Joining databases across teams without copying data or running servers
March 2026 When two teams need to combine data, the usual answer is infrastructure: an ETL pipeline, an API, a message bus. Each adds latency, maintenance burden, and a new failure mode. The data moves because the systems can’t share it in place. There’s a simpler model. If your database is an immutable value in […]
Apple discontinues the Mac Pro
It’s the end of an era: Apple has confirmed to 9to5Mac that the Mac Pro is being discontinued. It has been removed from Apple’s website as of Thursday afternoon. The “buy” page on Apple’s website for the Mac Pro now redirects to the Mac’s homepage, where all references have been removed. Apple has also confirmed […]
New York City hospitals drop Palantir as controversial AI firm expands in UK
New York City’s public hospital system announced that it would not be renewing its contract with Palantir as controversy mounts in the UK over the data analytics and AI firm’s government contract. The president of the US’ largest municipal public healthcare system, Dr Mitchell Katz, testified last week before the New York city council that […]
We haven’t seen the worst of what gambling and prediction markets will do
Here are three stories about the state of gambling in America. Baseball In November 2025, two pitchers for the Cleveland Guardians, Emmanuel Clase and Luis Ortiz, were charged in a conspiracy for “rigging pitches.” Frankly, I had never heard of rigged pitches before, but the federal indictment describes a scheme so simple that it’s a […]
CERN to host Europe’s flagship open access publishing platform
Representation of the multidisciplinary nature of the ORE platform (Image: Santa Fe) In an important step for open science, CERN has been selected to host a new phase of Open Research Europe (ORE), an initiative supported by the European Commission and a new funding consortium of European national funding agencies and research organisations. Aligned with […]
Chroma Context-1: Training a Self-Editing Search Agent
Using search systems in conjunction with a large language model (LLM) is a common paradigm for enabling language models to access data beyond their training corpus. This approach, broadly known as retrieval-augmented-generation (RAG), has traditionally relied on single-stage retrieval pipelines composed of vector search, lexical search, or regular expression matching, optionally followed by a learned […]
Show HN: Turbolite – a SQLite VFS serving sub-250ms cold JOIN queries from S3
turbolite is a SQLite VFS in Rust that serves point lookups and joins directly from S3 with sub-250ms cold latency. It also offers page-level compression (zstd) and encryption (AES-256) for efficiency and security at rests, which can be used separately from S3. turbolite is experimental. It is new and contains bugs. It may corrupt your […]
John Bradley, author of xv, has passed away
John Bradley, the longtime member of this community who was the founder, producer, and lead guitarist of Booster Patrol, died on March 20. He was 61. I couldn’t think of a better way to pay tribute to the man who was both a bandmate and a friend than to write a song for him in […]
Building FireStriker: Making Civic Tech Free
My wife is the politically active one in our house. She’s the person who shows up: rallies, election day volunteering, local organization meetings, city council sessions. She does the work. I’m a software engineer (she is too, but she’s more politically active). I build things for other people during the day, and until recently, that […]
Siclair Microvision (1977)
Sinclairbs Microvision. Sinclair say the final assembly ’requires only the connection of four printed circuit boards, insertion and connection of the tube, and housing the whole in a three-piece black steel case.’ The circuit uses 300 transistors. The heater needs 15s to warm up as a contribution to its low power consumption. After years of […]