Alexander Ulrich

GraalVM 25 is here, with lots of updates for native compilation, GraalPy, GraalJS, and WebAssembly.
Faster and better than ever!🐰🚀
Download: www.graalvm.org/downloads/
Release notes: www.graalvm.org/release-note...

One side says that LLMs lack knowledge of the world because they’re extensively trained on text and have no model of the real world, the other side says LLMs have PhD-level intelligence. Guys, guys—you’re both right

LOL Musgrave

Little Bobby Tables had a brother

What Are People Still Doing on X? Imagine if your favorite neighborhood bar turned into a Nazi hangout

I realize posting this here is preaching to the choir. But after the Grok White Genocide thing & Ye essentially launching an exclusive Neo Nazi single on the platform... I felt motivated to write about X and how bizarre it is that so many people (news outlets, celebrities, politicians) use it

USING KEY in Recursive CTEs Recursive CTEs in SQL allow for powerful iterative queries like graph traversals but can be memory-intensive and slow due to repeated row accumulation. DuckDB’s new USING KEY feature addresses this by...

Our USING KEY variant of recursive CTEs has landed in DuckDB 1.3 Formerly an off-the-beaten-path researchy idea, now available in a real off-the-shelf DBMS. Hooray! 🎉

duckdb.org/2025/05/23/u...

This is me.

Cat: “I cannot convey to you just how much I genuinely despise this food.”
Me: “Here, have this instead.”
Cat: “OMG I LOVE IT.”
Me: “It’s exactly the same bowl of food. I just took it away for six seconds then put it back in the same place.”
Cat: “I am fire and the wind. Do not attempt to know me.”

China admits its latest aggression around #Taiwan is a rehearsal for a blockade. This latest exercise is described as "stern warning and forceful deterrence" by an Eastern Theater Commander spokesman. A quick examination of the exercise and its purpose. 1/11 🧵

Daily reminder of who Musk is:

before tiktok,
before bluesky,
before twitter,
before meta,
before it all,
there were sewers.

after all, there will be sewers.

NASA’s updated global temperature spirals including 2024. Up and up and up.

2024 @copernicusecmwf.bsky.social #climate data out today:

📈 2024 - first year more than 1.5°C above pre-industrial; for ERA5 it was 1.6ºC
🌡️ the past 10 years were the 10 warmest years on record
📈 2024 was warmest year for all continental regions, except Antarctica and Australasia

🌍🌡️🧪⚒️🌊

A long thread on the war and the current situation. Although the worst-case scenarios didn’t materialize in 2024, it was the most difficult period since spring 2022. There were positive developments, and bright spots, but the current trajectory is negative. 1/

Meta's AI Profiles Are Indistinguishable From Terrible Spam That Took Over Facebook The Meta AI profiles everyone is mad about are old, were a colossal failure, and many are already dead.

The currently viral Meta AI profiles are old and are already inactive because they were such a colossal failure and were indistinguishable from AI spam. This 'inevitable' future Zuckerberg is trying to shove down our throats is being completely rejected

www.404media.co/metas-ai-pro...

Meta’s Big Bet on Bots Meta says to expect AI “profiles” on Facebook and Instagram.

I treat Facebook as a glorified address book. In the last year, I've been floored by the amount of AI slop in my timeline that Meta promotes. And now the company is going all-in on supporting AI bots that are making more AI slop. 2025 will be a big year for the enshitification of the internet!

As a straight white man, I salute the hubris, shamelessness, and utter contempt for humanity it requires to create a corporate bot "Proud Black queer momma" account which spits out saccharine posts polished with fake children and appropriated AAVE.

Bravo! 🫡

Evolution journal editors resign en masse Board members expressed concerns over high fees, editorial independence, and use of AI in editorial processes.

"In 2023 Elsevier began using AI during production without informing the board, resulting in many style and formatting errors, as well as reversing versions of papers that had already been accepted and formatted by the editors."

very innovative, very cool

Databases in 2024: A Year in Review Andy rises from the ashes of his dead startup and discusses what happened in 2024 in the database game.

Buckle up because we're banging into the new year with my annual retrospective of the last year in databases! Highlights include license change blowback, Databricks vs. Snowflake gangwar, @duckdb.org's shotgun weddings, and buying a quarterback to impress your lover: www.cs.cmu.edu/~pavlo/blog/...

I was excited to tell my kids that there's a sequel to Encanto, only to scroll down and learn that Google's AI just completely made this up

Does current AI represent a dead end? Eerke Boiten, Professor of Cyber Security at De Montfort University Leicester, explains his belief that current AI should not be used for serious applications.

www.bcs.org/articles-opi...

Don't Let the Enemies of Truth Ruin Wikipedia Elon Musk and other reactionary liars hate the "last good website" because it won't go along with their distortions

Elon Musk denounced Wikipedia (again), lying about its budget.
Of course he and other post-truth reactionaries hate it. It's a bastion of truth they haven't been able to buy or bully.
Wikipedia isn't perfect—what is?—but it's a valuable resource we should, and can, protect.
My latest, in Arc Digital

Also I've come to the conclusion that literally everyone I ever followed (or enjoyed seeing) on the former Twitter has migrated off the service; I'd say about 75% are primarily posting here and 25% are primarily on threads (and most are on both in some way). The replacement is entirely complete.

Our cat, somewhat inconvenienced by a bite wound and as a result having to wear a cone collar, has taken to watching professional StarCraft 2 games. I’m sure he’s a fierce critic of strategy.

Experte: Tatverdächtiger klassisches Beispiel für globalen digitalen Rechtsextremismus | MDR.DE Der mutmaßliche Täter von Magdeburg gilt als Anhänger des digitalen globalen Rechtsextremismus. Dass gerade Akteure dieses Spektrums die Tat nun instrumentalisieren, ist aus Experten-Sicht nicht nur ü...

Jemand flieht aus Saudi-Arabien nach DE, um dann die deutsche Gesellschaft anzugreifen? Ein langes, ausgeruhtes Interview mit dem Radikalisierungsexperten, der Taleb A. schon vor der Tat kannte — und #Magdeburg in einer Reihe mit #Halle und #Hanau sieht:

www.mdr.de/nachrichten/...

The future is uncertain but can we just relish this moment as prisoners reunite with families after decades?

Since you’re already warmed up, want to do mine as well?

Dijkstra Fellowship Acceptance Speech by Marcin Zukowski (Dijkstra Award 2024) Website: https://www.cwi.nl/en/events/dijkstra-awards/cwi-lectures-dijkstra-fellowship/ About the Dijkstra Fellowship The Dijkstra Fellowship is named after former CWI researcher Edsger W. Dijkstra, who was one of the most influential scientists in the history of CWI. Dijkstra developed the shortest path algorithm, among other contributions. The first Dijkstra Fellowships were awarded to David Chaum and Guido van Rossum in 2019. Dijkstra Fellowship 2024 for Marcin Żukowski Marcin Żukowski started his career at CWI. He did his MSc and PhD research on database management system architectures in our Database Architectures (DA) group. As a PhD student under the supervision of Peter Boncz, he developed the innovative concept of vectorized execution to improve the performance of database queries. This research received the DaMoN 2007 Best Paper Award and also the CIDR 2024 Test of Time Award, established by the Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research (CIDR). After his PhD, Żukowski co-founded CWI spin-off VectorWise (now Actian), turning his research into a high performance and highly scalable analytical database system. It became the blueprint for analytical databases, that is still widely used. After yielding a rapid technological and commercial growth, he left the company in 2012 to co-found Snowflake in Silicon Valley. Snowflake offered the first cloud-based data warehousing service that is truly designed for the cloud. Notable features are that it is an ‘elastically’ growing and shrinking system based on how busy it is, separating computation from storage, and automating many administration and configuration tasks. Snowflake uses vectorized query execution and lightweight compression methods in its columnar data storage, two techniques that were co-designed by Żukowski during his PhD years at CWI. Role model After leaving Snowflake earlier this year, Marcin Żukowski stays connected with academia by supervising students, publishing papers and taking part in computer science events. He is also an investor and advisor, supporting technology development and innovation in his home country Poland. “Marcin is an excellent example of how to apply CWI's mission in practice. He used his PhD research at CWI to create versatile foundational software products that are now widely used, and shares his knowledge and experience with the public and in particular with young technology entrepreneurs”, CWI director Ton de Kok says. CWI Lectures combined with Dijkstra Fellowship award Topics of the CWI lectures are related to the architecture of data processing and analysis systems.

Furthermore, we have now posted the videos of these lectures in the Dutch Seminar on Data Systems Design (DSDSD) YouTube channel:

bit.ly/cwida-dijkst...

many 🙏 to Daniel ten Wolde & Leonardo Kuffo Rivero for editing these!

This will enable substantial warmup and memory footprint improvements for Truffle languages (github.com/oracle/graal...)!

Conceptual example of the Bytecode DSL. Use any parser you like, create operations using an AST-like builder with custom node-like operations. The DSL generates an automatic bytecode format with optimizations for you.

Good news everyone! 🎉 After two years of R&D, we've finally merged the Bytecode DSL into master! Truffle now generates bytecode interpreters from AST-like specifications for you. ASTs are dead, long live bytecodes!

Check it out: github.com/oracle/graal...