Just a set of things too minor to move off of it but annoying enough to not want to start with it.
My list:
No `explain (analyze,buffers)`. Instant DDL has some warts (e.g. fk, metadata locks). Query planning bugs (actually... query planning in general is disappointing). Exiting the repl doesn't stop queries. Implicit type casting. Replication lag from large DDL (e.g. creating an index). Lack of two phase DDL (creating constraints NOT VALID and then VALIDATE later). Lack of extensions (e.g. pg_vector). No safe access to inspect buffer cache. AWS Aurora seems to only add shiny new things to Postgres. And more.
Again, none of this is quite enough to migrate off of it for an established system, but certainly enough to avoid it on a new project.
I've always known how to do zero downtime migrations. The question has always been "Is the engineering cost worth it?"
> It only makes backwards compatible deployments easier insofar you're able to do the overhead for splitting the change with less effort then before.
Yes. That reduces the cost of implementing them.
To be clear, I'm not talking about "Split my db migration and my code that depends on the new table". I'm talking about things like "Set up dual writes between an old database schema and a new database schema with a thorough test suite and do shadow reads against both datasets in prod to do differential testing". That's nontrivial engineering effort that would definitely warrant a discussion in the past. Today we just do it. It's fast and lowers risk.
> perfect refactor-proof testing contracts are still usually pretty hard to design
Not sure about hard, but definitely rare and we as an industry are under-skilled in these areas.
We have decades of research and tools for testing and verification of software. Property tests, dependent types, formal verification and proof, etc. The paths have been there, we have just collectively prioritized other things.
It requires an intentional shift in how we design and build. That shift is the harder part.
I mean "We can't build X because our code structure makes that difficult" has an opportunity cost of the value of X.
I don't think the future of dev work is being a bureaucrat. I've done more rigorous engineering the last two years than I did previously. I'm more confident in the things I shop and they were built in a fraction of the time. It's a bright future for software engineering.
I'm not talking about time. I'm talking about safety. The amount of times I've seen "I refactored it, but I'm not confident enough to take it to prod" is significant. Being able to go faster but still not ship it is the huge opportunity cost.
MTP on a MoE is hit or miss. If you're bottlenecked on memory, MTP can increase the number of active experts (like any batch processing would), which can eat away gains from it.
Generation is basically just memory bandwidth math.
Each token has to read all the active weights. I think that's around 40B parameters active. At a 4-bit quant that's 20GB. With 100GB/s (replace with whatever your bandwidth is) and you get 5 tokens per second.
My favorite lens on SQLite is that it is actually two things:
1. A robust durability implementation
2. A library of high performance data structure and algorithms
The fact this it's SQL is nice, but those two attributes are what make it great.
For example, I'm implement an in-process event log that I want to be durable. I started simple, but soon saw some edge cases and instead of playing whackamole I just swapped to using sqlite as an ordered kv store that gives me ACID.
Another example: ingesting multiple inter related datasets. Instead of a dozen hash maps in memory, I load them up into sqlite (no persistence) and then slice and dice as I need to.
I wonder how Sonnet vs Opus stacks up in a similar time-based comparison.
How far behind are open models compared to Sonnet?
It may be that the absolute SOTA models are way ahead of open models, but the gap in the mid tier really does feel like it's compressing. I'd love to see empirical data about it though.
I'm running opencode with qwen3.6-35b-a3b at a 3-bit quant. I also have qwen3.5-0.8b used for context compaction. I run with 128k context.
It's usable. I set it loose on the postgres codebase, told it to find or build a performance benchmark for the bloom filter index and then identify a performance improvement. It took a long time (overnight), but eventually presented an alternate hashing algorithm with experimental data on false positive rate, insertion speed and lookup speed. There wasn't a clear winner, but it was a reasonable find with rigorous data.
Long agent runs make such a difference. We focus a lot on new models and long context, but the bigger impact is in automatic verification.
I've been leaning in more on e2e test suites. They are slow, brittle and inefficient. But that's almost a feature. I can step away and come back an hour later, and use that time to think about bigger problems.
Since it's a procedural language, you can't do things like create a new index implementation or something else super low level. But there's still a lot you _can_ do. Like implement a custom comparator for a custom type and then use that type in a btree index.
The announcement was that it secured $50M in financing, sold the shoes business for $39M leaving $20M or so in cash.
An empty public company with $70M in financing to enter a hyped market was valued at $115M. The stated intent is to spend their money on a CapEx item with a fairly high demand and resale value (GPUs) in a sector that has a pretty simple playbook.
The 580% bump is a fun headline, but "startup secures $50M in funding at a 5.8x valuation bump" isn't unheard of.
Have I invested? No. Is this a ridiculously funny narrative and story? Absolutely. Is it the most ridiculous valuation I've seen? No.
Given the premise that zero day exploits are going to be frequent going forward, I feel like there is a new standard for secure deployment.
Namely, all remote access (including serving http) must managed by a major player big enough to be part of private disclosure (e.g. Project Glasswing).
That doesn't mean we have to use AWS et al for everything, but some sort of zero trust solution actively maintained by one of them seems like the right path. For example, I've started running on Hetzner with Cloudflare Tunnels.
My list:
No `explain (analyze,buffers)`. Instant DDL has some warts (e.g. fk, metadata locks). Query planning bugs (actually... query planning in general is disappointing). Exiting the repl doesn't stop queries. Implicit type casting. Replication lag from large DDL (e.g. creating an index). Lack of two phase DDL (creating constraints NOT VALID and then VALIDATE later). Lack of extensions (e.g. pg_vector). No safe access to inspect buffer cache. AWS Aurora seems to only add shiny new things to Postgres. And more.
Again, none of this is quite enough to migrate off of it for an established system, but certainly enough to avoid it on a new project.