technical.cx Sources

Lobsters

Are We Harold Bloom?

A human wrote this essay. Proof of work. Harold Bloom was a professor at Yale University and a famous author and literary critic: think Roger Ebert but for books. Many considered him a prick and colleagues often bristled at him. This grumpy professor’s in...

Lobsters

Arcan: 10 Years of Online Obscurity

... and 23 years of tedious yak shaving. Ten years ago my rather anemic post on the Arcan project started to circulate. It got enough attention that I considered stopping right there and then. I do not care much for attention; most of my other open source...

Lobsters

Blocking an ASN (or similar) from my sites - Matthew Somerville

I run a number of websites, some of which could even be said to be popular. I want humans to visit these websites, enjoy these websites, make their change of trains at New Street in good time, investigate miscarriages of justice, or find out the play they...

Lobsters

cps

Suppose you want to write a database. You'd probably start by implementing relational algebra operators — projection, filter, join, etc. The easy way is to implement them as functions that take in tables and return tables, and assemble them into a larger...

Databases

Databases

Lobsters

Only Bounds · baby steps

only bounds are going to be the most impactful change to Rust that you’ve never heard of. They are currently being designed and developed by the Arm team (David Wood, Rémy Rakic, et al.) as part of the Sized Hierarchy and Scalable Vector Extension project...

Lobsters

Looking Forward to Postgres 19: Query Hints

Postgres 19 brings plan advice: the query hints the Postgres community held off on for 15 years. Shaun Thomas covers the 15-year debate, pg_plan_advice, pg_stash_advice, and how to use them.

Lobsters

CSS: Unavoidable Bad Parts

An ersatz CSS tutorial for people who need to style a web page, but aren't web developers. I am a wrong person to write this kind of thing, as I have neither the time, nor experience. I'd much rather read a book about this. Alas, I had to learn all this...

Lobsters

Laurence Tratt: Test-case Reducers Are Underappreciated Debugging Tools

Test-case reducers are less well known than they should be, and those who are aware of them don’t always realise the variety of ways we can use – perhaps even abuse! – them. In this post, I’m going to explore some of the things I’ve learnt while using these...