Written pieces, talks, and other bits by Zach Holman.

How Hardwood detects fixed-length lists in Parquet's encoded definition and repetition levels, bypassing Dremel reconstruction for a 1.1×–3.9× parse speed-up.

The patent expired for US7680791B2 . I invented this while at Oracle and it landed in 10gR2  with claims of ~5X better performance vs the pr...

AI gets good at anything with an answer key. Your career is everything that doesn't have one.

The real AI risk is inside the labs

A monthly recap of links in and around the worlds of data and AI that I've found interesting. Click to read Interesting Links in the Data and AI World, by rmoff, a Substack publication with hundreds o...

In the wake of OpenAI’s cyberattack against Hugging Face, few seem ready to acknowledge the implications

Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

GCP Rapid Buckets should have made WarpStream faster on GCP, but they didn't, until we found the trick. Here's how we cut P99 file write latency by 3x with a few small, surgical changes.

Found yourself on a data project and have no idea what they all are talking about? Feel excluded from all the fun discussions in the office kitchen? If only there were a humongous guide going over…

Debezium is an open source distributed platform for change data capture. Start it up, point it at your databases, and your apps can start responding to all of the inserts, updates, and deletes that…

By Amer Hesson, Marcelo Mayworm, James Mulcahy, and Brittany Truong

machine-generated submissions aren't just a hypothetical risk—they're a real problem with pivotal consequences

Loops, harnesses, and why even loop skeptics may end up with them.

On the strange hostility that grows in communities built around abstinence.

98% of readers prefer imperfect-yet-authentic human writing; most will stop reading, block you, and downvote you if they suspect AI

Written by Rohit Channe and Simran Mirchandani at Lyft.

“Perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away.” — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry AI gives us an unprecedented ability to…