Database engineer @StardogHQ. Graph query planning, optimisations, evaluation -- all that stuff. University of Manchester alum. Endurance cyclist. Immigrant.
Heidelberg, Germany
Joined April 2011
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Torn TFCC in my wrist wasn't on the cards! Defn happened during Italy Divide in May. Maybe I do need to get a suspension fork after all... #bikepacking
Got a new bike frame for the next season.
Expectation: build it up and ride single track!
Reality: spending longs hours figuring out the right chain ring offset and the spindle length for the chain line that I actually want.
(pretty sure it won't matter too much in the end)
Pavel Klinov 🇪🇺 retweeted
Terence Tao made a very powerful point:
“In most cases in pure mathematics, the problems are posed not because we desperately want the solution to these problems in and of themselves, but because we have seen from past experience that human-directed efforts to solve these problems tend to spur further development of the field through the efforts to solve such problems, and then to digest any partial or complete solutions that emerge for further insights.
Prematurely solving the problem by purely AI-powered methods—particularly without full transparency into the solution process—can contaminate this process to the point where it actually becomes a net negative for the progress of mathematics as a whole.”
I’ve been following Terence Tao for like 20 years, and I have always been impressed by the clarity of his thinking.
This clarity stands out even more in this difficult moment, as AI labs turn mathematics into a battleground in their race for supremacy.
In this race, they risk damaging one of humanity’s highest intellectual endeavours.
sometimes i want a little tool that would mute all sets of accounts that cross-retweet the same small set of accounts, bidirectionally. i.e. small echo chambers.
they are almost never worth listening to but generate a lot of noise.
Pavel Klinov 🇪🇺 retweeted
It is concerning how enggs are losing their grip on their systems. Not just on the low-level code, but on the end-to-end flow of their systems as well.
I think there are two reasons for this:
1. Everything is in a hurry now. We are constantly optimizing for faster delivery, so there is less time to understand how things actually work.
2. We are moving towards higher-order abstractions. What could have been 5 well-documented steps explaining how things work is now abstracted away into poorly maintained skill files.
Btw, abstractions do not eliminate complexity. They just move it somewhere else.
So when a rare and complex issue shows up, it takes relatively longer to understand, diagnose, and fix the problem.
The happy path got faster. Yay! But failure path got longer. And that is a tradeoff we are not talking about enough.
Heartbreaking. Lida is the most selfless person that I know in the entire world. She dedicated her life to helping terminally ill kids in Russia.
I basically stopped using Claude for most javadoc and key code comments. I write that stuff myself once I'm satisfied with the PR. If I can do it easily, it means I understand the change and can explain it. If I struggle, something's off.
It slows me down, but that's the point.
Germany gets a lot of flak (and rightly so) for its bureaucracy but a lot depends on your local authorities. I must say our little @Schriesheim_DE is *awesome*: all appointments are online, quick (like "we can do it tomorrow" quick), people are lovely, cards accepted, etc.
Dear @DB_Info, this is how it looks when you sell 6 bike places for a train that has only 3. The fight for these places you cannot even imagine.
This is ICE 1214 from Vienna to Munich, 02.10.2026.
Pavel Klinov 🇪🇺 retweeted
🗓️ Save the date: @ApacheDataFusio meetup in Boston, during #VLDB26!
Can LLMs make DataFusion even faster? Maybe 😎
I’ll present DBPlanBench: test-time optimization of physical query plans with LLMs. RSVP: luma.com/yexgqifv
What's the story? 🧵
i was 9 at the time but the strong sense of relief when Argentina lost to Germany in the 1990 final was pretty much the first strong emotion i remember from watching international football.
36yrs ago! interesting how some things don't change.
the commentator on German Eurosport (Discovery) was confidently telling us that the GC group will pull in Pogacar because "look, he turns back and his shoulders are bouncing!!!".
Pavel Klinov 🇪🇺 retweeted
In Eindhoven, we are hiring faculty at all ranks in Language & AI. Closing date for applications is 15 August. Details at tue.nl/en/working-at-tue/ope…
Please share with folks who might be interested!
Sleep gear & setup are some of the trickiest decisions to be made in ultra distance bike racing. Like I have a 5L bag and a set of: 1) sleep pad, 2) sleeping bag, 3) bivvy. All ultralight. But I can pick any 2!
I'll prolly spend 3 nights in the Slovak mountains, about 3-4hrs each
i definitely want this heat wave to pass, but no longer sure why: to stop suffering from the heat or from the stupid AC debate on Twitter. both, i guess.
I realised what annoys me so much in the way this is presented. It's like not renouncing it is seen as some sign of lack of loyalty to the new country.
In fact, renouncing a citizenship is a HUGE pain in the arse. It's a long and expensive process. For some, it's also dangerous.
Germany's previous government changed laws to allow dual citizenship.
A new survey is showing that, one year after that reform, more than 85% of new German citizens are opting to keep their original nationality.
dw.com/en/most-new-german-ci…
Pavel Klinov 🇪🇺 retweeted
AI is killing All About Berlin. When you Google something, you used to get a link to my website, but now you get an AI-generated answer trained on my work. This has a devastating impact on traffic.
Hey @LA28, did you guy ever test your ticketing system under load? today is the drop 1 day, i have been allocated a slot, but all i can see attempting to log in is "Error Code: 403012".
this is bad engineering and bad testing resulting in bad user experience.