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I built bbtree, the foundation of databases and filesystems, and the fastest concurrent btree.
Code: github.com/XiangpengHao/bbtr…
Blog post & demo: bbtree.xiangpeng.systems/
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Will AI replace healthcare professionals?
Here is an AI robot on its first day working in a hospital after finding out that:
• the EHR needs 17 clicks to order one test
• the medication list is different in three systems
• interoperability sometimes means making a phone call
• and fax machines are still critical infrastructure
What else?
The video is obviously AI-made.
think(x) retweeted
This is such an incredible development, if you know barn owls. Manhattan is not a great fit for them. Somehow this one family seems to think "if I can make it here, I can make it anywhere".
One of my favorite things about NYC is there's always a cool Bird story. ❤️
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Dudes talk about being "Forward Deployed Engineers” like they're on assignment in Kandahar
You're an implementation consultant in Peoria, my guy. Let's chill out.
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We’ve lost an icon. Margaret Hamilton, a computer science pioneer best known for her work at MIT leading development of the flight software for the Apollo missions to the moon, has died at 90. Read about her legacy via MIT News: news.mit.edu/2026/margaret-h…
ALT Margaret Hamilton is reclined inside a NASA spacecraft module, surrounded by control panels and switches.
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Our new @postgres_ai harness for Postgres hacking/testing keeps findings bugs in PG19 and bringing patches. So I keep sending them to -hackers.
I have mixed feelings – I guess we should do it a couple of months earlier.
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"Borders's cancer resulted in a $190,000 debt—even though she had not yet received surgery and still needed chemotherapy. Borders said she could not even afford to get her prescriptions filled. She believed that her cancer was triggered by the toxic dust she was exposed to."
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PostgreSQL MVCC is often criticized for storing old versions in place. But the question is: does it have to traverse a chain of versions to find the correct row? A new blog post to answer that: dev.to/franckpachot/postgres…
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Anthropic Is building a surveillance system to monitor activists using a “pre-crime” approach that tries to predict incidents before they happen.
The extensive monitoring system that the AI company is building is aimed primarily at keeping tabs on activists who oppose the rapid development of artificial intelligence.
More from @DRBoguslaw below:
prospect.org/2026/09/09/anth…
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We've been aggressively fuzz-testing @pgrustdb vs. Postgres. For individual functions, we'll generate millions of inputs to find any behavioral differences between the Postgres and pgrust versions.
In the process, we've found over 20 different bugs in Postgres itself
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I've joined @AnthropicAI!
I'll be working on Claude Code and making it better for developers who use it. Here's a little Fable & Three.js
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New in recent PGSimCity releases:
Try the guided investigation nikolays.github.io/PGSimCity…:
• Collect evidence explaining why autovacuum cannot clean up.
• Release the old snapshot, then verify actual cleanup.
• Inspect row versions or try challenge mode.
Release notes: github.com/NikolayS/PGSimCit…
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🇺🇸 The Boatlift That Was Bigger Than Dunkirk
At 10:45 a.m. on September 11, 2001, a Coast Guard lieutenant named Mike Day keyed a radio in New York Harbor and said the only sentence that mattered.
“All available boats. This is the United States Coast Guard. Anyone wanting to help with the evacuation of Lower Manhattan, report to Governors Island.”
The boats were already coming.
The bridges were closed. The tunnels were closed. The subways were dead. South of the towers, hundreds of thousands of people had nowhere left to walk. Some jumped into the Hudson. Some stood on seawalls that were never meant to be docks and waited for anything that floated.
Dunkirk took nine days to pull 338,226 Allied soldiers off a beach in 1940.
On 9/11, roughly 800 mariners on about 150 vessels moved as many as 500,000 civilians off Manhattan in about nine hours. Ferries. Tugs. Dinner boats. Pilot boats. Yachts. A retired fireboat. Rubber dinghies that held two people. The largest water evacuation in history.
NY Waterway did not wait for the official call. After the second plane hit, the whole fleet moved. Captain Rick Thornton nosed his ferry against a seawall that was not a slip and started taking people off. Some of them he pulled out of the river. His company alone carried about 158,000 people to Jersey City, Hoboken, Weehawken, Brooklyn, and Queens.
On a normal Tuesday they carried 34,000.
The Staten Island Ferry moved more than 50,000 people and came back the other way with water, bandages, and men who still had work to do in the dust.
The old fireboat John J. Harvey, already retired, tied up near the Museum of Jewish Heritage, took civilians off the seawall, then pumped water when the hydrants downtown died.
Lt. Day later admitted what the day required. “I broke more rules that day than probably I’ve enforced in my whole Coast Guard career.”
In raw numbers it was bigger than Dunkirk. No boat went down. By nightfall the southern tip of Manhattan had been emptied by people who were not on anyone’s list of heroes when the morning started.
They were tug captains. Ferry deckhands. Pilots. A lieutenant with a microphone. Ordinary boats answering one sentence.
All available boats.
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Peel back a yogurt lid in Japan, and prepare to question the laws of physics.
The inner surface comes away bone-dry.
Not a smear. Not a smudge. Not a single drop of yogurt clinging to the foil.
It is as pristine as fresh snow.
How?
Engineers at Toyo Aluminium spent years studying the microscopic structure of the lotus leaf, which naturally repels rainwater in perfect rolling beads.
They engineered a nanotech coating that traps microscopic air pockets across the foil, making it physically impossible for liquid to stick.
Drop a dollop of yogurt onto it, and it rolls like a marble.
Nobody demanded this invention.
Yet Japanese engineers poured years of passion into it just so your thumb would never get sticky on a Tuesday morning.
Perfection lived in the single millimeter you never even thought to ask for.
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This is another gem from India, and this one is built almost entirely out of arcs. Sameep Padora’s Maya Somaiya Library in Kopargaon, Maharashtra, covers a children’s library with a self-supporting brick vault roof, no steel skeleton, no concrete shell underneath, just compression and geometry doing the work the way builders have used arches for centuries.
The team studied Catalan vaulting, the same brick-on-edge arch technique behind Gaudí’s work and later refined by Rafael Guastavino, and pushed it further with modern Rhino Vault software to calculate a roof that curves in two directions at once. Three layers of 32mm brick tile, held together with mortar, span 44 meters and are strong enough to walk across. Daylight comes in through angled glass walls tucked back under the overhanging brick, shaded from direct sun by the roof’s own geometry.
Africa has its own deep tradition of load-bearing arches and vaults. The Nubian vault technique out of Sudan has roofed homes across the Sahel for centuries without a single piece of timber or steel, and it’s still practiced in pockets of Mali and Burkina Faso today. But it’s nowhere near the mainstream of how we build now. India took a regional vaulting tradition, ran it through contemporary tools, and gave a school library a roof that will outlast most concrete slabs. We’re sitting on the same inheritance, mostly unused.
Location: Kopargaon, Maharashtra, India. Architect: Sameep Padora & Associates. Photography: Edmund Sumner.
India is showing us how to build schools in our villages, instead of the white painted rectangular boxes we build that the people can’t maintain.
Saraswati Vidyalaya sits on the banks of the Tansa River in Kelthan, a tribal village in Maharashtra. In 2019, floods partially submerged the school and wrecked it beyond safe use. unTAG Architecture didn’t just rebuild it, they redesigned it to survive the next flood.
The whole structure now stands on stilts, cutting the surface area floodwater can push against. Locally baked red brick, laid in a rat-trap bond that leaves gaps inside the wall, cuts down on brick count while adding thermal insulation, no imported material, no concrete block doing a job local brick already does better. Brick jalis filter breeze through the classrooms. The ground floor stays open underneath, used for community gatherings and medical camps when it isn’t holding up the school above.
The cost per square foot came out to about $13.50. The construction training itself became part of the outcome, local parents and farmers worked the site through community labor, alongside architects who taught the techniques hands-on.
Two-hundred and something dollars a square meter, built to survive the exact disaster that destroyed the last building, and it left the village with a group of people who now know how to build this way again.
Location: Kelthan, Palghar, Maharashtra, India. Architects: unTAG (Tejesh Patil, Gauri Satam, Nikita Patil). Photography: Yash Prabhu, Vibhu Viraj.
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Zohran Mamdani just created an Office of Worker Power, and launched it on Labor Day
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After more than 100 years, a British museum has agreed to return ancestral remains to the Naga people.
The Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford will return remains linked to 39 ancestors, including a warrior’s cranium, a woman’s skull, and a young person’s jaw, to Nagaland, an Indian state that borders Manipur and Assam and is home to Indigenous Naga tribes.
The return, which is expected to be completed by November 2026, marks the Pitt Rivers Museum’s largest repatriation of human remains. For decades, the museum displayed the remains under the label “headhunting trophies” in an exhibition called “Treatment of Dead Enemies.”
The Naga collection includes about 6,500 artifacts, including spears, shields, ornaments, armlets, and basketry. The museum decided to remove all remains from public display in July 2020. Since then, Naga groups have been negotiating for their return.
Much of the collection came from British colonial officers J.P. Mills and J.H. Hutton, who served in Naga areas in the early 20th century. Some were gifts, but other items were taken under duress. The human remains were brought to the museum between 1910 and 1940, Yahoo News reported. Christian missionaries, who arrived around the 19th century, also discouraged Naga ways of life.
“We bring back the light of our ancestors that was dimmed but never extinguished,” Ellen Konyak Jamir of the Forum for Naga Reconciliation told NYT.
There are still Naga ancestral remains in museums and private collections across Europe and the U.S. In 2024, an auction house tried to sell a Naga skull for £3,500, but Naga protests halted the sale.
Once the remains arrive, the Naga community plans to lay them to rest at a memorial site.
“The question to ask the world is: how dare you get away thinking it is okay to display Naga ancestral remains like this, ridiculing us and dehumanizing us for centuries?” anthropologist Dolly Kikon told ThePrint.
