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Reposted by Martin Kleppmann

Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · 1d

Vibe coding is irresponsibly building software through dice rolls, not caring what code is produced

What about when engineers at the top of their game use AI tools responsibly to accelerate their work?

I propose "vibe engineering"!

simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/7/v...

Vibe engineering

I feel like vibe coding is pretty well established now as covering the fast, loose and irresponsible way of building software with AI—entirely prompt-driven, and with no attention paid to …

simonwillison.net

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Sync Conf @syncconf.bsky.social · 1d

It was agonizing to choose from among the 34 excellent submissions, but here are the four talks selected from our CFP process!

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Jake Lazaroff @jakelazaroff.com · 3d

put another way: i don't want your data—not just from an ideological "users should be in control" perspective, but from a pragmatic "this makes my app harder and more expensive to run" perspective

we've been so focused on making it easy to scale up that we've accidentally made it hard to scale down

Jake Lazaroff @jakelazaroff.com · 3d

i like making little web apps for myself/family/friends. the most annoying parts — the parts that drastically increase the scope, from "a bunch of HTML, CSS & JS files" to "a web server and database" — are auth+persistence. so i am very excited about atproto including a user-owned solution for both.

Erlend Sogge Heggen @erlend.sh · 3d

The web can be made personal again.

blog.muni.town/personal-dat...

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Murat (Distributolog) @muratdemirbas.bsky.social · 5d

[new blog post]

The Invisible Curriculum of Research

muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2025/10/the-...

The Invisible Curriculum of Research

Courses, textbooks, and papers provide the formal curriculum of research. But there is also an invisible curriculum. Unwritten rules and ski...

muratbuffalo.blogspot.com

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Martin Kleppmann @martin.kleppmann.com · 5d

It took almost two years…! The Fugue paper that @mweidner.bsky.social and I wrote about interleaving in collaborative text editing algorithms was finally accepted by IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems

paywalled: ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/111...
free: arxiv.org/abs/2305.00583

The Art of the Fugue: Minimizing Interleaving in Collaborative Text Editing

Most existing algorithms for replicated lists, which are widely used in collaborative text editors, suffer from a problem: when two users concurrently insert text at the same position in the document,...

arxiv.org

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Reposted by Martin Kleppmann

Matthew Weidner @mweidner.bsky.social · 8d

I made a guest post on @powersync.com's blog: powersync.com/blog/collabo...
It describes a demo we made of collaborative text editing on top of PowerSync's DB sync engine, using character IDs & totally-ordered updates in a DB table (w/o CRDTs).

Collaborative Text Editing Over PowerSync

This blog post describes the resulting demo of collaborative text editing over PowerSync. The demo uses Tiptap as the editor, has basic support for shared cursors and anonymous share links, and includ...

powersync.com

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Reposted by Martin Kleppmann

Jimmy Bernot 🦐🔬🧬🏳️‍🌈 @jimmybernot.bsky.social · 8d

This is my 1st time catching my pet archer fish, Legolas, spitting on camera. Archerfish use modified jaw and tongue bones to fire a jet of water to knock down bugs from over hanging vegetation. Here Legolas is shooting down a fruit fly 🪰 🐠🧪

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Martin Kleppmann @martin.kleppmann.com · 8d

Glad you liked it! As the book is mostly focussed on general concepts than the specifics of particular systems, the Postgres update doesn’t really make a big difference to the book (also, we don’t go into that much depth regarding I/O).

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John Skiles Skinner @skiles.blue · 11d

Imagine the hubris required to burst into the largest socio-technical system on earth and just start yanking out wires, thinking you are genius. Mass-emailing insulting messages and thinking people will welcome your help. Destroying careers, killing kids in Africa, and thinking you're the hero.

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Martin Kleppmann @martin.kleppmann.com · 12d

I respectfully disagree

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Martin Kleppmann @martin.kleppmann.com · 12d

Our department @cst.cam.ac.uk is recruiting for a permanent position in Algorithms and Complexity (exceptional applicants from all areas of Computer Science will be considered) www.cam.ac.uk/jobs/univers...

University Assistant/Associate Professor in Algorithms and Complexity

The Department of Computer Science and Technology is seeking to recruit a new faculty member at the Assistant Professor/Associate Professor level who will contribute to research and teaching in

www.cam.ac.uk

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Martin Kleppmann @martin.kleppmann.com · 13d

Just learnt that “syzygy” is a real English word

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pvh @pvh.ca · 16d

It's pretty cool that Ink & Switch is contributing to this big ARIA programme now. We get two big things out of it: funding (obviously) but also a community of fascinating creators and problems to connect with. I'm learning all about the UK power grid this week.
www.inkandswitch.com/newsletter/d...

ARIA Safeguarded AI Programme, new faces, and a splattering of ink lab notes

Peter, our lab director, will announce a major new initiative. You’ll hear about two researchers who have recently joined our staff. Finally, we’ve got a collection of lab notes about Programmable Ink...

www.inkandswitch.com

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Martin Kleppmann @martin.kleppmann.com · 15d

You can probably swap half way through, as the high-level structure hasn’t changed hugely. Chapter numbering has changed and we moved a few sections around, but you should be able to match up 1st and 2nd editions easily enough.

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Martin Kleppmann @martin.kleppmann.com · 17d

I’m still confused. Every computational device, server or not, has some local memory. Regarding “decentralised reference”, the easiest would be using DNS to reference the server, but whether you consider that decentralised or not is a matter of definitions. It’s independent from local memory anyway.

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Martin Kleppmann @martin.kleppmann.com · 18d

I don’t understand — what do you mean with dedicated memory? You can run a PDS on just about anything: a cheap cloud VM, a raspberry pi, …

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Martin Kleppmann @martin.kleppmann.com · 23d

Hosting a website on a disposable vape bogdanthegeek.github.io/blog/project...

Hosting a WebSite on a Disposable Vape

Someone's trash is another person's web server.

bogdanthegeek.github.io

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sam henri gold @samhenri.gold · Sep 6

Did you know your MacBook has a sensor that knows the exact angle of the screen hinge?

It’s not exposed as a public API, but I figured out a way to read it and make it sound like an old wooden door.

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GOTO Conferences @gotocon.com · Sep 2

☁️ Beyond the cloud = local-first software.

On today’s #GOTOpodcast, @expede.wtf & @julianwood.com dive into apps that run on your device, sync seamlessly, stay private & empower devs.

🎧 gotopia.tech/podcast

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Andy Masley @andymasley.bsky.social · Sep 6

andymasley.substack.com/p/do-data-ce...

Do data centers only seem bad for the climate because we can see them?

Most of your climate impacts are invisible

andymasley.substack.com

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Martin Kleppmann @martin.kleppmann.com · Sep 5

Agree it’s not a binary “declarative or not”. I think the point is more that what’s considered declarative is often a matter of “vibes”, when in fact a fairly precise definition is possible.

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Martin Kleppmann @martin.kleppmann.com · Sep 5

Isn’t that comparing apples and oranges? I thought XPath is a way of querying data stored in XML form, whereas Jamie wants a way of querying data stored in relational form, while exposing it as JSON in the response.

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Martin Kleppmann @martin.kleppmann.com · Sep 5

I wouldn't over-index on the specifics of IMDB; it's just an example. My impression is that it's pretty common to want a hierachical view onto some data while keeping the underlying representation normalised (relational or graph-shaped). That's essentially what GraphQL is, after all.

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Martin Kleppmann @martin.kleppmann.com · Sep 5

I've long thought there wasn't a good definition of what makes a language "declarative". But then I stumbled across this 12-year-old blog post by my colleague Neel Krishnaswami, who has a surprisingly elegant and useful definition semantic-domain.blogspot.com/2013/07/what...

What Declarative Languages Are

On his blog, Bob Harper asks what, if anything, a declarative language is . He notes that "declarative" is often used to mean "logic or func...

semantic-domain.blogspot.com

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Martin Kleppmann @martin.kleppmann.com · Sep 5

Returning JSON from SQL queries, by Jamie Brandon. The syntax is bad but I guess it works www.scattered-thoughts.net/writing/sql-...

SQL needed structure

www.scattered-thoughts.net

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