I'm putting these down on paper, let's see how I do:

Model intelligence has plateaued. The scaling hypothesis was rejected years ago, but labs and true believers keep it around like a ghost to keep people hopeful. We've mostly seen gains from improved tooling and chain of thought techniques. Chain of thought is useful but it shouldn't be counted as improved model intelligence: if you had the ability to make a model that performed as well as a CoT one without spending the extra tokens you'd just do that.

I've been a customer of TornadoVPS since 2011. The VPS came with an ext3 formatted filesystem which was at the time the default filesystem in the Debian installer. In the meantime the kernel's ext3 driver depreciated and eventually removed prompting me to do the in-place upgrade to ext4. However, at some point I wanted to get a new, clean filesystem with bigger inodes, fast_commit support and year 2038 fixes.

Taylor Swift s/t - Amazon Linux 2

Banning or regulating TikTok has been discussed for years but now Congress may actually make a move towards it with the RESTRICT Act. Lawfare has the history of TikTok regulations and a brief summary of the RESTRICT Act and gives some useful analysis, although I wish they'd write more on it given the popular attention the bill's had so far.

I’ve put in my fair share of time with PostgreSQL. It has no shortage of functionality and I believe its expansive feature set drove a lot of its growing popularity in the 2010s. As my time with the database has worn on I’ve come up with a handful of features that I wish the database had. Some of these are ideas borrowed from other systems, some are inventions of my own. The real tragedy is that I simply don’t have the time to implement the patches myself.

Ed. note - This is the transcription of a memo written to President Kennedy that explores the CIA's bureaucracy, explains its cultural problems, and suggests organizational reforms. It is dated June 30, 1961, not long after the infamous Bay of Pigs invasion in April of 1961. The author, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., was a "roving reporter" who reported directly to the President. This is a candid and well-written memo.