Atoms

Published fragment Caveman. In 1980, Michael Crichton characters spoke like cavemen to save satellite bandwidth. It was absurd. Ridiculous! Forty-five years later, we’re doing the same thing with LLMs to save tokens.

A good article from Planet Scale on a product they’re introducing called “Database Traffic Control”. It talks about putting queues in Postgres as a potential source of pain and references my old blog post on failure by MVCC as an example.

I continue to think about Postgres queues a lot, and as much as I wish the problem I’d discussed was resolved by SKIP LOCKED and more contemporary Postgres advances, the fact of the matter is that the underlying root cause of dead tuple accumulation due to Postgres’ MVCC model was never fixed, and can still very much lead to major knock-on impact even today.

The Planet Scale proposed fix is a form of supervisor that terminates queries that are degrading database health and reschedules them for a more appropriate time. SKIP LOCKED helps, REINDEX CONCURRENTLY helps, years of B-tree optimizations help, but to guarantee real production stability, a component of this shape is probably wise.

Published fragment Somewhere, a short review of Sofia Coppola’s 2010 movie Somewhere. Unless I miss my mark, it’s the same movie as Lost in Translation?

This article on icons is excellent. It makes the point that Tahoe, which endeavored to add an icon for every menu item, regressed in that icons are no longer as distinctive, aren’t consistent between apps, and lose recognizability as they’re made too small (12x12).

This is the story again and again when it comes to modern Apple, which operates on mantra-based methodology: more icons, more whitespace, wider margins, more transparency, less character. Make it flat and boring!

Ironically, despite our technology today being superior in every way, UI design was better understood back in the 90s.

Nanoglyph 050 is published, on the second wave of the API-first economy, and a few last photos from Piaynemo Geosite in Raja Ampat.

Added a GitHub-style contribution graph to the atoms page. I tried to add one when I first put atoms in years ago, but gave up after not being able to style it satisfactorily within the few hours I’d allotted. Today, I iterated with an LLM for 30 minutes, and got it. Incredible. Scary.

I can recommend Web Site Blocker as a basic, ad-free, payment-free blocker for Chrome and compatible browsers like Brave.

I’ve tried a couple alternatives, but they all upsell too hard. I’m not against paying for software on principle, but paying for a browser extension whose only job is to block a couple URLs is a step too far, especially when it’s a subscription.

The main thing I use Web Site Blocker for is to block Reddit. Not during certain hours, not over a certain time threshold, but to ban it fully and permanently. There used to be some utility to this website, but it’s evolved into the most malignant cesspool of partisan extremism and propaganda imaginable. I used to need it available to click the occasional programming link, but these days LLMs provide superior answers in every case. It’s not worth wasting one more second of consciousness on this thing.

Published my first article in a while, The Second Wave of the API-first Economy.

APIs were meant to make the web programmable and interoperable. A combination of revenue chasing, security concerns, and abuse reversed the trend for a decade as walls went up instead of down. Today, LLMs are changing the equation. People want agents that act on their behalf, and the services that ship APIs will have a decisive edge over those that don’t.

River is SOC 2 Type II compliant.

Published a post on the River blog: The evolution of background job frameworks in Ruby, tracing the history of async job frameworks in the Ruby ecosystem from BackgrounDRb to Solid Queue, and our experience moving the Heroku API from Delayed::Job to Queue Classic to Que.

Nanoglyph 049 is published, on the end of Heroku (?), things we could’ve done to stave off its untimely demise, and a brief trip report from paradise in Raja Ampat.

Nanoglyph 048 is published, with mixed thoughts on LLMs, the past, present, and future of programming, Ambon, and psychedelic frogfish.

Nanoglyph 047 is published, on joining Stainless, six months at Snowflake, and going to view Komodo dragons on Rinca Island.

Trying Ghostty.

I didn’t switch before because I couldn’t find anything in the feature set that improved anything enough over iTerm to be worth the switching cost.

Easy theming and an automatic light/dark switching is what won me over.

In ~/.config/ghostty/config:

theme = dark:Belafonte Night,light:Belafonte Day

Strong recommendation for Mars Express. It’s been quite a few years since I’ve seen a good science-fiction movie, and doubly so for an original IP.

Mars Express is a breath of fresh air. No politics, no California identitarianism, just cool technology concepts, good plot in a tight runtime (it says more in a mere 90 minutes than Hollywood’s able to express with three hours), and great art/animation.