ch71r22
A few years ago, I was pretty excited about this but just as a casual observer. I'm out of the loop now
I'd be interested to hear what projects you think are the most exciting to follow these days
The way I remember it, back then they were building Beaker on dat in collaboration with dat devs, which I think was basically just Mathias Buus (mafintosh) who was part of an org called Hyperdivision. Now Mathias is continuing the dat/hypercore stuff at Holepunch (building Keet and Pears). It still seems cool, but I think a lot of the most exciting stuff in the dat ecosystem stopped when Paul Frazee left
So I think that original Beaker/dat/hypercore vision has probably moved mostly into the AT Protocol (Bluesky, tangled, etc.). I haven't been following that as much lately. I wonder if anyone is working on something like Beaker Browser for the AT Protocol, or if that even makes sense
Having land as a skill seems weird to me. You could write in your land skill that it should make sure CI is passing, but I wouldn't want to leave it up to the LLM to decide if CI is passing. I'd rather that be a decision enforced by the git remote
I think to make this work the way I imagine merge checks should work, I'd have to set up my git remote to only allow fast forward merges with checks passing. I don't think this work very well with my org's current merge queue setup, but might work better for people not using a merge queue
I don't buy the argument that being able to trace down the initial LLM prompts that led to a line of code will meaningfully accelerate review. That's just like a more advanced git blame. Reviewers will need to understand the code for themselves. A more advanced git blame doesn't really help with that
Just looking at the final version of the PR without all the intermediate history may be better since it won't sidetrack you with half-baked thoughts and assumptions from the development process. You can just focus on the result
There are cool things about this, but I'm not convinced it's actually useful. Even less convinced it's a replacement for pull requests. GitHub isn't great but I don't think this is really tackling the problems with GitHub
A big part of the book is about reconceptualizing this idea of the romantic "wild" nature. I think it's interesting because it's an example of people who actually lived in a "back to nature" kind of way, but it doesn't look like a rural homestead or anything like that. It's also different in how it's collective not individualistic. The author cites Muir and Berry as influences
It looks like it has so many cool features -- stacked PRs, jujutsu support, CI in Nix VMs. But I've never tried it because it sounds like (at least by default) it's some sort of decentralized, peer-to-peer public thing
All technologies have political, social, ethical, and economic aspects, and not all technologies are the same. AI is not, in reality, powered by CO2-neutral electricity. As the article mentions, AI is the fastest-growing energy user in the world, so it probably merits a deeper look than aluminum cans.
The real argument was that AI has many externalities that should be considered (climate change, water use, energy prices, putting people out of jobs) and that Linux, as a relevant and influential political actor, should engage with these topics. It's not even giving a final determination about what Linux should do, it's just disagreeing with Torvalds' total rejection of ethical arguments about AI.
Even if you believe that the technical merits outweigh the other costs, it seems at least reasonable to engage on those grounds. But Torvalds isn't doing that.
Also, simply stating that the "cat is out of the bag" and "Pandora's box is open" isn't really an argument. These are thought-terminating cliches; not logical arguments
> So is the magic here that it's Postgres? What makes being able to query something in Postgres special?
There are a bunch of pros and cons to using Postgres vs. DuckDB. The basic difference is OLTP vs. OLAP. It seems pg_lake aims to give you the best of both. You can combine analytics queries with transactional queries.
pg_lake also stores and manages the Iceberg catalog. If you use DuckDB you'll need to have an external catalog to get the same guarantees.
I think if you're someone who was happy using Postgres, but had to explore alternatives like DuckDB because Postgres couldn't meet your OLAP needs, a solution like pg_lake would make your life a lot simpler. Instead of deploying a whole new OLAP system, you basically just install this extension and create the tables you want OLAP performance from with `create table ... using iceberg`
> when we say it’s now queryable by Postgres, does this mean that it takes that data and stores it in your PG db?
Postgres basically stores pointers to the data in S3. These pointers are in the Iceberg catalog that pg_lake manages. The tables managed by pg_lake are special tables defined with `create table ... using iceberg` which stores the data in Iceberg/Parquet files on S3 and executes queries partially with the DuckDB engine and partially with the Postgres engine.
It looks like there is good support for copying between the Iceberg/DuckDB/Parquet world and the traditional Postgres world.
> Or it remains in S3 and this is a translation layer for querying with PG?
Yes I think that's right -- things stay in S3 and there is a translation layer so Postgres can use DuckDB to interact with the Iceberg tables on S3. If you're updating a table created with `create table ... using iceberg`, I think all the data remains in S3 and is stored in Parquet files, safely/transactionally managed via the Iceberg format.
https://github.com/Snowflake-Labs/pg_lake/blob/main/docs/ice...
https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/09/europe/poland-scramble-jets-r...
https://x.com/DowOperSZ/status/1965593314716995891
https://bsky.app/profile/onestpress.onestnetwork.com/post/3l...
https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/18/xai-is-facing-a-lawsuit-fo...
A good book on this topic is The Dawn of Everything, written by an anthropologist and an archaeologist. A YouTube video from one of the authors is here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SJi0sHrEI4
I disagree with the idea that "barbarism was common" in Native American societies. I don't think you can generalize from the Incas so directly like this
Once you've found some people you like, this tool is somewhat helpful for finding more people you might like to follow:
https://github.com/ArchiveTeam/warrior-dockerfile/blob/maste...
It's no myth that the Haudenosaunee and other indigenous people had sophisticated governments that could have inspired the writers of the US Constitution. The Haudenosaunee's democracy-ish form of government extends back probably a thousand years. The people who wrote the US Constitution had contact with these people. The exact extent to which this shaped the Constitution is up for debate, of course.
Yes, the US government draws from European roots too. I hope my kids learn about both the Magna Carta and the Great Law of Peace.
Marshall McLuhan introduced the idea that the "medium is the message," which is heavily alluded to in this book with images of the printing press, etc. The idea is that changes in how information is shared play a bigger role than the actual content of the messages being exchanged. Chris Cox, the Chief Product Officer, used to regularly talk about McLuhan.
McLuhan also envisioned trends in the change of information media culminating in a "global village," which Facebook echoes here in its mission of "making the world more open and connected." McLuhan expected that this would divide us more than it would unite us.
So I think what the person you're replying to was saying Facebook's appropriation of Mao Zedong and Marshall McLuhan is... weird. Facebook is directly drawing from dictators' propaganda and a philosopher who predicted what Facebook would bring about, and didn't think it was a good thing.
It paints a picture of how rich plant and animal life was before contact with Europeans. It shows how Native Californians depended on and deeply understood every root, leaf, flower, and fruit of every plant in their area. It explains how Native Californians were responsible for preserving and enriching the wildlife around them -- doing controlled burns, pruning, managing animal populations, sowing seeds, etc. These areas weren't "wild" or "pristine" at all, they were carefully managed and densely populated by Native Americans for over 10,000 years.
I think oftentimes we feel hopeless about our relationship to nature. We think if we touch it, we'll destroy it. Learning about how Native Californians lived shows how that's not inevitable at all.
They say that degrowth ideas would do "approximately nothing," but then their own article they link to states that "a shift toward plant-rich diets would do more than any other single change" to reduce emissions. They bash on eating local, but the academic paper they cite concludes "eating locally grown fruits and vegetables may be an effective strategy to meaningfully reduce food system GHGEs from transportation."