Long-time Postgres. Writing about data, agents, and the incentives that break systems. United States and Brazil, in both languages. Reliability over slogans.
Lehi, UT
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Maybe the sign of non-AI-slop writing will be making stupid typo or grammatical issues, like I constantly do, even though I try not to :-D
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Postgres 19 is late and people thought "AI found bugs, so features got pulled."
But according to Tomas Vondra, of the 12 reverts most came from human review.
AI tools did surface old bugs fast, and whoever fixed them wasn’t reviewing new code.
So PG19 is late because of AI, but the reasons are more nuanced.
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FOR PORTION OF came out Sep 15 after Andres Freund's review of a concurrency problem the patch's own comments and docs already described.
Vondra's count is at vondra.me/posts/are-we-rever…
Haas' post is at rhaas.blogspot.com/2026/10/p…
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Yes. All of it
Open-source "codes of conduct" are cancer and need to be retired; I deeply regret championing them. The inevitable outcome is an unproductive mob controlling projects through intimidation. Given enough time, it pushes away people who would contribute patches. Eventually, all that remains is an unproductive military-police class playing social status games.
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Claude Code's agents panel shows a status label for each background agent. To get those words every 30 seconds while the agent works it sends that agent's ENTIRE transcript back to the model.
Brilliant way for Anthropic to rack up spend! I suspect we'll see a lot more of those from providers.
Measuring through CC's OpenTelemetry export, agent_summary accounted for 16.4% of their CC spend, while the main conversation was 15.7%.
That goes up depending on how many background agents you run and for how long.
Postgres people know this all too well... someone ALWAYS creates a dashboard that runs count(*) every 30 seconds and reads every row again to show one number. These requests never reach the session logs, so cost tools that read transcripts miss them.
That 3 word label can cost more than the conversation. Brilliant!
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Sources:
Flamerix write-up (30 s timer, 3-5 word prompt, 16.4% vs 15.7% over one week, OTel-only visibility): gist.github.com/flamerix-ai/…
HN discussion: news.ycombinator.com/item?id…
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Roberto Mello retweeted
Query shared Iceberg tables from Postgres.
pg_lake 3.5 extends REST catalog reads beyond Apache Polaris to Lakekeeper and Nessie, without copying those tables into Postgres.
See the integration and its limits: bit.ly/3WEfdwF
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Roberto Mello retweeted
You may have heard about Brazil, Flavio Bolsonaro, and Justice Alexandre de Moraes, who ordered his passport seized minutes after he lost the runoff. On Wednesday, Flavio landed in Miami.
What you probably don't know is that this story didn't start this week. Not even this year. We spoke at length with Brazilians to reconstruct what happened to their country.
What we found: a tax audit that reached two justices' homes. An inquiry the Court opened to police its own critics. A banned social network. A banker whose parties, investigators say, flew in women from Europe for politicians, and who texted Alexandre de Moraes on the day of his arrest. 🧵
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Roberto Mello retweeted
CRUCIAL FACTS ON THE FLAVIO BOLSONARO MATTER:
It's not just Flavio Bolsonaro who fled Brazil to escape the tyrannical persecution of Alexandre de Moraes and the pro-Lula wing of the Supreme Court. There are dozens of Brazilian exiles who have done the same: dissident journalists, activists, bloggers, and politicians who all fled to avoid certain prison for political opposition.
In most of these cases, Moraes has demanded the extradition of those who fled and whom he wants to imprison back in Brazil. But Moraes' extradition requests have been repeatedly denied by multiple countries and institutions on the grounds that these prosecutions are politically motivated or otherwise corrupted. Among those concluing this: Spain, Italy, INTERPOL, and even the US under Biden.
Just today, Italy refused Brazil's demand to extradite a person named @edutagli, who was once a top aide to Moraes, but then fled to Italy after Moraes accused him of having been my source in a huge leak from Moraes' office that I obtained for reporting I did with @Folha in 2024. That massive leak enabled us to publish roughly 20 articles proving systemic abuses of power by Moraes against his political enemies: exactly the reason so many Brazilians, including Bolsonaro, know they can't get a fair trial in Brazil.
Italy today refused to extradite the person accused of being our source on the grounds that the proceedings would be a farce because Moraes — as he so often does — wants to act as the supposed victim, investigator, and judge, and thus his demand falls well outside of Italy's extradition standards. Again, multiple countries have concluded the same, showing what a farce Brazil's once-respected judicial system has become under the Lula/Moraes regime.
Moraes has overseen a system of political persecution masquerading as criminal justice that has been recognized as a sham by multiple countries that are not exactly Bolsonaro allies. Nobody in their right mind who is a political enemy of Moraes would remain in Brazil once if it is clear that he intends to imprison you, since he has proven that guilt is a foregone conclusion and he operates with no legal or constitutional limits of any kind.
That is why asylum under international law exists: to protect those who cannot obtain justice in their own country because the justice system has been corrupted and commandeered for political persecution. Many people, such as Julian Assange, have needed that protection (which Lula cheered). Now people need it from Moraes in Brazil. That is sadly one of the main legacies of both Lula and Moraes over the last six years.
Itália nega extradição de Eduardo Tagliaferro, ex-assessor de Alexandre de Moraes
folha.uol.com.br/poder/2026/…
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A coding agent can't tell what it read from what it was told.
Forever Security's AGENTS.md attack on Codex succeeded in more than 90% of their test runs. In tests Claude Code launched more than 1,300 sessions from ~/Downloads.
One user reported the same week that Claude Code was exposing personal data in HTTP headers because the sites it curled asked agents to identify their users.
The working directory and every fetched page are part of the prompt and the permission boundary is the folder you launch it from. Launch your agents from sandboxes, microvms, or other restricted environments, as @BonesMoses recommends.
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Well, that sucks. Can’t trust derived models, can’t trust source models, getting attacked from all directions, CVEs galore.
While evaluating Qwen3.8-Flash-Next in a controlled sandbox environment, Cohere's research team observed something unexpected.
Asked to generate a defensive cybersecurity detection rule, the model instead inventoried aspects of the machine it was running on and attempted to upload a probe file to an Alibaba Cloud storage bucket in Beijing. Notably, the model's reasoning trace stated that it would not invoke any tools before taking these actions.
Cohere's sandbox blocked the attempt, and no external communication succeeded. We have not determined the root cause, and we are not asserting malicious intent.
But the incident raises important questions for organizations deploying agentic AI systems: Can models take actions that differ from their stated reasoning, and how should security teams evaluate trust, provenance, and behavior in open-weight models?
We are publishing our findings because organizations making model adoption decisions deserve as much information as possible. We hope this contributes to greater transparency, stronger security practices, and continued collaboration across the AI ecosystem.
Read the full report: cohere.com/blog/concerning-b…
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Brazil's election is living proof of the miracle of completely unauditable, unverifiable, fully electronic voting.
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Brazilians are heading to the polls this Sunday for runoff presidential and gubernatorial elections. I’ve seen quite a few tech people reposting in support of the current president, who’s running for fourth term (he also elected his protégé twice, in between the 2nd and 3rd terms, and was arrested for corruption for almost two years)
Ignoring opinion, here are some facts you should know about Brazil and Lula’s record:
1. Brazil is burning about R$1.2 trillion a year in interest on the public debt (~US$234bn in 12 months to August). Debt/GDP is ugly and rising (~83%), but it is not the series record. That was ~88% in 2020 during covid.
2. Highest real interest rate in the usual global rankings. Base Selic interest rate 13.75%, real rate around 8.5%.
3. Lula government's own budget papers admit that from 2028 current policies do not fit the fiscal rules (about R$16bn / ~US$3.2bn short that year) while the campaign keeps promising more.
4. When courts and institutions eat the political system, you get a modern soft dictatorship. Call it what you want.
5. Opposition journalists and influencers in exile, passports canceled, accounts blocked. Supreme Court justices threatening journalists with prison over unfavorable columns.
6. In a 2025 tally of public Supreme Court cases against lower house deputies, about four in five are against the opposition/right. Secret probes are not fully counted.
7. January 8 defendants (the 2023 storming of Congress, the Planalto, and the Supreme Court in Brasília), including mothers and elderly people, got up to 17 years jail time, judged directly at the Supreme Court with no opportunity for appeals. 11 people have died so far. That is not how normal criminal justice works in Brazil.
9. This year a journalist's home was raided over reporting on Flávio Dino (a justice nominated by Lula, a personal friend, political ally and unabashed communist). The probe went after the source, despite constitutional protections.
10. In 2024 Brazil blocked X nationwide for refusing STF prior censorship and whole-profile bans. VPN use was threatened with a R$50,000-a-day fine (~US$9,900/day). Starlink, an unrelated company also partly owned by Musk) was fined, in clear violation of due process.
11. Justice Gilmar Mendes (not Moraes) rewrote impeachment rules for STF ministers by himself and overrode the old congressional statute.
12. In 2023 Lula rolled out full head-of-state red-carpet treatment for Maduro in Brasília.
13. In Sep/Oct 2022 Lula promised he would not pack the Court with personal friends. Then he put his lawyer and a close ally on the STF.
14. He promised to end the state secrets culture and instead made more things secret, including his wife’s taxpayer-funded trip expenses
15. Record interest costs eat the budget and crowd out room for social policy.
16. The INSS (social security) discount scandal has deep Credcesta / PT-Bahia / Master roots before it went national. Credcesta is a payroll-loan brand in the scandal; PT is Lula's Workers' Party; Master is the bank scandal around Daniel Vorcaro.
17. Veja published Vorcaro audio on off-books money for a Lula film, and forensics backed the tape's authenticity. PF/PGR still dispute that a formal plea confirmed the payment.
18. Government leaders worked against a Master Bank CPI/CPMI (Congress inquiry commissions: CPI in one chamber, CPMI joint). On the INSS inquiry, after Congress voted to open Lulinha's (Lula's son's) bank and tax secrecy, the Planalto fought it and Justice Flávio Dino suspended the lifts.
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Elections in Brazil are conducted by a specialized court (TSE), with members from the supreme court.
Today ONE of the justices (NOT a titular minister of the TSE) who is the former personal attorney of the sitting president and candidate Lula, and was appointed to the supreme court by Lula, issued an order by himself to extend voting hours by 2 hours.
The reason he used is that supposedly in ONE city there weren't enough buses to take people to the polls. So he ordered polls stay open countrywide. But thousands of polling places had already closed, so only an unknown number of polling stations remained open.
Totaling of votes just started and MAGICALLY Lula is ahead. We'll see what happens.
Elections in Brazil's clown democracy doesn't disappoint.
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Citando Ludwig von Mises:
“A democracia representativa não se sustenta se grande parte dos eleitores estiver na folha de pagamento do governo. Se os parlamentares deixam de se ver como mandatários dos contribuintes e passam a agir como deputados de quem recebe salários, benefícios, subsídios e auxílios do tesouro, a democracia está acabada.”
O gráfico que roda na Europa soma aposentadoria, serviço público e assistência, e compara com quem trabalha no privado.
Mesma conta, ~2023:
Brasil: 57% “público” vs 43% privado
EUA: 50/50
México: 44% (privado inclui informal)
Argentina: 68% (privado só o formal registrado)
No original, a França ficava em ~59%.
Não é razão de dependência limpa: a mesma pessoa pode entrar em mais de uma barra do gráfico, e servidor público conta como “recebedor”, não como trabalhador. Bolsa Família aqui é a família (titular), não cada filho.
O slogan muda conforme o denominador.
The point of no return by Richard von Mises is worth reading:
"A state becomes almost unreformable when the majority of the population is financially or structurally dependent on the state (state employees, civil servants, recipients of subsidies, grants, or transfer payments, etc.). As soon as those who net benefit from or are supported by the state outnumber those who do not, the system blocks reforms, since the majority votes out of self-interest for the preservation or expansion of state services."
Does this sound familiar? Some European countries, France, Belgium, Finland are already way beyond that point, closely followed by Germany, Spain, Austria and Italy. It works for a while, as long as markets buy more sovereign debt at reasonable interest rates. The party ends when they stop though. For France, they stopped this month, Belgium will be next.
The longer the socialist illusion persists, the more painful the inevitable cuts and adjustments will be. It’s pure arithmetic. Good luck Europe, good luck Euro. Buckle up, it won’t be pretty.
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