R.E.M. :: Lifes Rich Pageant at 40

aquariumdrunkard.com/2026/04/21/r...

Take a picture here, take a souvenir.

Happy Patriot's Day/Boston Marathon day.

Announcing Rust 1.95.0 | Rust Blog Empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software.

Rust 1.95.0 has been released! 🌈 🦀✨

This release includes cfg_select!{}, if-let guards in match,
Vec::push_mut, VecDeque::push_{front,back}_mut, std::hint::cold_path, and more!

Check out the blog post for details: blog.rust-lang.org/2026/04/16/R...

Wow. "When AI routinely completes tasks in seconds, the reference point for how long a task should take can shift – and as a consequence, unaided work starts to feel counterfactually more effortful, a process structurally analogous to hedonic adaptation..."

arxiv.org/abs/2604.04721

Welcome to the Wasteland: A Thousand Gas Towns Howdy partner, and welcome to the Wasteland!

This is the software equivalent of a William Vollmann novel steve-yegge.medium.com/welcome-to-t...

AI has taught me that I am not a "builder". I write software to learn things and useful tools are just a fortuitous side effect. I have yet to find a way to make "pay me to learn" sound sufficiently agentic.

This morning I was trailmaxxing and also heartratemaxxing.

Hash Tables - Picture Me Coding Some recent articles about research on hash tables made us realize we probably didn't know enough about hash tables, one of the fundamental data structures in the biz.  We talk about the history ...

In our latest episode we go back to basics and discuss hash tables. Turned out we didn't understand them as well as we thought, so we look at their history and some recent interesting developments: www.picturemecoding.com/2222783/epis...

This is cool cacm.acm.org/research/whe...

In spite of how it sounds this was usually a pretty cool outcome (and it typically only happened when people liked something I'd written). It felt like the work was taking flight: it had become independent of me and whatever I'd been thinking about when I wrote it.

I blogged about an aspect of reviewing llm-generated code that seems so offputting: erikaker.com/posts/2026-0...

I'm older than fiber optics but younger than lasers

"A few contributors even act as a proxy between the reviewer and the LLM, copy their reviewer’s question, reply with LLM-generated response. For the love of god, please. I want to emphasize this is incredibly frustrating. This is the top contributing factor to potential burn outs for me."

Scale 23x - Picture Me Coding We give a report of our experiences at the 23rd version of the Southern California Linux Expo (Scale 23x) in Pasadena.  Erik was a volunteer in the network group this year, so we have some behind...

We give our report on @socallinuxexpo.bsky.social 23x, where Erik worked as a volunteer this year. (Note: you might hear my dog whimpering toward the end-- she was fine she just wanted snacks) www.picturemecoding.com/2222783/epis...

Screenshot showing the Climate Shift Index from Climate Central for March 19, 2026. There is a change in likelihood of CSI 5 across nearly the entire Western USA.

Even in a world of extremes, some events still stand out to me. This is one. All-time monthly records are being shattered.

The size of this ridge across the western U.S. is truly striking for March, and we see a very clear climate change connection.

Explore: csi.climatecentral.org/climate-shif...

Cray Customer Service – Memories (1979 to 2014) by Charles Clark Cray Customer Service – Memories (1979 to 2014) a personal memoir by Charles “Charlie” Clark I have seen lots of articles on Cray Supercomputers, their design. development, uses and ins…

There is an excellent writeup by Charles Clark about Cray’s Customer Service division, go check it out here:


cray-history.net/2021/11/04/c...

Arctos Alliance - Open Collective Support the committers powering the world’s open data infrastructure.

Arctos Alliance (arctosalliance.org) is now officially launched!

"If your organization depends on Arrow or Parquet or you’re interested in helping sustain these critical data technologies, we would welcome a conversation about how to get involved."

Hugo, Girl!: Episode 90 - Green Mars: Your Mom's a Mohole This month we read Green Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson, which won the Hugo for best novel in 1994 and definitely meets the technical definition of "a novel." DM: Lori Don't forget we're still running a...

hugogirl.libsyn.com/episode-90-g...

This one took a little extra time. Here's Green Mars!

Talking Murderbot with Amy Salley - Picture Me Coding In this episode we're joined again by Amy Salley, cohost of the Hugo, Girl! podcast, to help us discuss the Murderbot series of books by Martha Wells.  We discuss our favorite characters and plot...

In our latest episode Amy Salley of @hugogirlpodcast.bsky.social returns to help us discuss Murderbot. We discuss the books (up to Network Effect) and how Martha Wells explores topics like AI, consciousness, and neurodivergence. www.picturemecoding.com/2222783/epis...

Making Iceberg Work for Operational Data | Materialize Apache Iceberg was built for batch analytics — but operational data changes continuously. Learn how Materialize streams live, transactionally consistent data into Iceberg without the memory and latenc...

A recent post by @dov.dev about Materialize's new Iceberg sink, and generally about connecting live operational data to analytics stores. Some interesting detail about (overcome) streaming-batch friction, and turning pristine CDC streams into .. Iceberg! materialize.com/blog/making-...

I wrote a tiny vectorized interpreter last night, and .. thought I'd write up a post describing it. Nothing earth shattering here, but if you haven't seen one of these before it could be interesting! Probably easier to read than the J Incunabulum, but also less .. wow.

github.com/frankmcsherr...

Check out my new episode with @gsalmieri.bsky.social on freedom of speech:
elucidations.vercel.app/posts/episod...

My short interview with Leah Hoffman for CACM
cacm.acm.org/opinion...

I started a software research company

notes.eatonphil.com/2026-02-25-i...

Nerds of a Feather 2026 Awards Eligibility Awards season has once again begun. We began by looking at all the works we collectively have in our sights for nominations in our Recomme...

Here's a roundup of many great fan writers to consider for your Hugo nominations!

We're especially excited to see @annmichelleharris.bsky.social, who is eligible for fan writer, short story, and novel!

www.nerds-feather.com/2026/02/nerd...

Book cover of "Designing Data-Intensive Applications, 2nd edition". It has a similar wild boar on the cover as the first edition, but it uses O'Reilly's new cover design, and the boar is now slightly colourised.

The second edition of Designing Data-Intensive Applications, by myself and @chris.blue, is finished and sent off to the printers! Ebooks should be available in the next week, and print books in 3–4 weeks. Sigh of relief. 😅

(BTW, this is a good opportunity to support your favourite local bookshop!)

Building A Distributed SQL Database in 30 Days with AI My journey building HoloStore a distributed key/value store and HoloFusion a distributed SQL DB using AI using the Accord consensus protocol from Cassandra.

kellabyte.substack.com/p/building-a... -- Exactly the kind of thing that shows the power of DataFusion. You can build the database and not (re) build the core query engine

📄 New blog post!

AI will soon write most distributed code.
Distributed code is where our worst bugs —Heisenbugs— live.

The real lever isn’t “test more,” it’s **aim better**: AI should target frameworks where correctness contracts are explicit and checkable.

jhellerstein.github.io/blog/codegen...

I read a lot of @hillelwayne.com and @simonwillison.net . I listen to @seanmcarroll.bsky.social , @geekingoutpod.bsky.social and @hugogirlpodcast.bsky.social. I like signalsandthreads.com but they are not on Bluesky.

J.S. Bach: Goldberg Variations (Live at Carnegie Hall, New York, 2025)

today is Bach day

new Goldberg Variations just dropped: open.spotify.com/album/29g6SU...

11/10

I'm so glad I got to experience writing code as a hobby. Creating things with the primary purpose of bringing yourself joy changes how you view software. Instead of bits and bytes, you start to see the thread and needle.