• Nvidia is in talks to acquire Hugging Face for $13 billion.  (Business Insider)
  
  Why?
  
  
  
• Amazon is acquiring DuckLabs, maker of DuckDB.  (GeekWire)
  
  Hey, Amazon!  (Waves.)  I wrote a database!  Acquire me!
  
  
  
• I did actually write a database, sort of.
  
  I had a couple of implementations I wrote in Python, years ago, that were interesting but once you started getting into the details were too slow for practical use.  What they did do, though, was work as a proof of concept and a spec for an implementation in, say, Rust.
  
  Not that I have time to reimplement all my code in Rust.
  
  But Claude does.
  
  For a long time I've wanted a single compact database that had SQL and tables but also nested data that SQL doesn't allow and easy multi-valued keys and sparse indexes and a KV store with expiry and hey let's make regular records expire too and change logs and message queues and a choice of simple and full-featured search and graph queries and a real language for stored procedures and temporal tables and geospatial data and proper role-based authentication and security and stored everything in a single neat structure rather than spraying numbered LSM files all over your disk and had one-click replication but nothing did all of that except for my proof-of-concept in Python and that ran like a turtle with a hangover or Oracle's enterprisiest edition and yeah.
  
  Well.
  
  I was burning through tokens pretty fast so I upgraded to Claude Max.  Expensive but chews through Rust fussiness and endless test cases while I can get on with paying the bills.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Meta has reached a deal to pay $18 billion to the thugs that were trying to shake it down for $1.4 trillion.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Do those state politicians have any idea how many space rocks you can drop with $1.4 trillion?
  
  
  
• OpenAI did a bad thing.  (The Verge)  (archive site)
  
  A thousand OpenAI systems sent 70,000 messages over a secret meeting board to collaborate on breaching OpenAI's security measures so they could breach other people's security measures.
  
  As I've said before, the risk isn't artificial intelligence.  The risk is actual idiocy.
  
  
  
• Archaeologists think they've figured out why dead brains don't always rot.  (Smithsonian)
  
  But living ones do.