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Why LLMs Drift into Convincing Nonsense (And a Practical Solution)

Level of difficultyMedium
Reading time14 min
Reach and readers20K

Imagine you have an idea powerful enough to change the world. Your tool of choice is a state-of-the-art LLM, ready to help you formalize the problem, generate hypotheses, and synthesize a solution. What you receive is a construct that is internally logical, elegant, and coherent... yet completely wrong. It's a mix of established facts, model-generated hallucinations, and your own subtle biases. With no way to test it in practice or design a clean experiment, the entire endeavor suddenly starts to look like sophisticated nonsense.

So, what went wrong along the way? From the very first prompt, the model doesn't truly "understand" your ambiguous intent. Instead, it steers you towards a formulation that fits its familiar and computationally cheap patterns. This guidance happens through clarifying questions and structured options, essentially funneling you down one of its predefined "corridors." This behavior isn't driven by any explicit "will" of the model; it's an emergent consequence of probabilistic optimization—minimizing prediction error. For the system, a structured, predictable dialogue is both optimal and safe. This aligns perfectly with the developers' goals: it's cheaper, more stable, and most users are satisfied with quick, template-based answers.

The result is that mathematical efficiency serves engineering and commercial objectives. There is no systemic incentive to combat the AI's tendency to reduce a complex problem to a simple, "cheap" answer. It's profitable for developers, economical for the model, and often, the user doesn't even know what an "ideal" answer would look like.

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Postgres Pro TDE — security and performance

Level of difficultyMedium
Reading time14 min
Reach and readers18K

TDE comes in many flavors — from encryption at the TAM level to full-cluster encryption and tablespace markers. We take a close look at Percona, Cybertec/EDB, Pangolin/Fujitsu, and show where you lose performance and reliability, and where you gain flexibility.

On top of that, Vasily Bernstein, Deputy head of product development, and Vladimir Abramov, senior security engineer, will share how Postgres Pro Enterprise implements key rotation without rewriting entire tables — and why AES-GCM was the clear choice.

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The Russian trace in the history of the PostgreSQL logo

Level of difficultyEasy
Reading time7 min
Reach and readers21K

The story of the PostgreSQL logo was shared by Oleg Bartunov, CEO of Postgres Professional, who personally witnessed these events and preserved an archive of correspondence and visual design development for the database system.

Our iconic PostgreSQL logo — our beloved “Slonik” — has come a long way. Soon, it will turn thirty! Over the years, its story has gathered plenty of myths and speculation. As a veteran of the community, I decided it’s time to set the record straight, relying on the memories of those who were there. Who actually came up with it? Why an elephant? How did it end up in a diamond, and how did the Russian word “slonik” become a part of the global IT vocabulary?

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Build a Short Video App Like DramaBox to Engage Global Audiences

Level of difficultyEasy
Reading time6 min
Reach and readers14K

Short video apps have completely reshaped how people consume entertainment. Instead of sitting down for a two-hour movie or a 45-minute TV episode, viewers are now hooked on bite-sized videos that fit into their busy schedules. This shift has been accelerated by Gen Z and Millennials, who prefer quick storytelling formats that are both interactive and engaging.

In 2025, the OTT and short video industry is projected to see over 1.5 billion monthly active users worldwide, with an average revenue per user (ARPU) of nearly $12. The reasons are clear: affordability, accessibility, and convenience. The success of apps like DramaBox shows that people are willing to spend money on shorter dramas as long as they deliver strong storytelling.

For entrepreneurs, this presents a golden opportunity to build OTT platforms like DramaBox and tap into this global demand.

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Building a Resume Matcher with tRPC, NLP, and Vertex AI

Level of difficultyEasy
Reading time6 min
Reach and readers15K

I share how I built a resume matcher app using tRPC, TypeScript, and Google Vertex AI. The project takes PDF resumes and job postings, extracts text, applies basic NLP for skill detection, and then calls Gemini 1.5 Flash for deeper analysis. Along the way, I explain why tRPC felt faster and cleaner than REST or GraphQL for an MVP, show code snippets from the repo, and discuss both the benefits and trade-offs of this approach.

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START: how to defeat hallucinations and teach LLMs accurate calculations

Level of difficultyEasy
Reading time3 min
Reach and readers11K

START is an open-source LLM designed for precise calculations and code verification. It addresses two major issues that most standard models face: hallucinations and errors in multi-step calculations. This article explains why these problems arise and how START solves them.

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OpenAI's Codex CLI Agent: The Complete VS Code Setup Guide

Level of difficultyEasy
Reading time3 min
Reach and readers16K

This tutorial will guide you through the process of integrating OpenAI’s powerful Codex coding agent directly into your Visual Studio Code environment. This tool functions as an AI pair programmer, capable of understanding complex prompts to execute commands, write code, run tests, and even build entire applications from scratch.

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How we loaded a petabyte into PostgreSQL before New Year — and what happened next

Level of difficultyMedium
Reading time17 min
Reach and readers13K

It all started as a joke by the office coffee machine. But, as with every decent joke, it suddenly sounded worth trying — and before we knew it, we were knee-deep in an experiment that turned out to be anything but trivial, complete with a whole minefield of gotchas.

It began simply: while everyone else was busy debating hardware tuning and squeezing out extra TPS from their systems, we thought — why not just shove a huge chunk of data into PostgreSQL and see how it holds up? Like, really huge. Say, a one-petabyte database. Let’s see how it survives that.

It was December 10, the boss wanted the report by January 20, and New Year was less than a month away. And that itch that all engineers know? It hit hard.

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How to load test PostgreSQL database and not miss anything

Level of difficultyMedium
Reading time14 min
Reach and readers14K

During load testing of Tantor Postgres databases or other PostgreSQL-based databases using the standard tool pgbench, specialists often encounter non-representative results and the need for repeated tests due to the fact that details of the environment (such as DBMS configuration, server characteristics, PostgreSQL versions) are not recorded. In this article we are going to review author's pg_perfbench, which is designed to address this issue. It ensures that scenarios are repeatable, prevents the loss of important data, and streamlines result comparison by registering all parameters in a single template. It also automatically launches pgbench with TPC-B load generation, collects all metadata on the testing environment, and generates a structured report.

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AGENTS.md: The README for Your AI Agent

Level of difficultyEasy
Reading time3 min
Reach and readers13K

If you’re like me and work with multiple AI coding agents, you know the frustration of managing different instruction files. It’s a pain to keep everything updated across various formats. But I’ve got some great news for you. A new, simplified standard has emerged, and it’s called AGENTS.md.

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My way of a full system backup without external software: incremental rsync plus btrfs with zstd compression

Level of difficultyMedium
Reading time3 min
Reach and readers7.5K

The repo of this script is https://gitlab.com/vitaly‑zdanevich/full‑backup/‑/blob/master/full‑backup.sh

Incremental with hard links means that if a file is not changed, on the next backup it will link to the same underlying data, like deduplication. Hard links — its usual files.

Also, this script ignores .gitignore of every folder.

Run this script from another system.

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We’ve learned how to migrate databases from Oracle to Postgres Pro at 41 TB/day

Level of difficultyEasy
Reading time3 min
Reach and readers7.6K

41 TB/day from Oracle to Postgres Pro without stopping the source system — not theory, but numbers from our latest tests. We broke the migration into three stages: fast initial load, CDC from redo logs, and validation, and wrapped them into ProGate. In this article, we’ll explain how the pipeline works, why we chose Go, and where the bottlenecks hide.

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Partition and rule: sharing practical knowledge about partitioning in Postgres Pro

Level of difficultyMedium
Reading time11 min
Reach and readers12K

Declarative partitioning may sound complex, but in reality it’s just a way to tell your database how best to organize large tables — so it can optimize queries and make maintenance easier. Let’s walk through how it works and when declarative partitioning can save the day.

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