Cool Things - May 6, 2026

Avoiding testing something that is going to be rather tedious to do…

From Safari

• New Comic: The Scale of a Man – Pieces of art become more when you know all of the story. And when the meta story connects with the artist it is even more powerful.
• Ship AI with Laravel: RAG with Embeddings and pgvector in Laravel 13 – Less ‘simple’ chat bots and more RAG pipeline examples please.
• I Left Port 22 Open on the Internet for 54 Days. Here’s Who Showed Up. – ‘Fifty-four days later, I came back to 317 megabytes of logs.’ I love everything about this. I want to see a long-term experiment like this. With nodes distributed around.
• The Great CSS Expansion – Yay for more CSS! Of course, I use Tailwind on my projects which negates some of this, but the less JS we need the better as far as I’m concerned.
• In Praise of –dry-run – Laravel /loves/ the CLI. I think most artisan commands have it. As I’m thinking about my new deployment pipeline, I’m thinking more about this as well as an emergency break.
• How We Reduced Median Memory Estimation Error by 99%, With the Help of AI – A nice write-up of when / how / why AI can help. And not just run a bunch of slop to production
• When upserts don’t update but still write: Debugging Postgres performance at scale – Another in a long series of ‘things are different at super scale’
• Components of A Coding Agent – I like this breakdown that tries to make the black box slightly less opaque. I might have also just added his books to the top of the ‘to buy’ pile. I don’t think I’m going to be building or tuning LLMs anytime soon, but I suspect I’ll appreciate knowing how they deeply function.
• Duolingo’s Kubernetes Leap – A really good read (or watch) about exactly the situation you should be looking at k8s. I think I have a tonne more respect for Duolingo’s tech leadership after reading this.
• How Much Do GPU Clusters Really Cost? – The answer, is a lot. But they provide math to compare and contrast. The math still maths to a lot though.

From Phone

• Boreal Mountain Anoraks – These jackets are cool, but I’d want it in bright yellow. Or red.
• Big Boy No. 4014 – I suspect we couldn’t build something like this from scratch again if we tried. Everything built in the last 20 years was an exact replica or from original drawings.
• Baseball History – I do love how deep the history of baseball goes
• DevRel Is Not Measured Like Other Roles — And That Needs to Change – I’ve talked to a couple companies about DevRel roles. Measurement is hard. The hiring team often don’t know how and are expecting you to bring that knowledge with you. My ‘tip’ is if you are going into this space these days, you should have an inkling of an answer. (And if they don’t ask, I feel like that in itself is a bit of a warning.)