One Useful Thing (Ethan Mollick)
Mass Intelligence
From GPT-5 to nano banana: everyone is getting access to powerful AI
Thursday, 28 August 2025
Everything this site carried that day, newest first. Stories are kept for a month, and the widely covered ones for a year.
APNIC Blog / RIPE Labs / Internet Society / 3GPP
Towards Rel-19 freeze date
Three sets of 3GPP Working Group meetings are drawing to a close in Goteborg (CT and SA) and Bengaluru (RAN).
Databricks / ClickHouse / DuckDB / Supabase / Neon / PlanetScale
Databuddy Is Open-Sourcing Privacy-First Analytics, Built on Neon
“I was surprised by how fast Neon was. It was faster than my self-hosted setup and Prisma Postgres. This plus the convenience of the Free Plan makes it a no-brainer for building your projects.” (Issa Nassar, founder of Databuddy) Databuddy is a new privacy-first web and product a...
Framework blogs: Next.js releases / Svelte / Angular / Django / Rails / Laravel / Spring / React Native / Flutter
From Grit to Growth: The Artisan of the Day Is Daniel Gouvignon.
Daniel Gouvignon built Hatchet from the ground up with Laravel, sponsored Laracon AU, and supports Perth’s developer community.
Vercel (blog + changelog)
Preparing for the worst: Our core database failover test
Many engineering teams have disaster recovery plans. But unless those plans are regularly exercised on production workloads, they don’t mean much. Real resilience comes from verifying that systems remain stable under pressure. Not just in theory, but in practice. On July 24, 2025, we successfully…
OpenAI News
Introducing gpt-realtime and Realtime API updates
We’re releasing a more advanced speech-to-speech model and new API capabilities including MCP server support, image input, and SIP phone calling support.
Databricks / ClickHouse / DuckDB / Supabase / Neon / PlanetScale
How to create reproducible ZIPs for AWS Lambda
Lessons from making reproducible ZIPs for Python Lambdas in CI/CD with Terraform and OpenTofu.
OpenAI News
Supporting nonprofit and community innovation
OpenAI launches a $50M People-First AI Fund to help U.S. nonprofits scale impact with AI. Applications open Sept 8–Oct 8, 2025 for grants in education, healthcare, research, and more.
Databricks / ClickHouse / DuckDB / Supabase / Neon / PlanetScale
How Sierra uses ClickHouse to bridge observability and analytics
“We don’t fear cardinality anymore. We don’t have the technical constraints we had earlier. ClickHouse lets us run really, really fast queries at scale.” Arup Malakar, Software Engineer, Sierra
Databricks / ClickHouse / DuckDB / Supabase / Neon / PlanetScale
ClickHouse achieves AWS Advertising and Marketing Technology Competency
We're excited to announce that ClickHouse has achieved the AWS Advertising and Marketing Technology competency, recognizing our deep expertise in serving organizations across the advertising and marketing technology landscape.