2026W05

A few interesting articles I read over the past few days

February 8, 2026

This is the output of an automated process. Every Sunday, a script retrieves articles I've saved and read, uses AI to expand my quick notes into something more coherent, then publishes them. This post is one of those articles.

My AI Adoption Journey — The most practical thing here is the “reproduce your own work” phase: doing tasks manually and then redoing them with agents. Painful, but it forces you to learn where agents actually help versus where you’re just cargo-culting. I also liked the idea of end-of-day agent sessions to get warm starts the next morning. What resonated most is his framing around craftsmanship rather than ideology — he doesn’t care if AI is here to stay, he just wants to do good work faster.
Nobody cares — The examples hit hard because they’re so mundane: bike lanes designed to kill you, gym weights left unracked, dog waste everywhere. It’s not malice, it’s indifference, and that’s almost worse. I keep thinking about the author’s failed experiment of installing dog waste dispensers in his neighborhood hoping it would snowball into community care. It didn’t. The Japan comparison is interesting but I’m not sure “will to have nice things” is something you can transplant — it might be downstream of much deeper cultural structures.
Hotpatching ClickHouse in production with XRay — The fact that you can inject log statements into a running ClickHouse instance via SQL is remarkable. SYSTEM INSTRUMENT ADD LOG 'QueryMetricLog::startQuery' '...' and it just works. The 4-7% binary size overhead with negligible runtime cost when inactive makes it a reasonable trade-off. This solves the one problem every production debugger knows: wishing you’d added one more log statement before deploying.
I miss thinking hard. — The Builder vs Thinker framing put words to something I’ve been feeling. When AI gives you a 70% solution, rejecting it to think harder feels economically irrational — even though that struggle is where the real growth happens. The honest part is the ending: there’s no resolution. He doesn’t pretend to have figured out how to balance velocity with depth, and I respect that more than a tidy answer.
Barefoot Data Platforms — This is the kind of pragmatism I appreciate: rip out Dagster and dbt, replace them with plain scripts that have metadata headers, and let agents iterate on isolated files. The constraint of “under 200 assets” is refreshingly honest about scope. Most data platform posts sell you a cathedral — this one says a well-organized shed is enough for most teams, and it probably is.
My First Distributed System — The Pokémon cloning exploit as a distributed systems lesson is one of those analogies that actually holds up under scrutiny. Two Game Boys linked by a cable are a real distributed system with real partial failure modes. The proposed escrow state fix is textbook two-phase commit, and the trade-off is clear: you can’t clone Pokémon anymore, but you might lose both if the cable disconnects mid-trade. Classic distributed systems — pick your failure mode.
ASCII characters are not pixels: a deep dive into ASCII rendering — I don’t know how I ended up reading this, but the core insight stuck: instead of mapping brightness to characters, you use 6-dimensional shape vectors to match character geometry to image regions. That’s why an L character gets placed where there’s an L-shaped edge in the image. The contrast enhancement technique — sampling into neighboring cells to push boundaries — is borrowed from cel-shading, which is a connection I wouldn’t have expected.
The Design & Implementation of Sprites — Three design choices that make Sprites interesting: no container images (pre-staged base instances for instant creation), object storage for disks (durable state becomes “just a URL”), and inside-out orchestration (user code in an inner container, platform services in the root namespace). The storage stack using JuiceFS-style chunk splitting with local SQLite metadata is clever — it makes VM migration trivial since there’s no attached volume to move.
WAL usage looks broken in modern Time Series Databases? — The core argument is that most TSDBs don’t actually fsync their WAL on every write, so the safety guarantee is weaker than you’d expect. Prometheus fsyncs WAL segments every 2 hours by default. Two hours. The author’s proposed alternative — buffer in memory and flush to SSTables — gives similar guarantees with less complexity. Though Ayende’s pushback is worth reading too: WAL implementations handle partial writes by rolling back incomplete transactions, which the article glosses over.
Keeping 20,000 GPUs healthy — The number that stands out: GPU issues account for 58.7% of all unexpected problems in production. Modal has never seen a degraded CPU core, but GPUs fail constantly — thermal throttling at 94°C, uncorrectable ECC errors clustering in specific regions, 0.1% CUDA initialization flake rates on L4s. Their approach of not attempting recovery and just disposing of unhealthy hosts is pragmatic. GPU reliability is years behind CPU reliability, and this post makes that concrete.
Standups — The argument that your teammates should already know what you did yesterday — through commits, PRs, and notifications — is one of those obvious truths that most teams ignore. I’ve been in standups that were pure “are you done yet?” rituals disguised as collaboration. The proposal to replace status reports with written updates and reserve meeting time for actual problem-solving is straightforward, but getting teams to actually make that switch requires someone willing to challenge the ceremony.
Tuning Tansu: 600,000 record/s with 13MB of RAM — What I liked about this is the methodology: using a null storage engine to isolate protocol overhead from I/O. The biggest wins came from reducing allocations during serialization and fixing eager evaluation of Option and Result methods — small things that compound. Getting from 3.7s to 1.9s on codec benchmarks (49% improvement) before even touching storage shows how much performance gets left on the table in the protocol layer.