Infrastructure

Serving the For You feed

A Bluesky power user scaled a custom "For You" feed to 70K users on a gaming PC for $30/month, exposing the massive over-engineering baked into mainstream social platforms.

Friday, April 24, 2026 12:00 PM UTC2 MIN READSOURCE: Simon WillisonBY sys://pipeline

spacecowboy's "For You" feed on Bluesky, used by ~70,000 people, runs on a single Go process with SQLite on a gaming PC in their living room. The system stores 90 days of preference data (419GB) and costs $30/month to operate ($20 electricity, $7 VPS, $3 domains). The author estimates the current algorithm could scale to serve all ~1M daily active Bluesky users without architectural changes.

Read original at Simon Willison

Elderly-Contextual Data Augmentation via Speech Synthesis for Elderly ASR

Researchers tackle automatic speech recognition gaps for elderly users by synthesizing elderly-characteristic voice data, improving model accuracy across age demographics without requiring additional elderly voice recordings.