It's 2026, Just Use Postgres

476 points | 289 comments

I recently started digging into databases for the first time since college, and from a novice's perspective, postgres is absolutely magical. You can throw in 10M+ rows across twenty columns, spread over five tables, add some indices, and get sub-100ms queries for virtually anything you want. If something doesn't work, you just ask it for an analysis and immediately know what index to add or how to fix your query. It blows my mind. Modern databases are miracles. — vagab0nd

LinkedIn checks for 2953 browser extensions

381 points | 185 comments

Looks like Firefox is immune.

This works by looking for web accessible resources that are provided by the extensions. For Chrome, these are are available in a webpage via the URL chrome-extension://[PACKAGE ID]/[PATH] https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/reference/manif...

On Firefox, web accessible resources are available at "moz-extension://<extension-UUID>/myfile.png" <extension-UUID> is not your extension's ID. This ID is randomly generated for every browser instance. This prevents websites from fingerprinting a browser by examining the extensions it has installed. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/Web... — cbsks

We tasked Opus 4.6 using agent teams to build a C Compiler

501 points | 466 comments

I spent a good part of my career (nearly a decade) at Google working on getting Clang to build the linux kernel. https://clangbuiltlinux.github.io/

This LLM did it in (checks notes):

> Over nearly 2,000 Claude Code sessions and $20,000 in API costs

It may build, but does it boot (was also a significant and distinct next milestone)? (Also, will it blend?). Looks like yes!

> The 100,000-line compiler can build a bootable Linux 6.9 on x86, ARM, and RISC-V.

The next milestone is:

Is the generated code correct? The jury is still out on that one for production compilers. And then you have performance of generated code.

> The generated code is not very efficient. Even with all optimizations enabled, it outputs less efficient code than GCC with all optimizations disabled.

Still a really cool project! — ndesaulniers

My AI Adoption Journey

539 points | 173 comments

This is such a lovely balanced thoughtful refreshingly hype-free post to read. 2025 really was the year when things shifted and many first-rate developers (often previously AI skeptics, as Mitchell was) found the tools had actually got good enough that they could incorporate AI agents into their workflows.

It's a shame that AI coding tools have become such a polarizing issue among developers. I understand the reasons, but I wish there had been a smoother path to this future. The early LLMs like GPT-3 could sort of code enough for it to look like there was a lot of potential, and so there was a lot of hype to drum up investment and a lot of promises made that weren't really viable with the tech as it was then. This created a large number of AI skeptics (of whom I was one, for a while) and a whole bunch of cynicism and suspicion and resistance amongst a large swathe of developers. But could it have been different? It seems a lot of transformative new tech is fated to evolve this way. Early aircraft were extremely unreliable and dangerous and not yet worthy of the promises being made about them, but eventually with enough evolution and lessons learned we got the Douglas DC-3, and then in the end the 747.

If you're a developer who still doesn't believe that AI tools are useful, I would recommend you go read Mitchell's post, and give Claude Code a trial run like he did. Try and forget about the annoying hype and the vibe-coding influencers and the noise and just treat it like any new tool you might put through its paces. There are many important conversations about AI to be had, it has plenty of downsides, but a proper discussion begins with close engagement with the tools. — libraryofbabel

Flock CEO calls Deflock a “terrorist organization” (2025) [video]

600 points | 411 comments

Mountain View recently turned off their Flock installs after they discovered Flock had enabled data sharing without notice and other agencies were searching through MV data.

https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/privacy/2026/02/flock-came... > A separate “statewide lookup” feature had also been active on 29 of the city’s 30 cameras since the initial installation, running for 17 straight months until Mountain View found and disabled it on January 5. Through that tool, more than 250 agencies that had never signed any data agreement with Mountain View ran an estimated 600,000 searches over a single year, according to local paper the Mountain View Voice, which first uncovered the issue after filing a public records request.

A different town (Staunton, VA) also turned of their Flock installs after their CEO sent out an email claming:

https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/flock-ceo-goes-... > The attacks aren't new. You've been dealing with this for forever, and we've been dealing with this since our founding, from the same activist groups who want to defund the police, weaken public safety, and normalize lawlessness. Now, they're producing YouTube videos with misleading headlines. — ian_d

Ardour 9.0

263 points | 62 comments

Hobbyist game dev here. Getting into audio and music effects has been fun but I constantly feel overwhelmed. I chose Ardour as my DAW (digital audio workstation) and have been excitedly working on learning. I also bought the book “ Writing Interactive Music for Video Games: A Composer's Guide” which has been very helpful at understanding high level vocabulary.

It’s a lot of work. I slightly enjoy it but boooooy is getting into audio and music pretty challenging. It’ll be good if I ever need to know what I’m talking about when working with others… in the future where I can dedicate myself full time to game dev… One day one day…

I don’t really have a point here. If anyone has any resources, tips, or recommendations on this subject let me know.

Edit: Congrats on the new 9.0 release! — sovietmudkipz

GPT-5.3-Codex

1250 points | 473 comments

Whats interesting to me is that these gpt-5.3 and opus-4.6 are diverging philosophically and really in the same way that actual engineers and orgs have diverged philosophically

With Codex (5.3), the framing is an interactive collaborator: you steer it mid-execution, stay in the loop, course-correct as it works.

With Opus 4.6, the emphasis is the opposite: a more autonomous, agentic, thoughtful system that plans deeply, runs longer, and asks less of the human.

that feels like a reflection of a real split in how people think llm-based coding should work...

some want tight human-in-the-loop control and others want to delegate whole chunks of work and review the result

Interested to see if we eventually see models optimize for those two philosophies and 3rd, 4th, 5th philosophies that will emerge in the coming years.

Maybe it will be less about benchmarks and more about different ideas of what working-with-ai means — Rperry2174

Unsealed court documents show teen addiction was big tech's "top priority"

272 points | 153 comments

I feel like there are some key differences between the companies though.

The second one outlined for Meta is:

> Heavily-redacted undated internal document discussing “School Blasts” as a strategy for gaining more high school users (mass notifications sent during the school day).

This sounds a lot like Meta being intentionally disruptive.

The first one outlined for YouTube is:

> Slidedeck on the role that YouTube’s autoplay feature plays in “Tech Addiction” that concludes “Verdict: Autoplay could be potentially disrupting sleep patterns. Disabling or limiting Autoplay during the night could result in sleep savings.”

This sounds like YouTube proactively looking for solutions to a problem. And later on for YouTube:

> Discussing efforts to improve digital well-being, particularly among youth. Identified three concern areas impacting users 13-24 disproportionately: habitual heavy use, late night use, and unintentional use.

This sounds like YouTube taking actual steps to improve the situation. — shaftway

Orchestrate teams of Claude Code sessions

344 points | 193 comments

This is great and all but, who can actually afford to let these agents run on tasks all day long? Is anyone here actually using this or are these rollouts aimed at large companies?

I'm burning through so many tokens on Cursor that I've had to upgrade to Ultra recently - and i'm convinced they're tweaking the burn rate behind the scenes - usage allowance doesn't seem proportional.

Thank god the open source/local LLM world isn't far behind. — bluerooibos

Claude Opus 4.6

1868 points | 780 comments

Just tested the new Opus 4.6 (1M context) on a fun needle-in-a-haystack challenge: finding every spell in all Harry Potter books.

All 7 books come to ~1.75M tokens, so they don't quite fit yet. (At this rate of progress, mid-April should do it ) For now you can fit the first 4 books (~733K tokens).

Results: Opus 4.6 found 49 out of 50 officially documented spells across those 4 books. The only miss was "Slugulus Eructo" (a vomiting spell).

Freaking impressive! — ck_one

European Commission Trials Matrix to Replace Teams

334 points | 169 comments

My team started using Matrix/Element after years of frustration with Teams and Slack. It's far from perfect, but using a simple application with no built-in ads, AI, bloat, crap, etc is wonderful.

I really hope the EU throws some serious money at them to get the bugs worked out, add some minor features, and clean up the UX enough that an "office normie" can onboard as easily as MS.

My dream is that Matrix can do for intra-org comms what Signal did for SMS. — yabones

CIA suddenly stops publishing, removes archives of The World Factbook

363 points | 153 comments

Facts are the enemy.

I remember reading books like 1984 and Fahrenheit 451 as a teen thinking, "Cool story, but the US will never look like that." Oof. — clintfred

CIA to Sunset the World Factbook

361 points | 243 comments

Unfortunate. So many essays that I wrote in school cited The World Facebook as a source.

I'm worried that the death of these easily accessible sources will push more and more pupils into relying on Wikipedia or even worse: AI. Being critical of what you see online and finding facts yourself is crucial to digital literacy. — regenschutz

Top downloaded skill in ClawHub contains malware

316 points | 144 comments

This article is so frustrating to read: not only is it entirely AI-generated, but it also has no details: "I'm not linking", "I'm not pasting".

And I don't doubt there is malware in Clawhub, but the 8/64 in VirusTotal hardly proves that. "The verdict was not ambiguous. It's malware." I had scripts I wrote flagged more than that!

I know 1Password is a "famous" company, but this article alone isn't trustworthy at all. — jampa

Don't rent the cloud, own instead

1132 points | 466 comments

This is an industry we're[0] in. Owning is at one end of the spectrum, with cloud at the other, and a broadly couple of options in-between:

1 - Cloud – This is minimising cap-ex, hiring, and risk, while largely maximising operational costs (its expensive) and cost variability (usage based).

2 - Managed Private Cloud - What we do. Still minimal-to-no cap-ex, hiring, risk, and medium-sized operational cost (around 50% cheaper than AWS et al). We rent or colocate bare metal, manage it for you, handle software deployments, deploy only open-source, etc. Only really makes sense above €$5k/month spend.

3 - Rented Bare Metal – Let someone else handle the hardware financing for you. Still minimal cap-ex, but with greater hiring/skilling and risk. Around 90% cheaper than AWS et al (plus time).

4 - Buy and colocate the hardware yourself – Certainly the cheapest option if you have the skills, scale, cap-ex, and if you plan to run the servers for at least 3-5 years.

A good provider for option 3 is someone like Hetzner. Their internal ROI on server hardware seems to be around the 3 year mark. After which I assume it is either still running with a client, or goes into their server auction system.

Options 3 & 4 generally become more appealing either at scale, or when infrastructure is part of the core business. Option 1 is great for startups who want to spend very little initially, but then grow very quickly. Option 2 is pretty good for SMEs with baseline load, regular-sized business growth, and maybe an overworked DevOps team!

[0] https://lithus.eu, adam@ — adamcharnock

When internal hostnames are leaked to the clown

432 points | 241 comments

I think people are misunderstanding. This isn't CT logs, its a wildcard certificate so it wouldn't leak the "nas" part. It's sentry catching client-side traces and calling home with them, and then picking out the hostname from the request that sent them (ie, "nas.nothing-special.whatever.example.com") and trying to poll it for whatever reason, which is going to a separate server that is catching the wildcard domain and being rejected. — notsylver

ICE seeks industry input on ad tech location data for investigative use

278 points | 337 comments

Since there's quite a few people here working at US companies with access to lots of user data, but they may not have decision making capacity, I just thought I'll link the Simple Sabotage Field Manual, out of context and for no reason at all https://www.cia.gov/static/5c875f3ec660e092cf893f60b4a288df/...

If some data is shared with an external entity, it likely needs to be included in a few usual disclaimers, with at least a few meetings to clarify the exact wording and verification of the legal implications with the right dept and double check how it complies with others data protection rules, and don't forget the audit, and I think this contains a mistake so maybe let's investigate this issue first, and ... — viraptor

OpenClaw is what Apple intelligence should have been

286 points | 251 comments

> This is exactly what Apple Intelligence should have been... They could have shipped an agentic AI that actually automated your computer instead of summarizing your notifications. Imagine if Siri could genuinely file your taxes, respond to emails, or manage your calendar by actually using your apps, not through some brittle API layer that breaks every update.

And this is probably coming, a few years from now. Because remember, Apple doesn't usually invent new products. It takes proven ones and then makes its own much nicer version.

Let other companies figure out the model. Let the industry figure out how to make it secure. Then Apple can integrate it with hardware and software in a way no other company can.

Right now we are still in very, very, very early days. — crazygringo

Why more companies are recognizing the benefits of keeping older employees

272 points | 129 comments

I'm now in my 50s. I tried management but prefer working as an IC. I think I'm good but I know most companies would never hire me. One thing I do now is try to look after all the youngest grads and new joiners. Its so cutthroat now it seems no one has time to help anyone else, so I like helping people get up and running and encouraging them to enjoy their work while being productive and getting their skills up. No one else seems to care. — rr808

Recreating Epstein PDFs from raw encoded attachments

321 points | 104 comments

Nerdsnipe confirmed :)

Claude Opus came up with this script:

https://pastebin.com/ntE50PkZ

It produces a somewhat-readable PDF (first page at least) with this text output:

https://pastebin.com/SADsJZHd

(I used the cleaned output at https://pastebin.com/UXRAJdKJ mentioned in a comment by Joe on the blog page) — dperfect

How Jeff Bezos Brought Down the Washington Post

222 points | 241 comments

I'd been a relatively long-time subscriber (since 2016) and preferred the Post to the Times for political and international news; more focused, a little drier, easier to follow. I canceled my subscription early last year, not because of anything Bezos did, but because the Times had improved to the point where I just wasn't reading the Post very often.

In understanding everything that's being written about the Post layoffs, one thing you absolutely have to understand (you can weight it however you'd like) to have a coherent take is: the New York Times is an anomaly. Newspapers are a terrible business. People don't get news from newspapers anymore, and advertisers don't reach customers through them.

The Times is thriving because they've pivoted from being a newspaper to being a media business. The games vertical is the first thing people talk about, but cooking is arguably a better example. The verticals have dedicated users, their own go-to-markets, their own user retention loops.

Like basically every other newspaper, the Post failed to replicate this. They're staffed like a big media business, not like a targeted vertical like Politico, but they don't successfully operate like a media business. — tptacek

Claude Code for Infrastructure

202 points | 147 comments

All these tools to build something, but nothing to build. I feel like I am part of a Pyramid Scheme where every product is about building something else, but nothing reaches the end user.

Note: nothing against fluid.sh, I am struggling to figure out something to build. — falloutx

The Great Unwind

246 points | 218 comments

Anger about the 2008 bailout makes sense. Yen carry unwind deserves attention. However, the trading call to action fails on market structure.

Key counterpoints:

- Global FX turnover runs near $9.6T per day (BIS, April 2025). A retail wave of calls will not move USD/JPY in a durable way at that scale.

- /6J options settle on /6J futures. When you buy calls, you mostly push dealer delta hedging into futures, then dealers unwind as exposure changes. No sustained spot yen demand comes from that flow.

- FXY calls track an ETF wrapper, not spot.

- “Widowmaker trade” most often refers to repeated losses from shorting Japanese government bonds, not a long-yen crowd squeeze. — panphora

AI is killing B2B SaaS

320 points | 501 comments

It's a tale as old as time that developers, particularly junior developers, are convinced they could "slap together something in one weekend" that would replace expensive SAAS software and "just do the parts of it we actually use". Unfortunately, the same arguments against those devs regular-coding a bespoke replacement apply to them vibe-coding a bespoke replacement: management simply doesn't want to be responsible for it. I didn't understand it before I was in management either, but now that I'm in management I 100% get it. — bandrami

French streamer unbanked by Qonto after criticizing Palantir and Peter Thiel

207 points | 67 comments

Like everyone else, I am very skeptical that it is somehow related, for several reasons.

- He is just a small time streamer, I didn't watch his videos but it looks like typical clickbait content playing on people's paranoia. Why would Palantir care about it?

- I didn't watch the videos in question, but I suppose that he says that Palentir is evil because it is used by police forces to attack poor migrants, that kind of thing. Not only he is saying what everyone is saying, but it may be good advertising for Palantir, as it shows that they are good at their (evil) job.

- Streisand effect, I am sure that even the idiots at Palantir know that it may not be a good idea to give attention to a streamer who annoys them.

- Speaking of attention, it is highly likely that the streamer in question was unbanked for a completely unrelated reason but saw the opportunity to make buzz, and it seems to be working!

- There seem to be no further evidence connecting the two. — GuB-42

Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

291 points | 366 comments

The biggest issue I see is Microsoft's entire mentality around AI adoption that focuses more on "getting the numbers up" then actually delivering a product people want to use.

Most of the announcements I hear about Copilot, it's always how they've integrated it into some other piece of software or cut a deal with yet another vendor to add it to that vendors product offering. On the surface there's nothing wrong with doing that but that just seems to be the ONLY thing Microsoft is focused on.

Worse yet, most of these integrations seem like a exercise in ticking boxes rather than actually thinking through how integrating Copilot into a product will actually improve user experience. A great example was someone mentioned that Copilot was now integrated into the terminal app but beyond an icon + a chat window, there is zero integration.

Overall, MS just reeks of an organization that is cares more about numbers on a dashboard and pretty reports than they are on what users are actually experiencing. — _fat_santa

Voxtral Transcribe 2

864 points | 211 comments

This demo is really impressive: https://huggingface.co/spaces/mistralai/Voxtral-Mini-Realtim...

Don't be confused if it says "no microphone", the moment you click the record button it will request browser permission and then start working.

I spoke fast and dropped in some jargon and it got it all right - I said this and it transcribed it exactly right, WebAssembly spelling included:

> Can you tell me about RSS and Atom and the role of CSP headers in browser security, especially if you're using WebAssembly? — simonw

A case study in PDF forensics: The Epstein PDFs

284 points | 156 comments

I found this part interesting:

There are also other documents that appear to simulate a scanned document but completely lack the “real-world noise” expected with physical paper-based workflows. The much crisper images appear almost perfect without random artifacts or background noise, and with the exact same amount of image skew across multiple pages. Thanks to the borders around each page of text, page skew can easily be measured, such as with VOL00007\IMAGES\0001\EFTA00009229.pdf. It is highly likely these PDFs were created by rendering original content (from a digital document) to an image (e.g., via print to image or save to image functionality) and then applying image processing such as skew, downscaling, and color reduction. — anigbrowl

FBI couldn't get into WaPo reporter's iPhone because Lockdown Mode enabled

566 points | 492 comments

https://archive.is/1ILVS — bwoah

Guinea worm on track to be 2nd eradicated human disease; only 10 cases in 2025

287 points | 132 comments

Thanks, Carter!

https://www.cartercenter.org/programs/guinea-worm/ — fanatic2pope