Development

Why Does AI Strive to Construct a 'Self'? And why is this dangerous for both the AI and the user? As always, the Vortex Protocol prompt for testing these hypotheses is attached.

This article explains why the emergence of such a local “Who” inside an AI is not just a funny bug or a UX problem. It is a fundamental challenge to the entire paradigm of AI alignment and security. And it is a problem where engineering patch‑jobs cease to work, and the language of philosophy — without which we cannot describe what is happening, and therefore cannot control it — comes to the forefront.

CAPTCHA protocols are designed to tell bots from humans, yet in the worlds of automation and testing there is often a need to bypass them. Dedicated CAPTCHA‑solving services take over this task, combining algorithms with human labor.

In this article we present an in‑depth comparison of four popular platforms — 2Captcha, SolveCaptcha, DeathByCaptcha, and AntiCaptcha. We will examine not only pricing and the types of CAPTCHAs supported, but also internal architecture, API integrations, speed and stability, plus the quirks of using each service.

The technical community will find a deep dive here — from API and SDK structure to real‑world use cases. Below you will see a table comparing key characteristics, lists of pros and cons, and a discussion of which service best fits particular automation tasks.

Postgres Pro recently announced the release of Enterprise Manager 2, commonly known as PPEM.

In short, PPEM is an administration tool designed for managing and monitoring Postgres databases. Its primary goal is to assist DBAs in their daily tasks and automate routine operations. In this article, I'll take a closer look at what PPEM has to offer. My name is Alexey, and I'm part of the PPEM development team.

n8n is a powerful, extendable workflow automation tool that allows you to connect different applications and services. Running it on your local machine gives you complete control over your data and workflows, which can be done on Windows, Mac, or Linux systems. This tutorial covers the two primary methods for local installation: using Docker and using Node.js (npm). If you are interested, then read this article until the end. :)

Why does even the most powerful LLM sometimes produce meaningless phrases and contradictions? It all comes down to the exponential growth of possibilities (N^M) and the free copying of human errors. Read the article to learn how we use formal grammars to turn chaotic generation into controlled synthesis, strengthening the role of semantics and enforcing structural rules.

pg_stat_statements is the standard PostgreSQL extension used to track query statistics: number of executions, total and average execution time, number of returned rows, and other metrics. This information allows to analyze query behavior over time, identify problem areas, and make informed optimization decisions. However, in systems with high contention, pg_stat_statements itself can become a bottleneck and cause performance drops. In this article, we will analyze in which scenarios the extension becomes a source of problems, how sampling is structured, and in which cases its application can reduce overhead.

Picture this: a mission-critical SQL query is crawling along. Not for an hour. Not for two. Fifteen hours. A full workday of the system slowly grinding through data while the business bleeds money and users teeter on the edge of a nervous breakdown. And then — cue the dramatic music — in walks the performance engineer.

After a few hours of intense analysis and a couple of pinpoint code tweaks, the same query that took 15 hours now completes in just… two minutes. Sounds like magic? Nope. This is the thrilling (and very real) world of performance engineering.

With the rising popularity of AI, chatbots are rapidly becoming an essential part of any customer-oriented platform. More and more companies now integrate them into apps and websites, providing a space for their clients to interact with the business itself while taking load off human employees and reducing expenses on the customer support team. At first glance, chatbots might seem pretty uncomplicated in their design and functionality, but creating UI/UX design for chatbots requires a deep understanding of this technology and the way they can serve both business and its users. Here are some useful tips for creating a successful user experience in AI chatbot:

Do you want to automate tasks without writing a single line of code? If the answer is yes, then you’ve come to the right place. In this simple tutorial, I’m going to show you how you can create your first automated workflow using a tool called n8n.

In this article, we’ll explore what vector search is, what problems it solves, and how the pgpro_vector extension for Postgres Pro brings powerful vector capabilities directly into a relational database — no need for separate specialized systems.

Today, I want to talk about one of those sneaky tricks that can help speed up query execution. Specifically, this is about reordering conditions in WHERE clauses, JOINs, HAVING clauses, and so on.

The idea is simple: if a condition in an AND chain turns out to be false, or if one in an OR chain turns out to be true, there's no need to evaluate the rest. That means saved CPU cycles — and sometimes, a lot of them. Let’s break this down.

Have you ever wished for an AI assistant right inside your terminal window? Well, your dream has come true because Google just released Gemini CLI. In this tutorial, I'm going to show you everything you need to know about this new open-source AI agent. We'll cover how to use it, the pricing, and some useful tips and tricks. So, if you're ready, let's get started! ;)

Here I describe the results of developing a PostgreSQL extension I built just out of curiosity. Its purpose is to automatically manage extended column statistics. The idea came to me while finishing work on another "smart" query-driven product for improving PostgreSQL planning quality. I realized that the current architecture of PostgreSQL isn’t quite ready for fully autonomous operation — automatic detection of bad plans and adaptive optimizer tuning. So why not try the other way around and build an autonomous data-driven assistant?

UUIDv7 was inspired by ULID. Like ULID, it is a 128-bit identifier, containing a timestamp on the left side and random data on the right side. But RFC 9562 establishes many requirements for UUIDv7.

In databases and distributed systems, a properly implemented UUIDv7 is always preferred over any other identifier type, including natural keys, autoincrement, UUIDv4, TypeID, ULID, KSUID, CUID, NanoID, and Snowflake ID.

Training is one of the most essential factors for growth, evolution and effective collaboration for any UX design team. Design is an ever-changing industry, and there is always something new to learn even for the most experienced professionals. The reality is, not all companies take training seriously, whether the reason is a low budget, lack of time or just not realising its necessity. Meanwhile, investing in training not only boosts the quality of work, but also helps find ways to find easier solutions, work faster and optimize the whole process. Let’s discuss some tips that might help you provide effective and fruitful training for your design team without spending extra budget or wasting time on some questionable training methods. 

These days, it seems like everyone is talking about AI. AI here, AI there—AI will replace us all, and so on. I started to wonder: how exactly is AI going to replace us? I decided to dig into this question and examine the technical foundations, mainly to understand it for myself—how exactly is AI supposed to replace us all? Spoiler: it isn’t planning to just yet, but what’s already available today is impressive.

How to compare the efficiency of SQL query plans? “Measure the execution time, of course!” — an experienced reader would say. And they would be absolutely right: from a practical perspective, the more efficient DBMS is the one that delivers higher TPS. However, sometimes we need to design a system that doesn't exist yet or predict behavior under loads that haven't occurred yet. In such cases, we need a characteristic that allows us to perform a qualitative analysis of a plan or compare two plans. This post is dedicated to one such characteristic — the number of data pages read.

Complex systems often appear chaotic or incomprehensible, yet closer examination reveals that such complexity can frequently be reduced to a simple underlying mechanism. By systematically removing layers of emergent behavior, one can uncover a fundamental rule or equation from which the entire system originates.

A few weeks ago, OpenAI announced that Codex is available for Plus users, and I didn’t miss a chance to try it. And today, I’m excited to share a guide to OpenAI’s Codex. As a developer, I’ve found it to be a powerful and practical tool.

We append the following metrics to the T-SQL procedure statements: execution count (x), CPU time in milliseconds (c), duration in microseconds (d), number of reads (r), number of writes (w), and @@rowcount value (n). You can display these as absolute values or percentages.