ClickHouse vs ClickUp

Introducing ClickHouse's new TimeSeries Engine: Your drop-In Prometheus replacement

ClickHouse PromQL support lets you store Prometheus metrics in ClickHouse Cloud, query them using familiar PromQL, and bring metrics together with your logs and traces without rewriting queries in SQL.

High-Performance ETL for Apple Health XML Exports

This technical tutorial describes building a high-concurrency ETL engine to process very large Apple Health XML exports. The author outlines a performance-first architecture: a streaming Rust XML parser (quick-xml) to extract <Record> tags, export data as Apache Arrow record batches via PyO3 for zero-copy consumption in Python/Polars, and bulk-ingest cleaned data into ClickHouse using clickhouse-connect. The post includes code snippets for the Rust parser, Arrow-to-Polars bridge, ClickHouse table schema and bulk insert, and discusses production considerations such as parallelization, schema evolution, malformed XML handling, Grafana visualization, and feeding Arrow buffers into ML frameworks like PyTorch.

• Apple Health exports a single massive XML file containing millions of <Record> tags.
• The pipeline uses a streaming Rust parser (quick-xml) to avoid loading the entire XML into memory.
• Rust code is wrapped with PyO3 to return Apache Arrow tables for zero-copy consumption by Python/Polars.

NeverBlink Adds ClickHouse Support

NeverBlink, an AI-driven database administrator, announced support for ClickHouse, extending its database resilience and optimization platform to ClickHouse clusters. The integration offers continuous health checks, automated root-cause analysis, query analytics, prioritized remediation guidance, and optional unlimited expert consulting via BigData Boutique. NeverBlink already supports Elasticsearch and OpenSearch and is used in production by companies including Akamai, Perforce, and Palo Alto Networks. The article notes ClickHouse has surpassed 4,000 customers and a reported $15 billion valuation. Leadership quotes emphasize reducing downtime, lowering costs, and accelerating database optimization in the AI era.

• NeverBlink announced support for ClickHouse, extending its AI-native database resilience and optimization platform to ClickHouse clusters.
• NeverBlink is described as the world’s first AI database administrator (DBA) and already supports Elasticsearch and OpenSearch.
• ClickHouse has reportedly surpassed 4,000 customers and a reported $15 billion valuation.

LLM Invented a Detailed, Nonexistent Company Website

A measurement study of six Chinese LLM APIs found a model confidently describing a nonexistent localized corporate website (airtable.cn), including pricing in RMB and a China-specific privacy policy. The author logged 4,023 valid responses across the corpus, discovered the domain was registered to a private individual and returned HTTP 502, and observed that seven of eight tested brand .cn domains were not owned by the brands. To detect these operationally convincing hallucinations the author recommends lightweight predicate checks on extracted URLs, simple WHOIS/DNS/HTTP lookups, repeated phrasing checks (ask the same factual question multiple ways) and strict provenance metadata for every row. The harness and validation scripts are published under CC BY 4.0 on GitHub.

• The author ran a measurement harness against six Chinese LLM APIs and recorded 4,023 valid responses.
• GLM produced a confident, structured description claiming https://www.airtable.cn/ was Airtable's official China website.
• WHOIS and HTTP checks showed airtable.cn was registered to a private individual (since 2016) and the domain returned HTTP 502.

How to Be Funny in Marketing

This playbook-style newsletter explains why humor is a high-value marketing skill that remains difficult for AI to replicate. It outlines the psychological basis for humor (Benign Violation Theory), two golden rules for marketing humor (be specific to your audience; be surprising), and a practical step-by-step approach for testing and scaling funny content. The piece includes case studies and examples — Ahrefs’ Letaido (an AI tool) used to diagnose traffic drops, a viral LinkedIn 'Viral Post Generator' (2M+ users, acquired two weeks after launch), and Wiz’s April Fools’ 'CISOtopia' stunt (110k+ visitors and a 15–20% uplift to Wiz.io). It also lists high-impact marketing surfaces for humor (social, ads, email, 404s, careers pages, swag) and cautions about sensitive topics, punching down, and overuse.

• Ahrefs introduced Letaido, described as an AI tool that runs analyses using Ahrefs’ live data.
• Ahrefs’ CMO tested Letaido on a case where ClickUp’s blog lost 97.6% of its traffic.
• The author’s Viral Post Generator was used by more than 2 million people and was acquired two weeks after launching.

AI 'Psychosis' and Accelerating AI-Driven Layoffs

Box founder Aaron Levie warned of “AI psychosis,” a management blind spot where executives overconfident in AI push to replace human roles without understanding the work. The article cites ClickUp’s announcement to cut 22% of its workforce and replace roles with AI agents, and notes 2026 tech layoffs have nearly matched all of 2025 before midyear. JudyAI Lab frames this as a requirements-analysis failure: teams skip deep interviews with role incumbents, automating visible steps while missing implicit human judgment, exception handling, and edge-case work. The piece urges AI implementers to involve the people doing the work when designing agent/workflow automation to avoid efficiency losses from over-automation.

• Aaron Levie (Box founder) described a phenomenon he calls "AI psychosis," where executives overestimate AI's ability to replace jobs.
• Collaboration platform ClickUp announced cutting 22% of its workforce and stated it will use AI agents to take over those functions.
• The article reports 2026 tech layoffs have nearly matched all of 2025 before midyear, citing accelerating AI-driven workforce reductions.