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Making Postgres slower

July 27, 2025 Everyone is always wondering how to make Postgres faster, more efficient, etc, but nobody ever thinks about how to make Postgres slower. Now, of course, most of those people are being paid to focus on speed, but I am not (although, if you wanted to change that, let me know). As I was writing a slightly more useful guide, I decided someone needed to try to create a Postgres configuration optimized to process queries as slowly as possible. Why? I am not sure, but this is what came o

How I fixed my blog's performance issues by writing a new Jekyll plugin

How I fixed my blog's performance issues by writing a new Jekyll plugin: jekyll-skyhook posted Jul 24, 2025 💡 If you don't want to read the full story, you can check out the jekyll-skyhook plugin on GitHub here. When I started writing this blog, I figured I could write my posts, submit my website to Google Search Console for indexing, and presto - my posts would start appearing in Google search results. That way, people who encounter issues like I did with dark/light mode not working in Ubunt

Performance and telemetry analysis of Trae IDE, ByteDance's VSCode fork

Performance and Telemetry Analysis of Trae IDE: A Deep Dive into ByteDance's VSCode Fork Executive Summary This analysis examines concerning performance and privacy issues discovered in Trae IDE, ByteDance's fork of Visual Studio Code. Key findings include excessive resource consumption (33 processes vs 9 in VSCode), persistent telemetry transmission despite user settings, and concerning community management practices. 1. Background and Methodology During evaluation of development environmen

Big agriculture mislead the public about the benefits of biofuels

Something felt off. Article continues after advertisement Tim Searchinger lacked the proper credentials to say exactly what was off that day in the spring of 2003. He was a lawyer, not a scientist or economist. He was reading a complex technical paper on an unfamiliar topic, produced by well-respected researchers at the world-renowned Argonne National Laboratory. Sitting at his cluttered desk in the Environmental Defense Fund’s sixth-floor offices in Washington, D.C., overlooking the famous ba

Britain's spies-for-hire are running wild

“That is quite unusual,” said a third private intelligence figure, adding that in the U.S. people are “very open” about having worked for the CIA. America has a “semi-retirement model where when you’re moving out of the agency, you’ll probably spend about six or seven years subcontracting back, and then you’ll finally move into the private sector.” “We don’t do things like that here at all. So, Vauxhall [MI6] will almost never outsource meaningful intelligence work to the private sector,” they

GPT might be an information virus (2023)

Obligatory: the views and opinions expressed in this post are my own and do not represent the views and opinions of my employer. In light of all the hype going around about ChatGPT, I wanted to offer my “hot take” on what the next 2-5 years of the web look like. One aspect of the rise of generative models that isn’t getting the right amount of attention is the long-term effects on the information economy. I think that being able to automatically produce arbitrary content that is indistinguisha

IBM Keyboard Patents

JavaScript disabled or not supported It appears you have prevented JavaScript from running in your web browser or are using a web browser that does not support JavaScript. Admiral Shark's Keyboards presently requires JavaScript for quality-of-life features like switching between light/dark mode, navigating via title or image and copying search query links, and is necessary for the keyboard matrix simulators, keyboard property modals, interactable slideshows and image size optimisation. Please c

Performance and Telemetry Analysis of Trae IDE, ByteDance's VSCode Fork

Performance and Telemetry Analysis of Trae IDE: A Deep Dive into ByteDance's VSCode Fork Executive Summary This analysis examines concerning performance and privacy issues discovered in Trae IDE, ByteDance's fork of Visual Studio Code. Key findings include excessive resource consumption (33 processes vs 9 in VSCode), persistent telemetry transmission despite user settings, and concerning community management practices. 1. Background and Methodology During evaluation of development environmen

Peacemaker S2 trailer finds our anti-hero in a parallel world

HBO Max dropped the hotly anticipated full trailer for S2 of Peacemaker—James Gunn's Emmy-nominated series spun off from his 2021 film, The Suicide Squad —at San Diego Comic-Con this weekend. (Spoilers for S1 below.) As previously reported, the eight-episode first season was set five months after the events of The Suicide Squad. Having survived a near-fatal shooting, Peacemaker—aka Christopher Smith—is recruited by the US government for a new mission: the mysterious Project Butterfly, led by a

Constrained languages are easier to optimize

jyn, what the fuck are you talking about a recurring problem in modern “low-level” languages is that they are hard to optimize. they do not reflect the hardware, they require doing complex alias analysis, and they constantly allocate and deallocate memory. they looked at the structure/expressiveness tradeoff and consistently chose expressiveness. what does a faster language look like consider this paper on stream fusion in Haskell. this takes a series of nested loops, each of which logically

4k NASA employees opt to leave agency through deferred resignation program

Nearly 4,000 NASA employees have opted to leave the space agency through the Trump administration's deferred resignation program, NASA said on Saturday. The cuts amount to an estimated 20% of NASA's workforce, and will reduce the agency from 18,000 to 14,000 employees, NASA spokesperson Cheryl Warner said in a statement shared with NPR. The total number includes the agency's loss of 500 other workers due to normal attrition, she said. During a second round of the program, which closed at midni

Dumb Pipe

Connect A to B. Send Data. In 2023 it's hard to connect two devices directly. Dumb pipe punches through NATs, using on-the-fly node identifiers. It even keeps your machines connected as network conditions change. What you actually do with that connection is up to you.

‘Bob’s Burgers’ Celebrates 300 Episodes and Teases New Holiday Episodes

The Bob’s Burgers panel is always a popular draw at San Diego Comic-Con, and programmers answered the call of the Belcher faithful by moving it to Ballroom 20—not quite the cavernous Hall H, but a larger venue than previous years. Season 15 has just four episodes left to air, but fans won’t have long to wait until season 16: it hits Fox in September. Season 16 contains a big milestone with Bob’s Burgers‘ 300th episode. “There’s something absolutely bizarre about doing 300 episodes of television

Your iPhone's Messages App Can Do Math. Here's How

Apple will release iOS 26 this fall, and it will bring Liquid Glass and more features to your iPhone. But iOS 18 upgrades your Messages app so that it can solve tricky equations without your Calculator app, and it doesn't need Google to look up conversion rates, either. Prior to iOS 18, if you wanted to figure out how to split a bill with your texting group from afar, you'd have to use your calculator app or Spotlight and then switch back to Messages. With iOS 18 you can perform multistep calcu

I tested out the Pixel VIPs feature and am not impressed

Stephen Headrick / Android Authority I was so excited to try out one of the headlining features of Google’s latest Pixel Drop. “Was” is the keyword here, unfortunately. One of the biggest features, prominently displayed in all the marketing for this update, is Pixel VIPs, a feature promised to help you keep up with those you care about most in the most convenient way possible. I’ve tried out this sort of relationship management app in the past, and I was excited at the idea of a lighter-weight

Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years (1998)

Why is everyone in such a rush? The conclusion is that either people are in a big rush to learn about programming, or that programming is somehow fabulously easier to learn than anything else. Felleisen et al. give a nod to this trend in their book How to Design Programs, when they say "Bad programming is easy. Idiots can learn it in 21 days, even if they are dummies." The Abtruse Goose comic also had their take. Let's analyze what a title like Teach Yourself C++ in 24 Hours could mean: Teach

Getting decent error reports in Bash when you're using 'set -e'

You're using a tool with a too-generic User-Agent You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace, the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately whatever you're using to do so has a HTTP User-Agent header value that is too generic or otherwise excessively suspicious. Unfortunately, as of early 2025 there's a plague of high volume crawlers (apparently in part to gather data for LLM training) that behave like this. To reduce th

‘Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’ Gets Muppet Fever In Season 4

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds has done a lot of odd things in the course of its five-season mission. We’ve had musicals, fantasy episodes, full-on horror adventures, and even a murder mystery is on the horizon. Now, the show is boldly going in another kooky direction: a puppet episode. Announced today during Trek‘s blockbuster Hall H panel at San Diego Comic-Con, Jordan Canning (who directed season 2’s “Charades”, but perhaps more crucially here, also directed seven episodes of the Fraggle Rock

The ‘Star Wars’ Black Series Figure We’ve Been Waiting For Is Finally Here

For the past year, this is what has happened here on io9 every time Hasbro has announced a new figure for its Star Wars Black Series line. James Whitbrook: “Germain, Hasbro just dropped some new Black Series Images.” Germain Lussier: “Are any of them The Stranger from The Acolyte with a removable helmet revealing the face of Manny Jacinco?” Whitbrook: *Silence* “No, it is not.” Without exaggeration, we’ve had that conversation at least a dozen times since the release of The Acolyte last year,

Astronomer winks at viral notoriety with ‘temporary spokesperson’ Gwyneth Paltrow

After spending the past week-plus in the headlines due to a seemingly inescapable social media scandal, data operations startup Astronomer is trying to shift the narrative with a tongue-in-cheek video starring actress and entrepreneur Gwyneth Paltrow. Paltrow was, of course, previously married to Coldplay singer Chris Martin. And it was at a Coldplay concert in Massachusetts that the company’s CEO Andy Byron and Chief People Officer Kristin Cabot were apparently caught dancing together on the “

U.K. starts enforcing online age check rules

In Brief A U.K. law requiring that pornography websites verify the age of their users took effect Friday. The BBC reports that around 6,000 porn sites have said they will start verifying users’ ages to comply with the Online Safety Act, although at least one major site was not requiring age checks as of Friday morning. The law also requires that online platforms prevent children from being exposed to harmful content, which is why sites like Reddit, Bluesky, X, and Grindr have also begun askin

Scientists Find Secret Code in Human DNA

Image by Getty / Futurism Genetics One person's junk is another's treasure. An international team of scientists have found that strings of "junk" DNA in the human genome that were previously written off as having no useful function are actually pretty important after all. The work, published as a study in the journal Science Advances, focuses on transposable elements, a class of DNA sequences that can "jump," via a biological copy-and-paste mechanism, to different locations in a genome. These

5G promised a revolution, but here’s what we actually got

Robert Triggs / Android Authority Depending on where you live, you’ve likely had 5G in your pocket for at least a couple of years — or possibly close to half a decade. In any case, the wireless tech has certainly been around long enough to have had time to accomplish the numerous lofty promises that CEOs piped up to upsell us, which included everything from rejuvenating retail to traffic lights pushing updates to your car. While some of those promises might have come to pass, quite a lot of th

Apple @ Work: Apple makes Managed Apple Account transitions easier for IT at scale

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Surfshark VPN review: A fast VPN for casual users

Engadget has been testing and reviewing consumer tech since 2004. Our stories may include affiliate links; if you buy something through a link, we may earn a commission. Read more about how we evaluate products . Surfshark pushes the envelope with its Nexus and Everlink features, but its fundamentals are solid too. Surfshark is one of the youngest major VPNs, but it's grown rapidly over the last seven years. Since 2018, it's expanded its network to 100 countries, added a suite of apps to its S

Ageing accelerates around age 50 ― some organs faster than others

Ageing of many tissues accelerates around age 50, according to an analysis of tissues in people ranging from teenagers to individuals in their sixties.Credit: Karen Haibara/AFP/Getty It is a warning that middle-aged people have long offered the young: ageing is not a smooth process. Now, an exhaustive analysis of how proteins change over time in different organs backs up that idea, finding that people experience an inflection point at around 50 years old, after which ageing seems to accelerate.

Breaking the WASM/JS communication performance barrier

In sledgehammer every operation is encoded as a sequence of bytes packed into an array. Every operation takes 1 byte plus whatever data is required for it. Each operation is encoded in a batch of four as a u32. Getting a number from an array buffer has a high constant cost, but getting a u32 instead of a u8 is not more expensive. Sledgehammer bindgen reads the u32 and then splits it into the 4 individual bytes. It will shuffle and pack the bytes into as few buckets as possible and try to inline

No, Reed Richards Won’t Lead the Avengers in ‘Doomsday’

We may not know much about Avengers: Doomsday right now, but we’ve known for months the Fantastic Four will be a core part of it. Now, we know something else about it: Pedro Pascal’s Reed Richards isn’t taking of the whichever Avengers team he winds up meeting. Earlier in July, Fantastic Four: First Steps director Matt Shakman described Reed to Variety as a man who “goes from being a nerdy scientist to the husband and father who’d do anything to protect his family, to the guy who’s leading the

A Rare Interstellar Object Is Zipping Through Our Solar System. This Brand-New Telescope Saw It First

Nearly a month ago, a mysterious object was seen hurtling through the solar system and later confirmed as an interstellar visitor traveling toward the Sun. Several telescopes have since turned their attention to the wandering object, but it turns out the brand-new Vera C. Rubin Observatory was the first to catch a glimpse of 3I/ATLAS. In an act of cosmic serendipity, astronomers pointed the Rubin Observatory toward the patch of sky where the interstellar object appeared during its commissioning

Frigidaire Mini-Fridges Cause $700,000 in Damage After Smoking, Sparking, Burning, Melting, Overheating, and Catching Fire

Over 600,000 Frigidaire mini-fridges are being recalled over internal electrical components that have short-circuited and ignited, according to an announcement by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission. The faulty fridges have cost over $700,000 in property damage thus far, according to a new recall notice. “Consumers should immediately stop using the recalled minifridges and follow the instructions to receive a refund at www.recallrtr.com/minifridge,” CPSC said in a press release. “Consum