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The Pharo project has released a version of its Smalltalk environment that runs directly inside a web browser using WebAssembly, including support for Git operations through Iceberg and Metacello package loading. The page lets users configure how Git HTTP requests are proxied, offering a choice between no proxy, a default site proxy, or a custom CORS proxy that the user controls.
A developer who originally built a stock analysis repository on MySQL's InnoDB storage engine rewrote it to run on an OLAP lakehouse stack built around Apache Iceberg. The author explains that the switch was driven by a single optimization available in the OLAP approach, but required learning the internals of lakehouse architecture to actually exploit it. The piece breaks down InnoDB's core mechanics—row storage layout, indexing tradeoffs, and MVCC via undo logs—as the baseline being replaced.
A technical essay examines how Amazon S3 and similar cloud object stores, built around spinning-disk economics from two decades ago, now underpin most modern data architectures including data lakes, Kafka alternatives, and vector databases. The author notes S3's per-request throughput and latency limits stem from disk physics, forcing developers to add caching layers, batch writes, and separate metadata stores to work around them. The piece highlights that SSD prices have fallen steadily since S3's 2005 launch, narrowing the cost gap with hard disks to about 3x.
Taco Bell's per-location traffic finished down 12.2% year over year from July 6 through Sept. 11, the period spanning the cyclospora outbreak tied to Taylor Farms iceberg lettuce, according to Placer.ai data. The chain had pulled lettuce, cilantro-onion mix and pico de gallo and rolled out $1 promotions on Enchiritos and Mexican Pizzas, but traffic had swung from -18.1% to -30.9% versus its own earlier averages before recovering somewhat.
Advances in AI tools like Cursor and Claude Code have automated much of the routine work of writing code, allowing agents to generate pipelines, tests, and API integrations from plain-language prompts. As a result, the role of software engineers is shifting away from producing logic themselves and toward defining the guardrails, intent, and system constraints that keep AI-generated work coherent and correct.
The FDA has tracked over 12,800 illnesses linked to foodborne outbreaks in 2026, dwarfing the 895 cases recorded in all of 2025. Recent outbreaks include salmonella tied to jalapeños, eggs, and dog food, plus a combined E. coli and salmonella outbreak from alfalfa sprouts, following what experts call an unprecedented cyclospora outbreak from tainted lettuce that ranks as the largest since the 1990s.
A Farm Action report examines Taylor Farms, the little-known produce supplier linked by the FDA to a 2026 Cyclospora outbreak that has sickened thousands and killed at least two people. The outbreak was traced to shredded iceberg lettuce served at Taco Bell, but the report shows Taylor Farms' products appear widely across grocery stores, restaurants, schools, and hospitals, often under different brand names.
A blogger built a customer analytics drilldown dashboard using only a 40MB pre-aggregated Parquet 'data cube' stored in R2, an 18KB browser-based Hyparquet reader, and HTTP range requests, avoiding any database or query engine. The demo rolled up NYC's 34-million-row 311 service request dataset into a compact cube that supports fast filtering by reading only small slices of the file at a time.