Principal Engineer at Tesla. Working on databases, distributed systems, and edge computing platforms for energy. Views are my own.

Kingston / Bay Area
Joined July 2014
Imagination brings us closer to reality. Fantasy pulls us further away.
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I feel like all my writing skills is gone. I feel like I am totally clueless and blank. In other words, everything is totally normal. That's how writing always feels. Good writing anyways...
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Colin Breck retweeted
Have you ever let AI write (or rewrite) any part of your tech blog posts? If so, please answer these quick questions, totally anonymously. It should take less than 3 minutes. forms.gle/3zYuANeuCdcmFt9D9
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Colin Breck retweeted
“AI is helping me write better and faster, but I’m fed up with reading almost anything written by AI.”
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Colin Breck retweeted
Less than a month later, a new record for the largest Powerwall VPP event On Tuesday, 85,000+ Powerwall owners across California dispatched more than 600 MW to the grid, helping to meet peak demand
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Colin Breck retweeted
Now all of our vehicles can provide home backup - Powerwall + your car can power your home for multiple days during an outage. Clean, quiet, low maintenance, and saves money on your bills - no reason to buy a generator ever again.
Powershare Home Backup is now available for new Model 3 & Model Y with Powerwall 3 Extend your home backup by over 2 days with your vehicle
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“AI is helping me write better and faster, but I’m fed up with reading almost anything written by AI.”
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Colin Breck retweeted
A painful part of working with your data has always been that your live data and historical data are stuck in separate systems: the order a customer just placed lives in your database, while their last five years of orders sit in a data lake in S3. And answering a real question usually needs both at once (is this a normal purchase for them, or should we flag it?), and to do that you had to move the data together first, copying history out of the data lake into your database (or the other way around), because the database couldn’t read it where it lived. That meant guessing ahead of time which data you’d want, keeping a second copy of it all, building pipelines to move it, and constantly syncing so the two didn’t drift apart. A lot of plumbing, and slow going, all before you could answer one question. And even then, the answers were only as fresh as your last sync. That now changes with Aurora PostgreSQL, which can call your live data and historical data in S3 together, in a single query. No copying, no pipelines to keep in sync. And it’s fast, because we’ve built in DuckDB, a popular open source engine that’s really good at reading and analyzing data right where it’s stored. DuckDB reads the open formats like Parquet and Iceberg already sitting in your data lake, so there’s nothing to convert or move. As folks build AI agents into their apps, the data their agent needs will depend on the task in front of it. Being able to query that specific data live, instead of copying it over just in case, is gonna be a big help for builders. aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/ama…
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It is funny that people now think the use of an em dash automatically means the text was generated by an LLM, like humans have never used the em dash.
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It has become clear to me that aging itself does not bring wisdom. It often brings regression to childishness, dependency & bitterness over lost opportunities. Only those who are still intellectually, emotionally, spiritually growing inherit the richness of aging.~James Hollis
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Colin Breck retweeted
The most valuable decisions give you zero feedback @tobi explains ... "Intuition is actually the most valuable when there isn't direct feedback." Wait, what? "If there's many choices, like there's five things that look like good paths to go forward, and any of them has rapid feedback, everyone goes to that." "That is what we call short-termism, right?" But there are many ways to improve the company (and yourself). "Many of them involve long-term investment, refactoring, potentially going into a new market, potentially saying no to going into obviously new markets and actually doubling down and going deeper on our current market. Or we could do what increases the stock value. By the way, this one has a daily ticker and rapid feedback." so in this sense, it's the absence of rapid feedback can be a strong signal. "I find a very high correlation between the right path and the ones that don't have feedback loops attached."
My third conversation with Shopify co-founder and CEO @tobi. 0:00 How Shopify Uses AI 7:18 River: Shopify's Internal AI 8:55 How to Encourage Osmosis Learning 10:52 AI Dreaming and Self-Reflection 11:53 How to Use AI for Strategic Decision Making 14:11 The One Thing AI Cannot Do 16:04 What AI is Making Worse at Shopify 19:46 Predictions: Where AI is Headed Next 21:55 The Future of AI-Powered Software 24:40 Will CEOs Be Replaced with AI? 27:54 Can Superintelligence Be Controlled? 31:13 Critical Skills in AI Age 34:22 Why Complex Solutions are Usually Wrong 36:33 Conditions Needed for True Intuition 38:02 The Best Path Doesn't Have Instant Feedback 44:51 How Affirmations Can Shift Your Behavior 50:44 The Inobvious Thing Hurting Companies 52:37 Relationship Between Beauty and Creation 56:23 How SpaceX Moves Forward By Subtraction 1:00:24 Why Companies Need Refounding Events 1:01:50 Books as Cheat Codes 1:02:39 Three Books to Change Your Thinking Enjoy! (Includes paid promotions.)
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Colin Breck retweeted
The largest residential virtual power plant event in history Combining output from Powerwalls and other batteries, Tesla and @Sunrun delivered 580 MW to the grid – 517 MW of that came from 110,000 Powerwalls across California
~69,000 Powerwall owners across California are currently dispatching more than 500 MW to the grid, helping meet peak demand during today's heatwave Equivalent to the output of a power plant, but from Powerwalls already in people's homes
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If left was right and right was left, who'd be left to say what's right?
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Colin Breck retweeted
On Labor Day, the charging peak load was 116 cars plugged in at once, at 11.4 MW. All electrical loads will eventually transition to solar + storage. The giant fusion reactor in the sky is free.
Labor day stats for Oasis Supercharger in Lost Hills, CA - Charging on sunshine, 7 MW of solar generated - 6038 sessions over 4 days, accross 164 stalls - 11.2 sessions/stall on Monday, zero waiters
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Colin Breck retweeted
Tesla virtual powerplant grid stabilization system
~69,000 Powerwall owners across California are currently dispatching more than 500 MW to the grid, helping meet peak demand during today's heatwave Equivalent to the output of a power plant, but from Powerwalls already in people's homes
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Colin Breck retweeted
It’s a hot night in California - dispatching nearly 500 MW right now from our VPP fleet to support the peak. tesla.com/vpp/california
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They make you the problem because you are pointing to the problem.
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Colin Breck retweeted
Code generation is solved. Any recent model can emit code. Code verification (that includes testing) is not. The verification harness is the software factory.
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Colin Breck retweeted
Every penny matters for Robotaxi scale, including charging. We're using public Superchargers where we can, especially at night when utilization is low. We're also building dedicated Robotaxi Superchargers: back-to-back sessions, low-cost real estate close to demand, low capex. Dispatching Robotaxis to charge uses the same Trip Planner fundamentals we've been refining for over a decade. They're plugged in manually, but that's just for now. On public Superchargers, cars with passengers take priority. Our Robotaxis are more flexible. We'll keep building out Superchargers for Robotaxi demand + improving Robotaxi orchestration as we learn and the fleet scales.
Cybercab now in Site Maps
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