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Upgrading an M4 Pro Mac mini's storage for half the price Jeff Geerling July 11, 2025

A brief addition to the 50000 words I wrote earlier on the cloud: what is the European situation? Software Initially, companies and governments would buy licenses to software. You’d typically have a piece of software in your office, on one of your computers, to calculate payroll with. Most other computers would have copies of WordPerfect installed. This software would function for years without updates or maintenance. If WordPerfect-the-company would disappear, you would not even notice.

There is a lot of recent discussion about digital autonomy and Europe’s “position in the cloud”. Here, I want to break down and refute a commonly made argument: that the lead of American cloud providers is so great that we can never catch up. In the recent and excellent policy initiative “Clouds on the Horizon” (by Dutch political parties GL-PvdA and NSC), we can read on page 23 why this can’t be a reason to just give up.

Generationship: Ep. #39, Simon Willison I recorded this podcast episode with Rachel Chalmers a few weeks ago. We talked about the resurgence of blogging, the legacy of Google Reader, learning in public, LLMs as weirdly confident interns, AI-assisted search, prompt injection,...

Postgres LISTEN/NOTIFY does not scale

I think this headline is justified. Recall.ai, a provider of meeting transcription bots, noticed that their PostgreSQL instance was being bogged down by heavy concurrent writes.

After some spelunking they found this comment in the PostgreSQL source explaining that transactions with a pending notification take out a global lock against the entire PostgreSQL instance (represented by database 0) to ensure "that queue entries appear in commit order".

Moving away from LISTEN/NOTIFY to trigger actions on changes to rows gave them a significant performance boost under high write loads.

Via Hacker News

Tags: databases, performance, postgresql

Exploring diagram.website, I came across The Computer is a Feeling by Tim Hwang and Omar Rizwan: the modern internet exerts a tyranny over our imagination. The internet and its commercial power has sculpted the computer-device. It's become the terrain of flat, uniform, com...

If you ask the new Grok 4 for opinions on controversial questions, it will sometimes run a search to find out Elon Musk's stance before providing you with an answer. I heard about this today from Jeremy Howard, following a trail that started with @micah_erfan and lead throug...

Grok 4 Released last night, Grok 4 is now available via both API and a paid subscription for end-users. Key characteristics: image and text input, text output. 256,000 context length (twice that of Grok 3). It's a reasoning model where you can't see the reasoning tokens or t...

Authorities in the United Kingdom this week arrested four alleged members of "Scattered Spider," a prolific data theft and extortion group whose recent victims include multiple airlines and the U.K. retail chain Marks & Spencer.

What I really want to know is: What benefit would I get from making my diet better?

As we gradually roll out HIBP’s Partner Program, we’re aiming to deliver targeted solutions that bridge the gap between being at risk and being protected. HIBP is the perfect place to bring these solutions to the forefront, as it's often the point at which

Infinite Monkey

Mihai Parparita's Infinite Mac lets you run classic MacOS emulators directly in your browser. Infinite Monkey is a new feature which taps into the OpenAI Computer Use and Claude Computer Use APIs using your own API keys and uses them to remote control the emulated Mac!

Here's what happened when I told OpenAI Computer Use to "Open MacPaint and draw a pelican riding a bicycle" - video sped up 3x.

Via @persistent.info

Tags: macos, mihai-parparita, ai, webassembly, generative-ai, llms, ai-agents, pelican-riding-a-bicycle

Techaro services were down for IPv4 traffic on July 9th, 2025. This blogpost is a report of what happened, what actions were taken to resolve the situation, and what actions are being done in the near future to prevent this problem. Enjoy this incident report! Num...

Microsoft today released updates to fix at least 137 security vulnerabilities in its Windows operating systems and supported software. None of the weaknesses addressed this month are known to be actively exploited, but 14 of the flaws earned Microsoft's most-dire "critical" rating, meaning they could be exploited to seize control over vulnerable Windows PCs with little or no help from users.

If you're running low on disk space and are a uv user, don't forget about uv cache prune:

uv cache prune removes all unused cache entries. For example, the cache directory may contain entries created in previous uv versions that are no longer necessary and can be safely removed. uv cache prune is safe to run periodically, to keep the cache directory clean.

My Mac just ran out of space. I ran OmniDiskSweeper and noticed that the ~/.cache/uv directory was 63.4GB - so I ran this:

uv cache prune                    
Pruning cache at: /Users/simon/.cache/uv
Removed 1156394 files (37.3GiB)

And now my computer can breathe again!

Tags: uv, python

A story of early Mac settings told by a bunch of emulators. (8,800 words. 10 emulators.)

eyes, money, nepotism, links, scribbles, futarchy, war and peace, yams

How did you go bankrupt?” Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.” Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises Every disruptive technology since the fire and the wheel have forced leaders to adapt or die. This post tells the story of what happened when 4,000 companies faced a disruptive technology and why only one survived. In the early 20th […]

New week, different end of the world! After a fleeting stop at home, we're in Japan for a proper holiday (yet somehow I'm still here writing this...) with the first stop in Tokyo. It's like nowhere else here, and this is now probably my