Where database blog posts get flame-broiled to perfection
Oh, a "beginner's guide to hacking into Turso DB"! Because nothing screams cutting-edge penetration testing like a step-by-step tutorial on... opening an IDE. I suppose next week we'll get "An Expert's Guide to Exploiting VS Code: Mastering the 'Save File' Feature." Honestly, "hacking into" anything that then immediately tells you to "get familiar with the codebase, tooling, and tests" is about as thrilling as "breaking into" your own fridge for a snack. The primary challenge being, you know, remembering where you put the milk.
And Turso DB? Let's just pause for a moment on that name. "Formerly known as Limbo." Limbo. Was it stuck in some kind of purgatorial state, unable to commit or roll back, before it was finally blessed with the slightly less existential dread of "Turso"? It sounds like a brand of industrial-grade toilet cleaner or maybe a discount airline. And of course, it's an "SQLite rewrite in Rust." Because what the world truly needed was another perfectly fine, established technology re-implemented in Rust, purely for the sake of ticking that "modern language" box. It's not revolutionary, folks, it's just... a Tuesday in the dev world. Every other week, some plucky startup declares they've finally solved the database problem by just porting an existing one and adding async to the function names. "Blazing fast," they'll scream! "Unprecedented performance!" And what they really mean is, "we optimized for the demo, and it hasn't crashed yet."
So, this "hacking" guide is going to lead you through... the codebase. And the tooling. And the tests. Which, last I checked, is just called developing software. It’s not "hacking," it's "onboarding." It's less "Ocean's Eleven" and more "HR orientation video with surprisingly loud elevator music." I fully expect the climax of this "hack" to be successfully cloning the repo and maybe, just maybe, running cargo test without an immediate segfault. Pure digital espionage, right there. My prediction? Give it six months. Turso DB will either be rebranded as "QuantumLake" and sold to a massive enterprise conglomerate that promptly shoves it onto a serverless FaaS architecture, or it'll just quietly drift back into the Limbo from whence it came, waiting for the next Rust rewrite to claim its memory.
Oh, "Highlights from Launch Week 15." My God, are we still doing this? Fifteen? You'd think after the first five, they'd have either innovated themselves out of a job or realized the well of genuinely revolutionary ideas ran dry somewhere around "Launch Week 3: We Added a Dark Mode." But no, here we are, dutifully witnessing the corporate equivalent of an annual talent show that’s somehow been stretched into a fortnightly ritual for the past few years.
I can already see the "highlights." Probably some groundbreaking new widget that "synergizes" with an existing, barely-used feature to "unlock unprecedented value" for an "evolving user journey." I bet they "iteratively improved" the "robustness" of some "mission-critical backend process" which translates to "we finally fixed that bug from last year, but now it's a feature." And let's not forget the ever-present "enhanced user experience," which inevitably means they moved a button, changed a font, and called it a "paradigm shift" in interaction design.
The sheer audacity of having fifteen of these "launch weeks" implies either an incredibly fertile ground of innovation that no other tech company seems to possess, or a relentless, almost desperate need to justify the payroll of an ever-expanding product management team. I'm leaning heavily towards the latter. It's less about the actual impact and more about the performative act of "shipping," of generating enough blog post content to make the investors feel warm and fuzzy about the "velocity" and "agility."
I’m picturing the internal Slack channels, the frantic late-night pushes, all for a "highlight" that, in reality, will barely register a blip on user engagement metrics, let alone "disrupt" anything other than maybe someone's coffee break. The real highlight for anyone outside this company is probably finding out which obscure, barely functional aspect of their product got a new coat of marketing paint this time. My prediction? Launch Week 30 will be them announcing a "revolutionary" AI tool that writes the "Highlights from Launch Week" blog posts automatically, thereby closing the loop on this glorious, self-congratulatory charade.
Oh, joy. Another "revolutionary" concept that sounds suspiciously like "let's get a bunch of people to do work for free, really fast, and then give them a certificate of participation." "Build an Open Source Project over 10 days. 5 prize categories." Right. Because the truly great, enduring open source projects – the ones that power the internet, the ones with actual communities and maintainers who've poured years of their lives into them – they just spontaneously appear fully formed after a frenetic week and a half, don't they?
Ten days to build an open source project? That's not a project, folks; that's barely enough time to settle on a project name that hasn't already been taken by some abandoned npm package from 2017. What are we expecting here? The next Linux kernel? A groundbreaking new database? Or more likely, a glorified to-do list app with a blockchain backend, a sprinkle of AI, and a "cutting-edge" UI that looks like it was designed by a committee of caffeine-addled interns? This isn't about fostering genuine contribution; it's about gamifying rapid-fire production for a quick marketing splash. The "open source" part is just window dressing, giving it that warm, fuzzy, community-driven veneer while, in reality, it's just a hackathon with slightly longer hours.
And "5 prize categories"? Ah, the pièce de résistance! Because true innovation and sustainable community building are best incentivized by... what, exactly? Bragging rights? A year's supply of ramen? The coveted "Most Likely to Be Forked and Then Immediately Forgotten" award? It turns the collaborative, often thankless, grind of genuine open source work into a competitive sprint for a trinket. The goal isn't robust, maintainable code; it's shiny, demonstrable output by Day 9, perfect for a presentation slide on Day 10. You just know one of those categories is "Most Disruptive" or "Best Use of [Trendy Tech Buzzword]."
Mark my words: this will result in a spectacular graveyard of hastily-committed code, broken builds, and a whole lot of developers realizing they've just spent ten days of their lives creating... well, another my-awesome-project-v2-final that no one will ever look at again. But hey, at least someone will get a branded water bottle out of it. And by "project," they clearly mean "a GitHub repo with a slightly less embarrassing README than average."
Oh, this is just marvelous. I’ve just finished my first coffee of the morning, and here lands a press release so beautifully crafted, so rich with ambition, it almost makes me forget the smell of burning cash that usually accompanies these announcements. A partnership, you say? Between Elastic and Microsoft? It’s always heartwarming to see two giants holding hands, skipping together toward our bank account.
The "integration with the Azure AI Foundry Model Catalog" is a particularly nice touch. I love the word integration. It has such a simple, elegant sound. It completely masks the reality, which I assume involves a six-month, seven-figure consulting engagement to make the two systems acknowledge each other’s existence without throwing a catastrophic error. But the promise of it is just lovely.
Let’s talk about "harnessing a full range of AI capabilities." I am all for harnessing things. We harnessed the budget last quarter after the marketing team discovered "experiential offsites." But what specific "capabilities" are we talking about here? The capability to generate TPS reports in the style of Shakespeare? The capability for an AI to tell me, with 98% confidence, that we need to spend more money on the cloud?
And the security angle! Chef's kiss. To "remain agile and robust against cyber threats." These are my two favorite words. Agile is vendor-speak for “we will change the pricing model every six months,” and robust means “it’s so complicated, you’ll have to pay our certified professionals $500 an hour to even look at it.”
But I'm a numbers person. It's a curse. So, I couldn't help but do a little back-of-the-napkin math on what this "partnership" might actually cost us. Let's call it the "Total Cost of Partnership," or TCOP.
So, the "delightful" $300,000 opportunity to become more agile and robust is actually a $1,250,000 Year-One investment. And for what? So our security alerts can be delivered with the empathetic tone of a therapy chatbot? The ROI on that is… what, exactly? Are we going to monetize the 'enhanced robustness'?
...enhances our security frameworks to remain agile and robust against cyber threats.
That sentence alone will cost this company more than my first house. If we sign this, our Q3 earnings call will be replaced by a bake sale to keep the lights on.
Ah, well. It’s a beautiful vision. A world where partnerships are seamless, integrations are effortless, and AI magically solves all our problems without presenting us with a bill that could destabilize a small nation's economy. I suppose I should get another coffee. I see a calendar invite just popped up from another database vendor. They’re promising a "revolutionary, paradigm-shifting synergy."
I'm sure it'll be great.
Alright, gather 'round, folks, and behold the latest in groundbreaking revelations: "Caching is fast!" Truly, the profound wisdom emanating from this piece is akin to discovering that water is wet, or that deadlines are, in fact, approaching. I mean, here I thought my computer was powered by pure, unadulterated hope and the occasional ritual sacrifice to the silicon gods, but no, it's caches! The "most elegant, powerful, and pervasive innovation in computing," no less. Frankly, I'm surprised they didn't slap a patent on the mere concept of "keeping frequently used stuff handy."
We kick off with a dizzying dive into the concept of... data. Yes, data! The stuff that lives on "servers" or "iCloud." Who knew? And then, the grand reveal: trade-offs! Between capacity, speed, cost, and durability. Hold the phone, an engineer has to balance competing priorities? My deepest apologies, I always assumed they just had infinite budgets and magic pixie dust. And the solution to this insurmountable challenge? Combine slow, cheap storage with fast, expensive storage. Gasp. This "core principle of caching" is so revolutionary, I'm surprised it hasn't completely reshaped civilization. It's like discovering that buying a small, fast car for quick errands and a large, slow truck for hauling makes sense. Truly, they've cracked the code on human behavior.
And then we get to the "hit rate." Oh, the hit rate! The percentage of time we get cache hits. Because before this article, engineers were just flailing around, hoping for the best. Now, armed with the sacred formula (cache_hits / total_requests) x 100, we can finally optimize! It’s all about these "trade-offs," remember? A small cache with random requests leads to a low hit rate. A cache nearly the size of your data gives you a high hit rate. It's almost as if storing more things allows you to find more things. Who knew? This interactive tour is just dripping with insights I could've learned from a mid-90s PC magazine.
Next, we zoom in on "Your computer," specifically RAM. The brain of the computer needs memory to work off of. And here I thought it just ran on pure spite and caffeine. And the hard drive remembers things even when the computer is off! What sorcery is this? Then they drop the bombshell about L1, L2, and L3 caches. Faster data lookup means more cost or size limitations. My word, the closer something is, the faster it is to get to? This is like a toddler discovering the difference between sprinting to the fridge and trekking to the grocery store. "It's all tradeoffs!" They practically scream, like they've just single-handedly disproved perpetual motion.
But wait, there's more! We get "Temporal Locality." Because, shocking news, people look at recent tweets on X.com more than ones from two years ago. I'm profoundly grateful for the deep analytical dive into Karpathy's "banger" tweet to prove this bleeding-edge concept. And yes, "older posts can load more slowly." Who could have possibly predicted that? It's almost as if you shouldn't cache things that are "rarely needed." Mind-blowing. And then "Spatial Locality" – when you look at one photo, you might look at the next one! So, if you load photo 1, you "prefetch" photos 2 and 3. This is less "optimization technique" and more "observing how a human browses a photo album and then doing the obvious thing." I guess next they'll tell us about "Alphabetical Locality" for dictionary lookups.
And let's not forget "Geospatial" – because, believe it or not, we live on a "big spinning rock." And, gasp, "physics" limits data movement! Engineers "frequently use Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) to help." You mean, put the data closer to the user? What a wild, untamed idea that truly pushes the boundaries of distributed systems. And the "simple visualization" confirms that, yes, data travels faster over shorter distances. Truly revolutionary.
Then, when the cache is full, we need "Replacement policies." FIFO – first in, first out. Like a line at the DMV. Simple, but "not optimal." Shocking. Then LRU – Least Recently Used. The "industry standard," because, you know, it's sensible to get rid of stuff you haven't touched in ages. And then, for the truly cutting-edge, "Time-Aware LRU," where you give elements a "timer." Because, you might want to automatically evict social network posts after 48 hours. Or weather info after a new day. Or email after a week. These are such specific, groundbreaking use cases, I'm frankly just astounded by the sheer ingenuity. Who knew that combining "least recently used" with "just delete it after a bit" could be so powerful?
Finally, we find out that even databases, those ancient, venerable data behemoths like Postgres and MySQL, use caching! Postgres with its shared_buffers and the OS filesystem cache. MySQL with its buffer pool. And they have to deal with "ACID semantics and database transactions," which, apparently, makes them "more complex than a 'regular' cache." Oh, you mean a system designed for guaranteed consistency across concurrent operations might have a slightly trickier caching problem than your web browser's temporary file storage? Unbelievable.
The conclusion then has the audacity to claim this "barely scratches the surface" after rehashing basic computer science concepts from the 80s. They avoided handling writes, consistency issues, sharded caches, Redis, Memcached... all the things that actually are complex and interesting in modern distributed caching. But no, they stuck to explaining why RAM is faster than a hard drive. My hope is that this "good overview and appreciation for caching" helps someone land a job as a senior engineer, confidently stating that "the CPU is the brain." I predict their next article will reveal that storing data on magnetic tape is slower than flash storage. The industry will be truly awestruck.
Alright, gather ‘round, folks, because I’ve just stumbled upon the digital equivalent of a five-alarm fire… in a very, very specific broom closet. Apparently, we’ve reached peak tech panic, and it’s not just about Skynet taking over missile silos; it’s about a new, terrifying threat to the fabric of online society: Large Language Models infiltrating niche Mastodon servers for queer leatherfolk. Oh, the humanity! Who knew the apocalypse would arrive draped in a faux-leather jacket, peddling market research reports?
Our intrepid author here, a digital frontiersman navigating the treacherous waters of his six-hundred-strong BDSM-themed Fediverse instance, has clearly faced down the very maw of machine learning. See, they had this bulletproof, revolutionary "application process"—a whole sentence or two about yourself. Truly, a high bar for entry. Before this ingenious gatekeeping, they were, get this, "flooded with signups from straight, vanilla people." Imagine the horror! The sheer awkwardness of a basic human being accidentally wandering into a digital dungeon. Thank goodness for that groundbreaking two-sentence questionnaire, which also, apparently, ensured applicants were "willing and able to read text." Because, you know, literacy is usually a secondary concern for anyone trying to join an online community.
But then, the unthinkable happened. An application arrives, "LLM-flavored," with a "soap-sheen" to its prose. Now, any normal person might just think, "Hey, maybe some people just write like that." But not our author! No, this is clearly the harbinger of doom. They approved the account, naturally, because even the most discerning eye can be fooled by the subtle AI aroma. And lo and behold, it started posting… spam. Oh, the shocking twist! A corporate entity, "Market Research Future," using AI to… promote their services. Who could’ve ever predicted such a fiendish plot?
The author even called them! Can you imagine the poor marketing rep on the other end, trying to explain why their latest report on battery technology ended up on a forum discussing power exchange dynamics? "Sometimes stigma works in your favor," indeed. I bet that's going straight into their next quarterly earnings call. "Q3 highlights: Successfully leveraged niche sexual communities for unexpected brand awareness, caller was remarkably fun."
And it’s not just one server, mind you. This is an organized, multi-pronged "attack." From "a bear into market research on interior design trends" to an "HCI geek" (Human-Computer Interaction, for those of you who haven't yet achieved peak jargon enlightenment), these bots are everywhere. Our author details how these "wildly sophisticated attacks" (that use the same username, link to the same domain, and originate from the same IP range… brilliant!) are simultaneously "remarkably naive." It’s Schrodinger's spambot, both a genius super-AI and a babbling idiot, all at once!
But the real heart-wrencher, the existential dread that keeps our author up at night, is the chilling realization that soon, it will be "essentially impossible for human moderators to reliably distinguish between an autistic rope bunny (hi) whose special interest is battery technology, and an LLM spambot which posts about how much they love to be tied up, and also new trends in battery chemistry." This, my friends, is the true crisis of our age: the indistinguishability of niche fetishists and AI spam. Forget deepfakes and misinformation; the collapse of civilization will be heralded by a bot asking about the best lube for a new automotive battery.
Our author, grappling with this impending digital apocalypse, muses on solutions. High-contact interviews (because faking a job interview with AI is one thing, but a Mastodon application? Unthinkable!), cryptographic webs-of-trust (last seen failing gloriously in the GPG key-signing parties of the 90s), or, my personal favorite, simply waiting for small forums to become "unprofitable" for attackers. Yes, because spammers are famously known for their rigorous ROI calculations on everything from penis enlargement pills to market research reports on queer leather communities.
The conclusion? "Forums like woof.group will collapse." The only safe haven is "in-person networks." Bars, clubs, hosting parties. Because, obviously, no sophisticated AI could ever learn to infiltrate a physical space. Yet. Give them five or ten years, they’ll probably be showing up at your local leather bar, generating perfect "authentic" banter about their new electro-plug while subtly dropping links to market trends in synthetic rubber.
Frankly, I think they’re all just overthinking it. My prediction? Within a year, these LLM spambots will have evolved past crude link-dropping. They'll just start arguing endlessly with each other about obscure sub-genres of kink, generating their own internal drama and exhausting themselves into obsolescence. The human moderators will finally be free, left only with the haunting echoes of AI-generated discussions about the proper voltage for a consensual, yet informative, market analysis.
Alright, gather 'round, folks, because PlanetScale has apparently cracked the code on database reliability! And by "cracked the code," I mean they've eloquently restated principles that have been foundational to any competent distributed system for the past two decades. You heard it here first: "PlanetScale is fast and reliable!" Truly groundbreaking stuff, I tell ya. Who knew a database company would aspire to that? My mind is simply blown.
They kick off by telling us their "shared nothing architecture" makes them the "best in the cloud." Because, you know, no one else has ever thought to use local storage. It's a miracle! Then they pivot to reliability, promising "principles, processes, and architectures that are easy to understand, but require painstaking work to do well." Ah, the classic corporate paradox: it's simple, but we're brilliant for doing it. Pick a lane, chief.
Then, brace yourselves, because they reveal their "principles," which, they admit, "are neither new nor radical. You may find them obvious." They're not wrong! They've basically pulled out a textbook on distributed systems circa 2005 and highlighted "Isolation," "Redundancy," and "Static Stability." Wow. Next, they'll be telling us about data integrity and ACID properties like they just invented the wheel. My favorite part is "Static stability: When something fails, continue operating with the last known good state." So, when your database is actively failing, it… tries to keep working? What revolutionary concept is this?! Did they stumble upon this by accident, perhaps after a particularly vigorous game of Jenga with their servers?
Their "Architecture" section is equally thrilling, introducing the "Control plane" (the admin stuff) and the "Data plane" (the actual database stuff). More mind-bending jargon for basic components. The "Data plane" is "extremely critical" and has "extremely few dependences." So critical, in fact, they had to say it twice. Like a child trying to convince you their imaginary friend is really real.
But the real gem, the absolute crown jewel of their "Processes," is the wonderfully alarming "Always be Failing Over." Let me repeat that: "Always be Failing Over." They "exercise this ability every week on every customer database." Let that sink in. They're intentionally failing your databases every single week just to prove they can fix them. It's like a mechanic who regularly punctures your tires just to show off how fast they can change a flat. And they claim "Query buffering minimizes or eliminates disruption." So, not eliminates then? Just "minimizes or eliminates." Good to know my business-critical application might just experience "some" disruption during their weekly reliability charade. Synchronous replication? Progressive delivery? These are standard practices, not Nobel-Prize-winning innovations. They’re just... how you run a competent cloud service.
And finally, the "Failure modes." They proudly announce that "Non-query-path failures" don't impact customer queries. Because, you know, a well-designed system's control plane shouldn't take down the data plane. Who knew decoupling was a thing?! And for "Cloud provider failures," their solution is... wait for it... to fail over to a healthy instance or zone. Shocking! Who knew redundancy would protect you from failures? And the truly heartwarming admission: "PlanetScale-induced failures." They say a bug "rarely impacts more than 1-2 customers." Oh, so it does impact customers? Just a couple? And infrastructure changes "very rarely" have a bigger impact. "Very rarely." That's the kind of confidence that makes me want to immediately migrate all my data.
Honestly, after this breathtaking exposé of fundamental engineering principles rebranded as revolutionary insights, I fully expect their next announcement to be "PlanetScale: We Plug Our Servers Into Walls! A Groundbreaking Approach to Power Management!" Don't worry, it'll be "extremely critical" and have "extremely few dependencies." You can count on it. Or, you know, "very rarely" count on it.
Alright, folks, buckle up, because we're about to delve into the truly groundbreaking, earth-shattering revelations coming out of the CedarDB camp. Prepare yourselves, because they're on the bleeding edge of... figuring out how to search documentation. Yes, you heard that right. Forget quantum computing, forget cold fusion, CedarDB is here to tackle the truly pressing issue of finding things. My mind, it's positively boggled by the sheer audacity of it all.
The author, with the gravitas of a philosopher contemplating the meaning of existence, opens by declaring, "Not so long ago, I shared that I have an interest in finding things." Oh, do tell! Who among us hasn't, at some point, felt this inexplicable urge to locate information? I'm sure entire millennia of human endeavor, from the Library of Alexandria to the very inception of Google, have merely been preparatory exercises for this profound self-discovery. And then, the true intellectual leap: "Another common requirement is... finding the set of documents that best answers the question." Stop. Just stop. Are we talking about... a search engine? Because last I checked, the world already has a few of those. They've been quietly performing this 'common requirement' for, well, decades. But apparently, CedarDB is about to redefine the paradigm.
They tantalize us with visions of "Indian restaurants within a specified geographic area," implying this grand, universal search capability, this majestic understanding of the informational cosmos. But don't get too excited, plebs, because this grand vision immediately snaps back to earth with the humble declaration that this article, this magnificent intellectual endeavor, will "restrict the focus to the problem of finding the most relevant documents within some collection, where that collection just happens to be the CedarDB documentation." Ah, of course. From the cosmic dance of information retrieval to the riveting saga of their own user manual. Peak self-relevance, truly.
And then, the ultimate validation of their genius: "my query 'Does the CedarDB ‘asof join’ use an index?' should return a helpful response, while the query 'Does pickled watermelon belong on a taco?' should ideally return an empty result." Bravo! They've cracked it! The elusive 'relevant vs. irrelevant' problem, solved with the brilliance of distinguishing between a technical term from their own product and a culinary abomination. I mean, the sheer intellectual horsepower required to deduce that questions about 'asof joins' should yield results from a database called 'CedarDB,' while random taco toppings should not, is truly humbling. I half expect them to announce a Nobel Prize for demonstrating that water is wet, but only when it relates to their specific brand of bottled water.
Honestly, the profoundness of this discovery – that search engines should return relevant results for relevant queries – leaves me breathless. I eagerly await their next epoch-making blog post, perhaps on the revolutionary technique of 'scrolling down a webpage' or the astonishing utility of 'clicking on a hyperlink.' My prediction? Their 'cutting-edge' documentation search will inevitably conflate 'asof join' with 'asynchronous jellyfish' within six months, because that's just how these 'revolutionary' in-house tools always end up. Better stick to DuckDuckGo, folks. It understands pickled watermelon is a travesty without needing a dedicated project team.
Alright, gather 'round, folks, because I've just stumbled upon a groundbreaking, earth-shattering revelation from the front lines of… blog comment moderation. Apparently, Large Language Models – yes, those things, the ones that have been churning out poetry, code, and entire mediocre novels for a while now – are also capable of generating… spam. I know, I know, try to contain your shock. It’s almost as if the internet, a veritable cesspool of human ingenuity and digital sludge, has found yet another way to be annoying. Who could possibly have foreseen such a monumental shift in the "equilibria" of spam production?
Our esteemed expert, who's been battling the digital muck since the ancient year of 2004 – truly a veteran of the spam wars, having seen everything from Viagra emails to IRC channel chaos – seems utterly flummoxed by this development. He’s wasted more time, you see, thanks to these AI overlords. My heart bleeds. Because before 2023, spam was just… polite. It respected boundaries. It certainly didn't employ "specific, plausible remarks" about content before shilling some dubious link. No, back then, the spam merely existed, a benign, easily-filtered nuisance. The idea that a machine could fabricate a relatable personal experience like "Walking down a sidewalk lined with vibrant flowers reminds me of playing the [redacted] slope game" – a masterpiece of organic connection, truly – well, that's just a bridge too far. The audacity!
And don't even get me started on the "macro photography" comment. You mean to tell me a bot can now simulate the joy of trying to get a clear shot of a red flower before recommending "Snow Rider 3D"? The horror! It's almost indistinguishable from the perfectly nuanced, deeply insightful comments we usually see, like "Great post!" or "Nice." This alleged "abrupt shift in grammar, diction, and specificity" where an LLM-generated philosophical critique of Haskell gives way to "I'm James Maicle, working at Cryptoairhub" and a blatant plea to visit their crypto blog? Oh, the subtle deception! It’s practically a Turing test for the discerning spam filter, or, as it turns out, for the human who wrote this post.
Then we veer into the truly tragic territory of Hacker News bots. Imagine, an LLM summarizing an article, and it's "utterly, laughably wrong." Not just wrong, mind you, but laughably wrong! This isn’t about spreading misinformation; it’s about insulting the intellectual integrity of the original content. How dare a bot not perfectly grasp the nuanced difference between "outdated data" and "Long Fork" anomalies? The sheer disrespect! It's a "misinformation slurry," apparently, and our brave moderator is drowning in it.
The lament continues: "The cost falls on me and other moderators." Yes, because before LLMs, content moderation was a leisurely stroll through a field of daisies, not a Sisyphean struggle against the unending tide of internet garbage. Now, the burden of sifting "awkward but sincere human" from "automated attack" – a truly unique modern challenge, never before encountered – has become unbearable. And the "vague voice messages" from strangers with "uncanny speech patterns" just asking to "catch up" that would, prior to 2023, be interpreted as "a sign of psychosis"? My dear friend, I think the line between "online scam" and "real-life psychosis" has been blurring for a good deal longer than a year.
The grand finale is a terrifying vision of LLMs generating "personae, correspondence, even months-long relationships" before deploying for commercial or political purposes. Because, obviously, con artists, propaganda machines, and catfishers waited for OpenAI to drop their latest model before they considered manipulating people online. And Mastodon, bless its quirky, niche heart, is only safe because it's "not big enough to be lucrative." But fear not, the "economics are shifting"! Soon, even obscure ecological niches will be worth filling. What a dramatic, sleepless-night-inducing thought.
Honestly, the sheer audacity of this entire piece, pretending that a tool that generates text would somehow not be used by spammers, is almost endearing. It’s like discovering that a shovel can be used to dig holes, and then writing a blog post about how shovels are single-handedly destroying the landscaping industry's "multiple equilibria." Look, here's my hot take for 2024: spam will continue to exist. It will get more sophisticated, then people will adapt their filters, and then spammers will get even more sophisticated. Rinse, repeat. And the next time some new tech hits the scene, you can bet your last Bitcoin that someone will write a breathless article declaring it the sole reason why spam is suddenly, inexplicably, making their life harder. Now, if you'll excuse me, I think my smart fridge just tried to sell me extended warranty coverage for its ice maker, and it sounded exactly like my long-lost aunt. Probably an LLM.
Well, well, well. Another brave manifesto from the frontiers of database development. I just poured myself a lukewarm coffee in a branded mug I definitely didn't steal from a former employer and settled in to read this... passionate proclamation of Postgres purity. And I must say, it’s a masterpiece.
It takes real courage to stand up and declare your love for PostgreSQL. It’s so brave, so contrarian. Who else is doing that? Oh, right, the forty other companies you mentioned. But your love is clearly different. It's the kind of deep, abiding love that says, "I adore everything about you, which is why I've decided to replace your entire personality and central nervous system with something I cooked up in my garage over a long weekend."
I have to applaud the commitment to building a database from scratch. That’s a term that always fills me with immense confidence. It's a wonderful euphemism for "we read the first half of the Raft paper, skipped the hard parts of ACID, and decided that error handling is a problem for the 2.0 release." It’s the kind of bold, blue-sky thinking that can only come from a product manager who thinks "five nines" is a winning poker hand.
And the pursuit of PostgreSQL compatibility? Chef's kiss. It’s a beautifully ambitious goal, a North Star to guide the engineering team. I remember those roadmap meetings well.
...we made sure to build CedarDB to be compatible with PostgreSQL.
You "made sure." I can practically hear the weary sigh of the lead engineer who was told that, yes, you do have to perfectly replicate all 30 years of features, quirks, and undocumented behaviors of pg_catalog, but you have to do it by next quarter. And no, you can't have more headcount.
This "compatibility" is always a fun little adventure. It's like a meticulously crafted movie set. From the front, it looks exactly like a bustling 19th-century city. But walk behind the facades and you’ll find it’s all just plywood, two-by-fours, and a stressed-out crew member frantically trying to stop the whole thing from collapsing in a light breeze. The compatibility usually works great, until you try to do something crazy like:
JOIN.pg_stat_statements.EXPLAIN plan and expect it to reflect reality.READ COMMITTED with a trench coat and a fake mustache.It’s a truly commendable marketing move, though. You get to ride the coattails of a beloved, battle-hardened brand while papering over the countless compatibility caveats and performance pitfalls that litter your codebase like forgotten TODO comments. It’s a classic case of "close enough for the demo, but not for production."
Honestly, bravo, CedarDB. A truly masterful piece of prose that perfectly captures the current state of our industry: a relentless race to reinvent the wheel, but this time, make it square, paint it green, and call it Postgres-compatible.
It's just... so tiring. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go read the actual Postgres docs to remember what a real database looks like.