Adam Marcus
@marcua.net
2.8K followers 220 following 210 posts
Hummus, people, and data. Co-Founder & CTO of B12. Previously Locu, MIT CSAIL. He/him. https://marcua.net/ Queens is the future.
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marcua.net
The past few months, I've been Claude Coding cute lil' games for friends' birthdays ("You like triathlons and we think horses are funny, here's a side-scroller with both that ends in 'Happy Birthday!'"). Previously I'd text "Happy Birthday! I hope it's a great one!" Not art, but how is it perceived?
marcua.net
This one made my brain move in many directions. Not sure I have some conclusive takeaway/worldview after reading it, but it felt good to sit with for a while: theoatmeal.com/comics/ai_art
A cartoonist's review of AI art - The Oatmeal
This is a comic about AI art.
theoatmeal.com
marcua.net
If you end up writing something on what you learned, I'd love to read it!

(I wish I had something to contribute, but we mostly encourage people to take the company time/money to set up and use the tools, and share success stories where they have them. Though very possible I'm dumb/out of touch :D.)
marcua.net
Makes sense! Thank you for staying curious and sharing with the rest of us! :)
marcua.net
Great read! Beyond the async vs sync distinction, is there a reason you are dabbling with so many tools? For example, are you finding Claude Code to be materially different from Codex CLI, or is it more a matter of trying them all out of curiosity? Thank you for sharing!
Reposted by Adam Marcus
manoelhortaribeiro.bsky.social
Social media feeds today are optimized for engagement, often leading to misalignment between users' intentions and technology use.

In a new paper, we introduce Bonsai, a tool to create feeds based on stated preferences, rather than predicted engagement.

arxiv.org/abs/2509.10776
marcua.net
Beautiful nostalgic piece by @adityagp.bsky.social! Don't miss the end for some nice reflections. Aditya's just getting started! :)
A screenshot of the "Reflections and takeaways" section at the end of https://data-people-group.github.io/blogs/2025/09/30/ten-papers/.
Reposted by Adam Marcus
My student Theia Henderson just presented at UIST (and earned a best paper award) for her work "Graffiti: Enabling an Ecosystem of Personalized and Interoperable Social Applications".

If you want to build a social app, Graffiti makes it simple and serverless; I explain why below.

1/
Reposted by Adam Marcus
marcua.net
ayb now includes a web frontend! I hope this expands the set of people that can use ayb.

The web interface lets you create databases, share them with collaborators, and query them from anywhere!

More here: blog.marcua.net/2025/09/27/a...
Reposted by Adam Marcus
pinartozun.bsky.social
📢📢 The September 2025 issue of SIGMOD Record is out, so is the Reminiscences column. Thank you, Viktor Leis, Anja Gruenheid, @senorcarbone.bsky.social, and @elenitz.bsky.social for the great contributions!
pdf --> sigmodrecord.org/publications...
marcua.net
ayb now includes a web frontend! I hope this expands the set of people that can use ayb.

The web interface lets you create databases, share them with collaborators, and query them from anywhere!

More here: blog.marcua.net/2025/09/27/a...
Reposted by Adam Marcus
eatonphil.bsky.social
Eliana is a backend developer interested in data systems, looking for work based in NYC. She's a Recurse Center alumnus and has been an active member of NYC Systems and the Software Internals book club.

She's smart and thoughtful. Talk to Eliana.

RT for reach.

www.linkedin.com/in/eliana-ab...
marcua.net
From our first days in starting @b12.io, we've enabled customers to describe what they wanted and have us worry about how to get it done. With the AI Agent, this can happen near instantaneously. Really proud of the team for getting us here!
b12.io
B12 @b12.io · 21d
Your site should feel less like a to-do list & more like a collaborator. 🤝🏆
That’s why we built B12’s AI Agent. It does 30+ actions, including instantly adding pages, switching color palettes, & even writing blog posts.
Read more & take advantage of AI Agent in seconds: www.b12.io/blog/b12-ai-...
marcua.net
I've been thinking about this all day
marcua.net
Great summary, thank you for sharing! I'm similarly scratching my head at "why not iterate on the agents?"

If I understood correctly, they assume the DB can leave hints for the exploratory agents, so they are already assuming more than a black box between client and server.
marcua.net
Not something you see every day: while looking at a database cluster, I noticed that the "follower" machine had higher CPU utilization than the "primary." At some point, without us (and our customers) knowing, the primary failed over to the follower and was replaced. What a world.
marcua.net
I appreciate @werd.io's notion of a career mission (his is "to work on and support projects with the potential to make the world more informed and equal.") as a way to guide one's technical skills toward positive change.

werd.io/using-techno... (h/t Mike Olson)
Using technology skills for positive change
Let's help build the world we want to see.
werd.io
marcua.net
Wow congratulations Amy!
marcua.net
Same. The one thing that sometimes works for me is to think of the URL as a parenthetical. Like you have text, and you want to give someone a little more detail about how to learn more about that text.
marcua.net
What an exciting time! Congratulations!
Reposted by Adam Marcus
arnab.org
Where is the Cursor for SQL?

CoQuery is a minimal vibe-coded SQL playground powered by SQLite WASM and Google Gemini language models. There is no backend, everything is in the webpage frontend.

github.com/arnabdotorg/...
marcua.net
Hurricanes amirite
marcua.net
Your appreciation of Blink 182 makes you approachable
marcua.net
There's almost always a surprising nugget, usually multiple, in the acknowledgements section of a book/dissertation.

Here's one from Manning Marable's "Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention," for which he was posthumously awarded a Pulitzer prize in history.
A screenshot of a page of an electronic book, with this relevant quote: "In the last year in researching this book, I could not travel and I carried
oxygen tanks in order to breathe. In July 2010, I received a double lung transplant, and following two months' hospitalization, managed a full recovery."