Wendell Berry is dead and I don’t feel so good myself. Peace of the Wild Things is the poem I’ve returned to most in life as a general comfort.
Matthew Mullins
@mmullins.coginiti.co
technologist, philosopher, and outdoors enthusiast CTO@COGINITI
Excited for the release of Coginiti 26.8. A highlight: Semantic Lineage, helping teams understand not just where data comes from, but how business meaning connects across entities, metrics, and transformations. Another step toward governed, semantic, AI-ready analytics. coginiti.co/blog/coginit...
Coginiti 26.8 Release Notes | Coginiti Blog
Coginiti 26.8 deepens semantic modeling with a lineage graph, autocomplete and linting in the SMDL editor, and data quality testing for the Semantic Layer. It also adds synonyms,…
coginiti.co
Wrote up some thoughts on what the AWS acquisition of DuckLabs means for users and builders. (I think it's mostly good news). Congrats to Hannes, Mark, and the whole team at DuckLabs
What Changes When AWS Owns DuckLabs
AWS announced today that it has signed an agreement to acquire DuckLabs, the company behind DuckDB.
fieldnotesondata.substack.com
1 The world is all that is the case 1.1 The world is made up of facts, not things 1.11 Facts don't care about your feelings 1.111 😢
We're moving data quality up stream to the semantic layer. Why? Because your tables can pass every data quality test and your business metrics can still be wrong. CoginitiScript tests now work with Semantic SQL, making it possible to test metrics as the business actually consumes them. #databs
Testing Meaning, Not Just Rows: Data Quality at the Semantic Layer | Coginiti Blog
Row-level tests validate ingredients, not recipes. How CoginitiScript and Semantic SQL bring assertion-based testing to metrics, dimensions, and relationships.
coginiti.co
Some people are reading this article about Sen. Kevin Cramer and Trump nominees as a sign of GOP pushback on Trump. Nope, the real subject is a bipartisan issue about the future of North America’s “Duck Factory” which is a huge conservation story that's barely registered here on bluesky.
GOP senator places hold on Trump nominees over wetlands policy
Republican Sen. Kevin Cramer (N.D.) is placing a hold on all future Trump nominees over the administration’s approach to wetlands. In a statement shared with The Hill, Cramer expressed disapp…
thehill.com
Great evening out with the Wake Dems. @ross.house.gov was on fire with her remarks and generously took town hall questions. Lot of good energy in the room going into the midterms.
Excited to be headed to #BigDataLDN next month and talking about semantic layer goodness. Come for the talk and swing by the Coginiti booth to chat all things data, semantics, and AI. Tickets are free, so no reason not to attend if you're in the London area. www.bigdataldn.com/en-gb/regist...
A career in data takes more than learning the right tools. I’m talking with Aaron Wilkerson of Carhartt next Tuesday about what actually gets you to the next level: technical skills, business impact, leadership, career choices, and what AI changes. riverside.com/webinar/regi...
Had the chance to meet @paulbarringer.com running to be North Carolina's 13th district representative. He's an a real Eagle Scout, AT trail hiker, grew up and lives on a farm, and most importantly understands the needs of North Carolina voters. Working for change in the midterm elections!
Want to meet the next congressman for NC13? Meet and Greet with Paul Barringer at Norse Brewing in Wake Forest tomorrow.
Meet and Greet with Paul Barringer at Norse Brewing in Wake Forest! · Paul Barringer for Congress
Come join us for a Meet and Greet at Norse Brewing in Wake Forest on August 12th at 6:00 PM! This is your chance to meet Paul, ask him any questions, learn about the campaign, and find out how you c...
mobilize.us
Cool: the Neurosymbolic AI Summer School has a logic programming tutorial. Cooler: The tutorial is by Bob Kowalski!
Neuro-Symbolic AI Summer School 2026 · Luma
Please join us for the 5th Neuro-Symbolic AI Summer School (NSSS), a free, fully-remote meeting to be held Aug 6-7, 2026. Learn how to be part of this exciting…
luma.com
Kicking the Palantir habit seems like a good start. It's amazing to see someone complain about finding a good alternative. I can think of a half dozen off the top of my head that aren't actively trying to be evil. We don't ship spark in a box, but would consider it. 😂 #databs
Europe wants to kick its Palantir habit
The U.S.-based data crunching firm is deeply embedded in the most sensitive European workflows, from policing to intelligence to health care. Finding alternatives won’t be easy.
politico.eu
👊I've joined the crew at @clickhouse.com to establish the *ClickHouse Labs* research group. We'll be working side-by-side with ClickHouse engineers to cook up ways to make the system even faster. I'll also be exploring new research topics related to PostgreSQL. clickhouse.com/blog/andy-pa...
Andy Pavlo joins ClickHouse to establish ClickHouse Labs | ClickHouse
I am excited to announce that I am joining ClickHouse, Inc. to establish and lead a new research team at ClickHouse Labs.
clickhouse.com
A million newly minted ontologists… and most of them have never even read Quine.
Interesting opportunity, a weeklong workshop on ontological engineering with deep emphasis on BFO. Free in person and virtual summer school with NCOR. #databs ncor-network.org/summer-schoo...
Intensive Ontology Summer School | The Ontology Research & Development Network
PHI 605SEM (13336), The World's Ontology Ecosystem, August 3–7, 2026. Co-sponsored by the University at Buffalo and the National Center for Ontological Research.
ncor-network.org
I don't watch much tv and even less reality tv, but this is surprisingly compelling. Watching 8 teams of engineers try to build a product is a good reminder that writing the code wasn't the hard part. @kelseyhightower.com is a fantastic host and it's hard to imagine a better choice!
Jason Lengstorf@jason.energy · 2mo agoyou might be able to build an app, but can you build a *product*? 8 teams start this competition hosted by @kelseyhightower.com, but only 7 advance to episode 2 presented by @awscloud.bsky.social, this is @codetv.dev's largest production yet premieres tomorrow: www.youtube.com/watch?v=8aHX...
Somebody make it make sense. Databricks is raising yet additional funding, beyond their last 16th round of funding, at a valuation that is north of 35x current revenue. #databs
Databricks is Raising a Strategic Round of Funding at a $188 Billion Valuation
The new capital will drive AI innovation across Unity AI Gateway, Genie, and LakebaseSAN FRANCISCO, CA — July 16, 2026 — Databricks, the Data and AI company, today announced strategic funding at a $18...
databricks.com
In the last week I've had two calls with publicly traded tech companies where the CFO's hair is on fire regarding out of control token costs. I wish I could share company names, because even I was shocked by the spend level. We wrote up how a semantic layer can reduce token consumption for data.
coginiti.co@coginiti.co · 2mo agoA Databricks engineer spent $7k on AI tokens in two weeks. Forbes calls it "tokenmaxxing." Gartner says token costs are on track to rival developer salaries. The token bill is an architecture problem, not a pricing one. coginiti.co/blog/semanti...
You can, and almost certainly should, opt out of being part of Muse Image's new experiment in making the internet a worse and more invasive place.
Instagram about to start letting internet randos "remix" your photos with AI
Instagram about to start letting internet randos "remix" your photos with AI
avclub.com
Two more reasons Coginiti 26.6's LLM blocks hold up: 1. Same block runs on Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery, Redshift, Postgres, SQL Server, and with OpenAI, Claude, Gemini, or local Ollama. 2. Batching patterns keep prompts bounded, so it scales from 50 rows to 50k.
Process large datasets with LLM blocks | Coginiti Documentation
Learn four patterns for processing large datasets with LLM blocks while keeping prompts within token limits.
docs.coginiti.co
The thing I like most about Coginiti 26.6's LLM blocks: the model's output is typed, so it's queryable immediately. JOIN it against real tables. Write tests that validate it. Cache it. Schedule it. AI output held to the same bar as every other transform in your pipeline.
Building an AI-Powered Data Pipeline with LLM Blocks | Coginiti Documentation
LLM blocks are scheduled to ship in the Coginiti 26.6 release. This tutorial is published as a preview so you can plan ahead — the feature is not yet available in earlier versions, and some details…
docs.coginiti.co
This by @mmullins.coginiti.co is so good. Summary: philosophers have had a place, especially around metaphysics, in tech, but with LLMs epistemology and ethics take center stage and are no long just a necessary foundation, but a product differentiator open.substack.com/pub/msmullin... #dataBS
Philosophers in the Machine
Philosophers are not new to AI. From ontology engineering to alignment, philosophy has long shaped how machines classify, reason, and act.
open.substack.com
Coginiti 26.6 is out and you can now call an LLM directly inside CoginitiScript. New llm block type, sits next to your SQL. Write a prompt, declare a typed schema, get structured rows back, then query them downstream like any other table. The model's a pipeline step now, not a bolt-on.
This is the conversation happening in a lot of AI analytics pilots right now. The demo works, the SQL is syntactically perfect, but then someone checks the number against the board deck only to discover the model invented its own churn definition and reported it with confidence.
Her: It's hot outside today Me: Is the temperature 90 and rising? Her: Is that from a movie? Me: No it's the Partee Paradox, but we can resolve it with the Montague grammar. Her: But what about the Capulet grammar? 😂
Listening to Tarkio, Colin Melody’s pre Decemberists indie-folk band, and I’d forgotten how good the songs were on this album. Here is a sample:
Tarkio - Keeping Me Awake (from Omnibus)
YouTube video by Kill Rock Stars
youtu.be