around their website, I found that they had mapped out the Personas really effectively for various people at organizations that work on cloud.

(The) Postman Carries Lots of Secrets ◆ Truffle Security Co. Postman, the popular API testing platform, hosts the largest collection of public APIs. Unfortunately, it’s become one of the largest public sources of leaked secrets. We estimate over 4,000 live cred...

Truffle Security also wrote about this last year trufflesecurity.com/blog/postman...

Postman is logging all your secrets and environment variables I was originally investigating this report that Postman is not HIPAA compliant. I found that Postman is not just wholly unsuitable for…

It’s really common to use Postman to try and test APIs. Thanks to Corey Quinn’s weekly AWS newsletter to highlight this article. Be careful what you share with Postman because they are logging your secrets. anonymousdata.medium.com/postman-is-l...

🚀 Heading to @AI & Big Data Expo next week? I'll be @Vultr booth 152
🎤 I’ll be speaking about Move to Vultr in Minutes, Not Months, highlighting how FluidCloud and Vultr are working together to power cutting-edge AI infrastructure.
📅 Stop by to learn, connect, and explore what’s next in AI.

#AIExpo

There are some political aspects that frankly should be ignored because the most meaningful content in this long interview is the global impact that can be made to save literally millions of lives and substantially improve standards of living across the world.

The $200 Billion Gamble: Bill Gates’s Plan to Wind Down His Foundation

This Bill Gates interview is a fascinating read on the state of global philanthropy.