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Icathian

1,450 karma · joined August 10, 2019

Currently working with: database internals and distributed systems.

Influences: Ecology academia, BigCo analytics, multiple startups, BigTech.

Interests: Systems, networks, databases, and performance optimization.

Hobbies: League of Legends, yoga, programming.

Important: If you are looking at this profile because you thought something I posted was wrong, dismissive, disrespectful, douchebaggish, what have you -- I would really like to hear from you so that I could understand how you got that impression. I won't get mad, I won't "retaliate" I just want to hear what you have to say. It is important to me to communicate clearly and if something I said struck you that way then I failed and I would like to correct it.

Note: Any comments on this site attributed to me are my opinions and not those of any current, past, or future employer. Consider yourself so notified.

Credit to ChuckMcM for this profile format. I liked it enough to steal it!

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Icathian··on Microsoft agentically ports Copilot runtime to Rust for $120K
Your reply misunderstands the parent comment, I think. MS devs clearly don't understand their output given how garbage it is.
Icathian··on Mini Shai-Hulud Strikes Again: 314 npm Packages Compromised
Kimwoolf and Aisuru kind of make my point better than yours, I think?
Icathian··on Mini Shai-Hulud Strikes Again: 314 npm Packages Compromised
Yeah, I'm reminded of 15 years ago being told Linux was super secure because people were popping Windows all the time. Turns out it was mostly just a function of effort pointed at the target, and I don't have any reason to believe that's not the case here too.
Icathian··on Mullvad exit IPs are surprisingly identifying
I deeply appreciate Mullvad's thorough approach to privacy and ethics. In this day and age, you all are an absolute breath of fresh air. Thanks for that.
Icathian··on Pgrx: Build Postgres Extensions with Rust
Postgresml closed up shop, the guy you're replying to was one of the key players there. Pgrx is trucking right along, and gaining speed at the moment.
Icathian··on Capability-Based Security for Redox: Namespace and CWD as Capabilities
Cloudflare's developer platform uses them. That's what their "bindings" are.
Icathian··on Cloudflare outage on February 20, 2026
It is not. They went about 5 years without one of these, and had a handful over the last 6 months. They're really going to need to figure out what's going wrong and clean up shop.
Icathian··on Everything that's wrong with Google Search in one image
Nope. The slope has been slippery, but way back at the top of it there were zero ads on the page.
Icathian··on Shai-Hulud malware attack: Tinycolor and over 40 NPM packages compromised
Go sits at about the same level of abstraction as Python or Java, just with less OO baked in. I'm not sure where go's reputation as "low-level" comes from. I'd be curious to hear why that's the category you think of it in?
Icathian··on Bcachefs Goes to "Externally Maintained"
I happen to work at a company that uses a ton of capnp internally and this is the first time I've seen it mentioned much outside of here. Would you mind describing what about it you think would make it a good fit for something like bcachefs?
Icathian··on GPT-5
Anyone who still takes predictive statements from leadership at AI companies as anything other than meaningless noise isn't even trying.
Icathian··on AMD CEO sees chips from TSMC's US plant costing 5%-20% more
I think you're mistaking the name of a cardinal direction for a cohesive set of political ideologies.
Icathian··on Zig's New Async I/O
> a change in a leaf function in a little file in a random helper module could introduce asynchronocity which propagates all the way up to your `pub fn main`

If this doesn't make the argument that Zig has certainly not defeated function coloring, I don't know what would.

The fact that this change to how my program runs is hidden away in the compiler instead of somewhere visible is not an improvement.

Icathian··on Figma Slides Is a Beautiful Disaster
If information is important enough to bother someone asking for a copy of it, but not important enough to spend an hour ingesting, I'm not sure what to tell you.
Icathian··on Databricks and Neon
Hosting and operating the autoscaling of the various services (compute, pageserver, safekeeper, storage broker) that it takes to make all that work is complex enough that most folks would rather not. Same as any other "managed X" service.
Icathian··on Zig, the Ideal C Replacement Or?
That's reasonable. I think major restrictions that cause you to need to refactor your code when going from debug to release are a footgun and a half, but that'd at least be defensible.
Icathian··on Zig: A new direction for low-level programming?
This is the exact same attitude as people who threw tantrums about seatbelt laws in the 90s. It was wrong then, and it's wrong now. For mostly the same reasons.
Icathian··on Less Slow C++
I would pay some real money for the rust equivalent of this kind of material. Anyone got a book or repo they like and would recommend?
Icathian··on TikTok is harming children at an industrial scale
Yeah, 100% with you on that.
Icathian··on TikTok Is Harming Children at an Industrial Scale
This is completely wrong. Kids can easily learn to read at age 5. A child who is working on "basic reading proficiency" at 8 is very behind and has not been well-served by the people responsible for raising them.
Icathian··on Show HN: Uscope, a new Linux debugger written from scratch
Termdebug works great with gdb, and I get my usual editor features as well as the full functionality of gdb. Seems fine to me.

Before I switched from emacs I had an equivalently good setup with dap-mode.

Icathian··on Apache Iceberg
I think this mischaracterizes the state of the space. Iceberg is the winner of this competition, as of a few months ago. All major vendors who didn't directly invent one of the others now support iceberg or have announced plans to do so.

Building lakehouse products on any table format but iceberg starting now seems to me like it must be a mistake.

Icathian··on Why is Cloudflare Pages' bandwidth unlimited?
I'd vote for you. God damn I wish this was the world we lived in.
Icathian··on Debugging: Indispensable rules for finding even the most elusive problems (2004)
Tacking on my own article about git bisect run. It really is an amazing little tool.

https://andrewrepp.com/git_bisect_run

Icathian··on Databases in 2024: A Year in Review
Cloudberry, last I checked, took their snapshot of all the Greenplum utilities way before the repos got archived and development went private. The backup/restore, DR, Upgrade, and other such seem to leave a lot on the table. I haven't checked in a bit, it's possible they've picked back up some of that progress.

You're completely right, I had the wrong PG version in my memory. Embarrassing, thanks for catching that.

Icathian··on Databases in 2024: A Year in Review
This is mostly correct, but it's worth mentioning that cloudberry substantially predates Greenplum going closed source. It just got quite a boost from that change happening. Different dev team too, afaik none of the original Greenplum team was involved with Cloudberry until very recently.

Also, Greenplum 7 tracks postgres 14. Which is still old at this point, but not so bad as 12....

I also don't think I'd call the architecture ancient. Just very tightly coupled to postgres' own (as a fork of postgres that tries to ingest new versions from upstream every year or two) and paying the overhead of that choice in the modern landscape.

Source: former member of the Greenplum Kernel team.

Icathian··on [dead]
I hadn't heard of this one before, I'm curious what people think. Will any of the C variants aiming to accomplish memory safety actually pick up enough adoption to be taken seriously? I don't think a 5x slowdown is going to fly, but I find the idea in general pretty interesting.

Ultimately I've picked up Rust and am betting on it long term, but I'd be very curious to hear takes from other people.

Icathian··on Why Pg_dump Is Amazing
It's been pulled to close-source by Broadcom now, but if anyone is interested there was a fairly cool from-scratch go implementation of the same basic ideological approach as pg_dump for Greenplum. Fairly cool for seeing the catalog queries it takes to pull each piece of information that goes into a schema, at the very least.

https://github.com/greenplum-db/gpbackup-archive

Icathian··on How to do distributed locking (2016)
We use it a ton at my shop for internal things like release rollouts. Fairly big tech company, and same experience. It's an excellent product.
Icathian··on Cloudflare's new marketplace lets websites charge AI bots for scraping
Do you also get mad at companies that make locks when people install them on their front doors?
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