Chris Ellis @intrbiz@bergamot.social

Exactly 4 weeks from this moment we'll all be tucked up in bed ready for a nice early Saturday morning start of OggCamp. Definitely not still in the bar talking nonsense or anything...

Chris Ellis is teaching us many useful PosrgreSQL tricks!

#postgresql #database #helsinki

I have been invited to but turned down 3 conferences talks already this year because they're told me it's new policy to not cover speaker travel under the assumption that your tech employer will cover it. I own my own small business as a researcher and my wife is an academic teaching professor, so I cannot ask my household to absorb that. I just want to generally observe that we are filtering the voices we're going to be able to hear from, with all this contraction

Hello! We are Edinburgh Linux Cafe, joining Mastodon was something we meant to do for a while but never got around to. We are a small but dedicated group helping people to install Linux on their laptops. Our interests are Linux (obviously), repair, reuse, and bicycles. Amazing to see that we have actually been mentioned already (👋 @DoomsdaysCW )!

*laughs and laughs and laughs*

Are you going to @oggcamp this year? April 25-26 in Manchester (the original one in the UK).

https://www.oggcamp.org/

#Events #OpenSource #FreeCulture

PGDay Lowlands is back! We can't wait to see you all at the "second best PostgreSQL conference in Europe", September 10, at TivoliVredenburg in Utrecht: https://2026.pgday.nl/

I am VERY tempted to write another long post about how the decision in the 1970s not to establish a Norway-style sovereign wealth fund in favour of simply using the oil money to prop up finances at the time, has done more damage to the UK than any other decision in history. LONG THREAD, SORRY.

We are thrilled to announce that the main stage schedule for OggCamp 2026 is now officially live.

More details here: https://www.oggcamp.org/posts/schedule/

Full main stage schedule here: https://talks.oggcamp.org/oggcamp-2026/schedule/

Mark your calendars! PGConf.EU 2026 will be held on October 20-23, 2026, in Valencia, Spain.

#pgconfeu #postgresql #database #valencia

I don't think the UK media have made nearly enough noise about the US Navy sinking an *unarmed* Iranian warship and then, in clear violation of the Geneva Conventions, leaving them to drown.

This is a heinous war crime which the media would be rightly up in arms about if any country that wasn't nominally an "ally" had done it.

https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/ihl-treaties/gcii-1949/article-18/commentary/2017

#IRISDena #IranWar #WarCrimes #GenevaConventions

In my online undergraduate P5.js course, students are about to begin the module on motion and physics, including a bit of physics simulation using Matter.js. It suddenly occurred to me that I had never seen anybody put together this particular demo before, and I realized it had to be done. Messy source code at https://editor.p5js.org/isohedral/full/vJa5RiZWs.

[$] The ongoing quest for atomic buffered writes

There are many applications that need to be able to write multi-block chunks of data to disk with the assurance that the operation will either complete successfully or fail altoget [...]

https://lwn.net/Articles/1060063/ #LWN #Linux #kernel #Git #PostgreSQL #PostgreSQL #XFS #BPF #io_uring

😞

Just over a day until our Call for Papers closes so if you're thinking about submitting one, now is the time!

https://talks.oggcamp.org/oggcamp-2026/cfp

i built an entire x86 CPU emulator in CSS (no javascript)

you can write programs in C, compile them to x86 machine code with GCC, and run them inside CSS

https://lyra.horse/x86css/

lol. reasons never to use bcachefs or spend 1ms thinking about it ever again:

it's vibe coded.

yeah, a vibe coded Linux file system.

here's the "blog" of the lead dev's "AI assistant": https://poc.bcachefs.org/

i now have much more insight into bcachefs getting kicked out of the kernel

@ludicity For the record, I work at a software company that employs ~10k developers.

Before LLMs, I'd encounter such engineers a couple of times a month, but I interact with a lot of engineers, specifically the ones that need help or are new at the company or industry at large, so it's a selected sample. Even the most inexperienced ones are willing and able to learn with some guidance.

After LLMs, there's been a significant uptick, and these new ones are grossly incompetent, incurious, impatient, and behave like addicts if their supply of tokens is at all interrupted. If they run out of prompt credits, its an emergency because they claim they can't do any work at all. They can't even explain the architecture of what they are making anymore, and can't even file tickets or send emails without an LLM writing it for them, and they certainly lack in any kind of reading comprehension.

It's bleak and depressing, and makes me want to quit the industry altogether.