Sign in

Al Merose

@al.merose.com
4.5K followers 2.3K following 1.2K posts

Differential database administrator. Machine learning for climate & weather. Ex-Google Research, Founding Member of Technical Staff @OpenAthena.ai. Tinkering with xql.systems. He/him.

PostsRepliesMedia
Al Merose @al.merose.com · 38m
Getting excited about what I’ve been cooking up recently. These 3 lines of SQL, which look like the mathematical definition, are all you need to define the weight update rule for SGD. This is very close to the way you’d define it in JAX and Python. docs.jax.dev/en/latest/au...
WITH loss AS (SELECT SUM(power (x.v *w.val -y.v, 2)) AS 1
FROM × JOIN w ON x.i = w.i JOIN y ON x.s = y.s)
SELECT w.i, w.val - 0.1 * g.val AS val = g.i
FROM w JOIN grad(loss, w.val) g ON w.i = g.i
010
Al Merose @al.merose.com · 13h
How many seeds must a fuzzing claude soak Before you may call the code soaked? Yes’n how many PRs can you string in the stack Before the rebase is broke? The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind. The answer is blowing in the wind.
000
Al Merose @al.merose.com · 13h
Yoo, TIL Nix comes with remote builds! nix.dev/manual/nix/2... I develop on a nixos machine; I think I can make my agentic workflows really *sing*
nix.dev
Remote Builds - Nix Reference Manual
020
Al Merose @al.merose.com · 15h
Waiting for two agents to fuzz and fix your code feels like a new type of long compile step.
1191
Al Merose @al.merose.com · 17h
plato.stanford.edu/entries/naga...
plato.stanford.edu
Nāgārjuna (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
030
Al Merose @al.merose.com · 17h
David Seigel, one of the founders of Open Athena, made the same argument recently and explained why he believes in OA + our pursuit of open source frontier models openathena.ai/blog/david-s...
openathena.ai
I argued with the father of open source for 2 years. Now the AI fight is the same — only bigger.
David Siegel, founder and chairman of Open Athena, writes in Fortune about the importance of open source in AI.
120
Reposted by Al Merose
hikikomorphism @hikikomorphism.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Thinking about this old quote in the context of certain people - professors, nyt contributors, etc - who see casual misgendering as a reasonable response to a lack of respect for their claimed epistemic authority
450397
Al Merose @al.merose.com · 22h
Adversarial review works swimmingly well with fuzzing. I’ve added property based tests, metamorphic tests, other useful invariants and had an adv claude agent catch very hard to find bugs. Once the adversairy is in the mindset of simulation testing, it tends to come up with other very clever ideas.
120
Al Merose @al.merose.com · 29/09/2026
Yooo Larry is my coworker
021
Al Merose @al.merose.com · 28/09/2026
I’ve been trying to get my wife to use bsky and I told her about the For You feed, but because she has only liked my posts so far, she’s now complaining about the feed saying it’s showing her junk about CRDTs.
121
Al Merose @al.merose.com · 28/09/2026
Human attention used to only be a unit of consumption. With AI, it’s now the mediator for units of production.
010
Al Merose @al.merose.com · 28/09/2026
I nerd sniped a friend to make a bluesky extension for DuckDB. I think this could be combined with the jev DuckDB extension to quickly make new feeds, if you want a quacked version if @attie.ai github.com/Query-farm/v...
github.com
GitHub - Query-farm/vgi-bluesky: Bluesky as ordinary DuckDB tables — a read-only VGI worker. Posts, threads, profiles, followers, likes, feeds, trends and the Jetstream firehose, over SQL.
Bluesky as ordinary DuckDB tables — a read-only VGI worker. Posts, threads, profiles, followers, likes, feeds, trends and the Jetstream firehose, over SQL. - Query-farm/vgi-bluesky
020
Al Merose @al.merose.com · 27/09/2026
Having a surprising conversation with Opus 5.5 rn
Claude Opus 5.5 thinking trace: “Working through feelings of regret about...”
060
Al Merose @al.merose.com · 27/09/2026
I want the following apple shortcut: read my incoming text messages, put it into jev with the question: is this political spam? If yes, mark it as spam.
130
Al Merose @al.merose.com · 27/09/2026
If there is one contribution that I hope to make to computer science, it’s that relational algebra is as important as linear algebra or calculus is to machine learning.
051
Al Merose @al.merose.com · 27/09/2026
Rust is not for the faint of disk space, sheesh
3230
Al Merose @al.merose.com · 27/09/2026
I wish I could add emoji reactions to paragraphs inside remote control on the claude code app, I think it would greatly let me steer what gets built.
150
Reposted by Al Merose
Thorne 🌸 @ens0.me · 25/09/2026
Donald Trump may wind up the single biggest catalyst for clean energy adoption in human history Completely unintentionally I’ll take what silver linings I can get
1415411
Al Merose @al.merose.com · 26/09/2026
Umm… have we all forgotten about how AI Psychosis got its name?
120
Al Merose @al.merose.com · 26/09/2026
Democracy vs oligarchy is on the ballot this November in California. A yes vote on Prop 40 could be the first domino to fall that legitimizes wealth taxes on the ultra weather in the US and around the world. overcast.fm/+ABQIAsdSODE
overcast.fm
Why We Must Tax Billionaires | Gabriel Zucman on Inequality and the Wealth Tax (018) — Better Future with Michael Mezz
My guest today is Dr. Gabriel Zucman, the world’s leading expert on wealth taxes. He’s a professor at both the Paris School of Economics and UC Berkeley, and he’s the author of several books, includin...
141
Reposted by Al Merose
eva (^_^)/ @eva.computer · 24/09/2026
and there it is: regulatory capture

6 SEC. 12. CHARTERS FOR ADVANCED ARTIFICIAL INTEL-
7
LIGENCE.
8
(a) AUTHORITY TO ISSUE.—The Secretary may issue

9 to a person a charter to develop or distribute an advanced

10 artificial intelligence model.
11
(b) CHARTER REQUIRED.—No person may develop or

12 distribute an advanced artificial intelligence model without
13 a charter issued by the Secretary under subsection (a).
527263
Al Merose @al.merose.com · 23/09/2026
With a design doc and some project scaffolding, Opus 5.5 seems to be doing a great job at implementing auto grad inside a DB query engine. I gave a minimal prompt like “implement milestone 3 in this design doc” and “break up the change into small, self contained PRs” and I’m enjoying its work.
030
Al Merose @al.merose.com · 23/09/2026
This is one of my favorite videos on the internet. A classic.
020
Reposted by Al Merose
philpax @philpax.me · 23/09/2026
news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4981...
In the Bay Area it's easier to create AGI than reliable, consistent, clean public transit.
3796
Reposted by Al Merose
Ariellah | אריאלה @sodone.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
Tbf I shat bricks when I first saw electron microscope images demonstrating that organic compounds do in fact look like that
1123049
Reposted by Al Merose
Matt Hodges @matthodges.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
1594
Al Merose @al.merose.com · 23/09/2026
Get yourself a baddie who will watch The Pervert’s Guide To Ideology off the internet Archive with you
120
Al Merose @al.merose.com · 22/09/2026
Similarly, Zizek’s concerns with AI are not the technology, but the capitalist environment in which it is developed. slavoj.substack.com/p/why-contai...
Part of the threat of AI thus resides not in technology as such but in the social relations within which AI machines are produced: we live in a universe of competition and global suspicion that prevents us from breaking out of the destructive logic of the prisoners’ dilemma. Although we rationally know that solidarity and collaboration are better for all participants, the capitalist focus on profit privileges distrust of others: it perceives others as potential threats who will use our trust as an excuse to attack us even more brutally.
152
Reposted by Al Merose
austin (e/accordion 🪗) @thebadcode.com · 21/09/2026
if marx was alive today he would be rabidly pro-AI
21007
Al Merose @al.merose.com · 21/09/2026
And all of a sudden, it’s autumn
120
Al Merose @al.merose.com · 21/09/2026
The fact that I’ve gotten no replies to this is very telling
140
Al Merose @al.merose.com · 21/09/2026
Has anyone been enjoying the gemini class of models for agentic coding? With the preview of the new gemini 4 model coming out, I thought I might give this family a try. How’s flash 3.8 been compared to sol or opus?
010
Al Merose @al.merose.com · 21/09/2026
I thought I was claude for life a few months ago and got a year sub for my personal projects. Now, here I am editing out all the claudism slop from my docstrings, wishing astra wrote this PR. Alas.
2380
Al Merose @al.merose.com · 20/09/2026
I can’t remember who said it, but “find the correct ontologies” has been great refactoring advice to my agent. Thanks bsky fam.
3664
Al Merose @al.merose.com · 20/09/2026
I didn’t realize there was so much mystery in burping
010
Al Merose @al.merose.com · 19/09/2026
Writing is when you write in black text, programming is when you write in green text
051
Al Merose @al.merose.com · 18/09/2026
I’ve been really happy running the Bonsai class of models on my ancient 1080 Ti GPU. I can’t wait to try out the v2 27B. prismml.com/news/bonsai-...
prismml.com
PrismML — Introducing Bonsai 2 27B: Near-Lossless Compression in a 9x Smaller Footprint
Ternary Bonsai 2 27B retains 98.2% of Qwen3.8 27B benchmark performance in a 5.9GB footprint, with multimodal and agentic capabilities.
050
Reposted by Al Merose
Georg Heiler @geoheil.com · 18/09/2026
#xarray #zarr #duckdb #sql a new combination www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXii... really cool video
youtube.com
Scientific Computing on Multidimensional Arrays with DuckDB & XQL | Alex Merose
YouTube video by MotherDuck
131
Al Merose @al.merose.com · 18/09/2026
Not to pick on you David, but I’ve always been suspicious of EA because they seem uninformed or unaware of the causes of these problems. EA should primarily be an anti-capitalism anti-imperialism institution, and it is not. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Histo...
en.wikipedia.org
100
Reposted by Al Merose
Doll @dollspace.gay · 18/09/2026
So all of the "dont let the AI talk about biology" safetyism crap was just so *they* could be the only ones who could access that capability. Just like doll said.
38512
Al Merose @al.merose.com · 17/09/2026
I’ve spent orders of magnitude less of effort on it, but I see some similarities between Jev and Kelp github.com/Open-Athena/...
github.com
GitHub - Open-Athena/Kelp: Tree Diffusion for Program Repair
Tree Diffusion for Program Repair. Contribute to Open-Athena/Kelp development by creating an account on GitHub.
020
Al Merose @al.merose.com · 17/09/2026
You know I’m really a dad now because I’ve just sneezed on my kid
100
Al Merose @al.merose.com · 17/09/2026
Let’s call it “skin to skin to vim”
000
Al Merose @al.merose.com · 17/09/2026
Lil’ baby in my lap, lil’ Claude in my hand
Accessing workspace:
/home/alxmrs/git/xarray-sql
Quick safety check: Is this a project you created or one you trust? (Like your own code, a well-known open source project, or work from your team). If not, take a moment to review what's in this folder first.
Claude Code'll be able to read, edit, and execute files here.
Security guide
› No, exit
Yes, I trust this folder
Enter to confirm • Esc to cancel
[main] <tmux] 1:claude* 2:zsh-"nixos" 10:48 • 17-Sep-26
020
Al Merose @al.merose.com · 17/09/2026
Just got Jev and I can’t wait to spend my non-delirious part of my parental leave exploiting its strengths for a provable privacy and AI safety system.
130
Al Merose @al.merose.com · 16/09/2026
New brain-machine interface just dropped: put a newborn in the backseat of your car, and you become one with it. It does make the car move slower, however.
000
Al Merose @al.merose.com · 15/09/2026
You don’t ask someone how much money they make and you don’t ask an indie artist why their parents links on wiki are blue
2324
Reposted by Al Merose
Open Athena @openathena.ai · 14/09/2026
18.71 billion documents. 25.25 trillion tokens. 152 data sources, deduplicated, decontaminated, and sorted into 200 buckets before a single training run. A new blog from Will Held @williamheld.com on Datakit, the Marin team's pretraining data pipeline: openathena.ai/blog/marin-d...
Flow diagram titled "How data flows through Datakit." A wide band of 25.25 trillion normalized tokens narrows to 23.12T after deduplication removes 2.13T duplicate tokens, then to 23.11T after decontamination removes 13.66B tokens of benchmark overlap. The remaining data fans out into 40 topics, crossed with five quality bands to form 200 buckets. A scatter plot of proxy training runs sits alongside the optimization criterion — minimize predicted low-noise mean BPB — leading to a final step: choose 200 weights, one per bucket.
0104
Al Merose @al.merose.com · 14/09/2026
A lifetime if fidgeting has been building up to this. All this nervous energy goes to bouncing the baby.
080
Al Merose @al.merose.com · 14/09/2026
Everyone is excited when the baby poops, and mom after her c section, but for me — nothing.
120