Local AI: A Question of Power, Not Price
Anthropic's threat report, OpenAI's soap opera, the closure of the $200 subscription tier, and rising GPU and memory prices—all of this week's events tell the same story.
Ruohang Feng · Database Guru · Cloud Exiter
Vonng’s Blog
Ruohang Feng (@Vonng): Pigsty author, PGSTY founder, OSS contributor.
Database Guru, Cloud Exiter, PostgreSQL Mage, and AI Agent Explorer.
Columns
Database Guru
66posts
News, insights, and best practices from the database industry.
Cloud-Exiter
61posts
Cloud-exit and self-hosting — deep dives and cost analyses.
AI Agent Explorer
67posts
Agents, LLMs, and everything between AI and databases.
Postgres Mage
112posts
Blogs about PG ecosystem, admin, development and operations.
Travel Notes
10posts
Trips, hikes and the things seen along the way.
Miscellaneous
33posts
The things that are not about technology, or not only about it.
Latest Posts
Chinese PostgreSQL Docs Are Live: All 11 Major Versions
pgsql.cc is live, with Chinese documentation for all 11 PostgreSQL major versions from 10 through 20, a redesigned mirror of the official website, and better full-text search. Kept in sync with …
How Do You Burn Through 10 $200 Codex Subscriptions?
Buying 10 AI subscriptions is easy. The real bottleneck is turning tokens into useful output—and using automation to scale your time, attention, and ability to judge the results.
GPT Astra Launch Giveaway: Free Banked Resets
As Astra began rolling out, Tibo announced one banked reset per day for paid users still waiting for access. I'm stocking up for when Astra arrives.
Documentation-Driven Development: The First Secret to AI Software Engineering
People often ask: how do I ensure quality when AI writes the code? My answer has four parts: documentation-driven development, adversarial review, brute-force testing, and complexity penalties.
Catalog Bullshit: Take the Database Apart, Then Rent a PostgreSQL Table Back to You
Snowflake blames the lakehouse's governance gaps on multiple engines and turns the Catalog into a new billing layer. But the core of an Iceberg Catalog is just a metadata-pointer CAS; the real …
AWS Acquires DuckDB: The Duck Flies into the Amazon Rainforest
AWS bought the people who build the duck and left the duck itself to the foundation.
Apple Skipped the Event and Quietly Launched a 512 GB Mac Studio
No teaser, no rumors—the website simply changed. For local AI, this may be the most important machine of the year.
Omarchy: Is There Hope for Desktop Linux?
I installed Omarchy, then removed it. Why? Who is it for, and who isn't it for? Does the Linux desktop still have a future?
Did PostgreSQL Win Because Oracle Screwed Up?
Starting with Stonebraker's remark that PostgreSQL should "thank Oracle," this essay looks at the community's unusual governance model and the challenges it now faces.
AGI Machine Guns Are Now Standard Issue
In one month, my friend Jiang cobbled together four databases, an operating system, a programming language, a compiler, and a CPU—a microcosm of today's AI frenzy.
The World in Ten Years: What Gets Cheap, What Gets Expensive
Starting with the price curve of AI inference, this essay projects how the world will be repriced by 2036: intelligence will become as cheap and ubiquitous as electricity, while electricity itself, …
Projects
PigstyA battery-included PostgreSQL distribution — the local-first, free and open source RDS.
SILOThe community-maintained MinIO fork that keeps S3-compatible storage open source.
OINKA local-first Hugo theme for engineering docs — the one this site runs on.
PIGOne command, any extension — across EL, Debian and Ubuntu.
SOWStore once, serve everywhere — building and mirroring APT and YUM repositories.
PG ExporterPostgreSQL observability expressed in SQL — 600+ metrics, declarative collectors.
Capslock EnhancementTurn the mostly useless CapsLock key into a fifth modifier.
PGEXT.CLOUDAn index, catalog and metadata for 2200+ PostgreSQL extensions, plus download, install and build matrices for 570+ of them.
PGSTYThe team behind Pigsty, and the open source and services around it.Publications
DDIADesigning Data-Intensive Applications, translated into Chinese.
PostgreSQL InternalsPostgreSQL Internals, translated into Chinese.
pg.centerA complete Chinese mirror of postgresql.org, including the PG 18 manual.
pgsql.ccAn aggregate operations library for PostgreSQL and the components around it.
Paper: D-Bot DB Diagnosis with LLMsDatabase Diagnosis System using Large Language Models, VLDB 2024.
Paper : Unified DB Access LayerA unified access layer over heterogeneous databases through PostgreSQL FDW.
Cyber DharmaSeven traditions orbiting one machine — notes on technology and belief.
Empire of AIDreams and nightmares inside OpenAI, translated into Chinese.
The Product-Minded EngineerA book on engineering with a product mind, translated into Chinese.