EdgeDB is now Gel and Postgres is the future

Check out the discussion of this post on Hacker News. We have news! EdgeDB is rebranding as Gel, more on that below. Let’s talk about something else first. Something fascinating has been happening recently. PostgreSQL seems to be quietly eating the database world. It’s not just topping the charts, its adoption momentum is accelerating. What’s […]
Emergent Misalignment: Narrow finetuning can produce broadly misaligned LLMs [pdf]
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Depending in Common Lisp – Using the CLOS dependent maintenance protocol (2022)
Posted on August 26th, 2022. A while ago I was working on a Common Lisp library that makes use of the Metaobject Protocol. I ran into a few edge cases around dependencies between classes and it took a while for me to figure out how to solve them, so I wanted to write down what […]
Framework’s first desktop is a strange–but unique–mini ITX gaming PC

In Framework’s first-party case, the PC starts at $1,099, which gets you a Ryzen AI Max 385 (that’s an 8-core CPU and 32 GPU cores) and 32GB of RAM. A fully loaded 128GB with a Ryzen AI Max+ 395 configuration (16 CPU cores, 40 GPU cores) will run you $1,999. There’s also an in-between build […]
I Went to SQL Injection Court

Should public bodies in Illinois, like cities and school districts and sheriff’s departments, be allowed to hide information from Freedom of Information requests by keeping them in databases? That question is before the 104th Illinois General Assembly, thanks to a bill sponsored by Donald P. DeWitte, elected state senator by the wise citizens of Batavia […]
Low Overhead Allocation Sampling with VMProf in PyPy’s GC
Introduction¶ There are many time-based statistical profilers around (like VMProf or py-spy just to name a few). They allow the user to pick a trade-off between profiling precision and runtime overhead. On the other hand there are memory profilers such as memray. They can be handy for finding leaks or for discovering functions that allocate […]
The XB-70 (2019)

My Dad and the Cold War On the occasion of the public unveiling of the XB-70 Valkyrie, brigadier general Fred Ascani stood at his podium and began addressing the crowd at North American Aviation’s plant no. 42 in Palmdale, California. General Ascani was the Air Force’s program director for the project and knew as much […]
The vinyl-carver sparking a craze for cutting records at home

If you want to buy a bespoke, brand-new machine to cut your own vinyl records at home, there seems to be just one man who can help you. Ulrich Sourisseau’s workshop is in a disused railway station in a remote part of the Black Forest in Germany, and he is in extremely high demand. He’s […]
Hard problems that reduce to document ranking

There are two claims I’d like to make: LLMs can be used effectively for listwise document ranking. Some complex problems can (surprisingly) be solved by transforming them into document ranking problems. I’ve primarily explored both of these claims in the context of using patch diffing to locate N-day vulnerabilities—a sufficiently domain-specific problem that can be […]
Maestro – Next Generation Mobile UI Automation

Maestro is the simplest and most effective UI testing framework for Mobile and Web. Why Maestro? Maestro is built on learnings from its predecessors (Appium, Espresso, UIAutomator, XCTest) Built-in tolerance to flakiness. UI elements will not always be where you expect them, screen tap will not always go through, etc. Maestro embraces the instability of […]