Calls, puts & mise en place

Appel & Mise

Vol. IThursday, September 17, 2026 · 71° & clear on the UWSThe daily, for Jeremy Ettlinger

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The lede

Training a 4B model to write better Postgres query plans than Postgres

Rohan Bansal · made the Sunday

Bansal distilled 420 trajectories out of a frontier model into a 4B Qwen with a 21M-parameter LoRA, then ran RL against real query timings on Postgres containers on his own machine, and got a 1.81x geometric-mean speedup across the 113 join-heavy queries of the Join Order Benchmark. The genuinely instructive half is the noise: page-cache contention was producing phantom 5% speedups until he raised shared_buffers to 2GB, interleaved candidate and default runs, and took medians, which dropped the false-signal rate to 1.7% — without that, the reward was training the model on measurement artifacts. Total cost $1,200, and it is the clearest recent demonstration that a small model plus a tight feedback loop beats a big model with a vague one.

AI & Agents

Simon Willison

Claude Cowork and chat are now one Claude

Anthropic has collapsed Cowork back into Claude — one product across web, desktop and mobile, Pro and Max first, with work that continues after you close the laptop. Willison notes the same move at OpenAI folding the Codex desktop app into ChatGPT, which is the real signal: the labs have stopped selling 'the agent' as a separate thing and started assuming every chat is one. Anyone who has been explaining the Cowork/Claude distinction to a team can stop.

LeadDev

Open source has a big AI slop problem

cURL shut its bug bounty because by mid-2025 only 5% of submissions were real, with seven maintainers burning days on machine-written reports; RubyGems saw a tenfold volume increase and months without a valid one; tldraw closed external contributions outright. Daniel Stenberg's line — it feels like fighting a machine rather than humans, and that is more exhausting — is the part worth sitting with, because the countermeasures being reached for are CLAs, trust networks and turning pull requests off, all of which tax the newcomer to stop the bot.

Engineering & Leadership

LeadDev · made the Sunday

Nobody knows what programming will look like in two years

Charles Humble opens with his mother-in-law, who programmed with punch cards in 1960s Kenya and watched the skill evaporate, and uses her to argue that the workflow dies while the practitioner's judgment does not. The list he lands on is specific and checkable: knowing how the machine actually behaves under memory and concurrency, reading code critically, testing strategy, domain knowledge, debugging — and, against the LinkedIn consensus, that this is a good time to hire juniors. For anyone mapping out a next chapter, it is a better inventory of durable skills than most of what gets written on the subject.

Web & Product Craft

Cloudflare

Stay discoverable in search while disallowing AI training

Almost 17% of Cloudflare sites want to block model training and fewer than 1% want to block search, but a single mixed-use crawler served both, so refusing one refused both. The new Disallow AI Training setting publishes the right per-operator directive — Google-Extended, Applebot-Extended — for crawlers that have agreed to be Accountable, which means offering an opt-out and promising that refusing training will not cost you rankings, and blocks the rest. Bing does not honor it yet, so the control is real but not complete.

Nikola Filipovski

Backups aren't simple

A careful walk from a daily rsync to GFS rotation, hard-link dedupe and Borg, taking seriously the failure modes that defeat a mirror: ransomware that dutifully replicates into your copy, a database that flushes in batches and restores half-written, Docker writing root-owned files into the archive. The advice that matters is boring and rarely done — snapshots rather than mirrors, pick an RPO on purpose, and actually test a restore every six months. Good reading for anyone whose personal infrastructure has quietly become several sites and a content repo.

New York & the Table

West Side Rag

A 28-story tower is coming to 200 West 97th Street

Rockefeller Group and Atlas Capital paid $96 million in February for the four-story block at Amsterdam that held DeLaSalle Academy and the parish thrift shop, and filed demolition permits on September 9 for a 390,000-square-foot, 340-unit replacement with 85 affordable apartments. The comment section is doing the usual UWS two-step — yes to supply, no to the shadow — and the one line that lands is the resident pointing out that rents are not coming down regardless.

Eater NY

The best new steakhouse in New York is Argentine

Pablo Rivero, of Don Julio and El Preferido in Buenos Aires, opened Graciela on Greenwich Avenue this summer and named it for his mother, and Nadia Chaudhury's report is less about the beef than about the room — a kitchen that will split an entrée for a solo diner because he asked nicely. The useful note for a home cook is that the standout is the milanesa napolitana, which is a cutlet, not a steak, and entirely reproducible on a Tuesday.

Diversions

Literary Hub

Is nonfiction in crisis? These 14 books suggest otherwise

Publishing insiders have been saying that true books are harder to acquire and readers have defected to escapism; Maris Kreizman answers with a stack of forthcoming titles that got bought anyway, led by David Treuer's history of violence in America and Franny Choi's essays. A useful list precisely because none of these arrive with a celebrity name or a marketing budget attached — it's the fall reading pile assembled by someone who reads for a living.

Loose Change

Works in Progress · made the Sunday

Engineering the disposable diaper

Virginia Postrel on the thirty-year manufacturing problem behind a thing nobody thinks about. P&G had the idea in 1957 and a working prototype by 1959, but there was no machine that could make it — no standard equipment existed, so they designed a block-long continuous-process line from scratch, fighting glue applicators that dripped and wadding that shed dust into the glue, until it could turn out 400 diapers a minute. Pampers failed in Peoria in 1961 at ten cents each and only worked in 1966 at six, which is to say the invention was never the product; the invention was the price, and the price was the machine.

The Back Page

The Guardian

Boehly and Walter sell up as Clearlake takes full control of Chelsea

Announced late Wednesday: Clearlake buys out both American partners, Boehly leaves the chair, Wyss stays on as a stakeholder, and the private equity firm that already held 61.5% now holds the club outright. Chelsea say nothing changes day to day and Alonso keeps the job with the team sixth, which is the correct thing to say and also the least interesting question — the interesting one is what a club looks like when the last person whose name was on the front of it is gone.

The Guardian · made the Sunday

Raheem Sterling's bleak tale and the path young footballers face

Liew refuses both the pile-on and the excuse, and turns a wrecked Lamborghini on the A327 into the sharpest thing written this week about how the game consumes teenagers. Sterling moved from QPR to Liverpool at 15 for £2m, one of the first of his kind, and the market he opened now runs on 14- and 15-year-olds — half the Premier League is 25 or under, and the three youngest debuts in its history have all happened since 2022. He is 31 and possibly finished, which Liew notes is younger than Ariana Grande.

Around town

Sat Sep 19 · 6:30pm

Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait, with Darius Khondji

Metrograph, 7 Ludlow St, Lower East Side

Ninety minutes of seventeen cameras pointed at one man for the length of a Real Madrid match in 2005, two of them carrying Army prototype lenses Panavision made them wait a year for. Khondji, who shot it, is there for the Q&A, which means you get the football film and the lecture on how it was lit in the same sitting.

casual

Mon Sep 21 · 5:00pm

NY Tech Meetup: Climate Tech Edition

Civic Hall, 124 E 14th St, Union Square

The city's oldest demo night, still run on the old format — people plug in and show the thing working rather than talk about it. Climate Week edition, so the room will be fuller and stranger than usual.

professional

Wed Sep 23 · 7:00pm

Selected Shorts: The Five Boroughs

Symphony Space, 2537 Broadway, Upper West Side

Actors reading short fiction set in each of the five boroughs, at the theater twelve blocks from his door. The season opener is the one where the Manhattan story usually gets shown up by the Staten Island one.

casual

Wed Sep 30 · 9:00am

MongoDB.local New York

Pier 36, 299 South St, Lower East Side

A full day of database talks on the East River, aimed at founders rather than DBAs. Worth a morning if only for the hallway census of what small teams are actually running in production this year.

professional

Quote of the day

“Getting from idea to code is cheaper than it's ever been.”

— Chris Swan

On this day

September 17, 1976 — the first Space Shuttle orbiter rolls out of the Palmdale plant. It was going to be called Constitution until a write-in campaign by Star Trek fans got it renamed Enterprise. It never flew to orbit, and it has spent the last decade parked on the West Side, on the deck of the Intrepid.

The puzzle corner

The Mini · Wordle · Connections

Two pieces today are the same piece: a 4B model that only works because someone fixed the measurement, and a diaper line that only worked because someone fixed the glue. The idea was never the hard part.