An engineer from Charlotte, North Carolina sat down in the spring of 2000 to write software for guided missile destroyers in the United States Navy. The ships needed a database that did not require a system administrator on board. So he wrote one himself. 26 years later that database, SQLite, runs inside every iPhone on Earth, every Android phone, every Mac, every Windows machine, every major web browser, every airplane cockpit avionics system, and most of the cars built in the last decade. It is the most widely deployed software in human history. He still maintains it from his home in North Carolina. His name is D. Richard Hipp. Most people call him Richard. Here is the story, because the engineer behind the most replicated piece of code on the planet is a man almost nobody can name. Richard was born in Charlotte on April 9, 1961. He grew up in the suburbs of Atlanta. He graduated from Stone Mountain High School in 1979 and went to Georgia Tech, where he earned both a bachelor's and a master's degree in electrical engineering by 1984. He spent three years at AT&T Bell Labs working in Unix and C. Then he went back to school at Duke University and earned a PhD in Computer Science in 1992. His dissertation was on spoken natural language dialog processing under Alan W. Biermann. He could have stayed in academia. He told one interviewer the market for PhDs was saturated with better qualified candidates. He started a software consulting company instead. He married a musician and author named Ginger G. Wyrick in 1994 and renamed the firm Hipp, Wyrick and Company. Then in 2000 he picked up a contract through General Dynamics to write software for the US Navy. The target was the Aegis class guided missile destroyer. The original system ran HP-UX with an IBM Informix database backend. The whole stack required a database administrator on board. The Navy did not want a database administrator on board. Richard's job was to make the database administrator unnecessary. The design goals were simple. The database had to be self-contained. It had to run inside the application. It had to have zero configuration. It had to be transactional and reliable. It had to require no separate process. It had to be small. On August 17, 2000 he released SQLite 1.0. He wrote it in C. The whole thing fit in less than a megabyte. The license he chose was the most extreme one possible. He released the source code into the public domain. No copyright. No royalties. No restrictions. Anyone could use it for anything forever. The decision changed software history. SQLite spread quietly. Mozilla adopted it for Firefox. Apple put it inside iOS. Google put it inside Android. Microsoft started shipping it inside Windows. Chrome, Safari, and Edge all use it. Photoshop uses it. Skype used it. Every major operating system you have ever touched runs SQLite somewhere underneath. The Airbus A350 uses it for flight software. Every Boeing 787 has SQLite onboard. By 2026 SQLite was estimated to be running on more than 1 trillion devices. It is the most replicated piece of software ever written. Richard has personally turned down what is almost certainly hundreds of thousands of dollars in royalties over the past 26 years by keeping it public domain. The SQLite team is tiny. Richard and a small group of core contributors. He maintains a separate version control system he wrote himself called Fossil. He maintains a parser generator he wrote himself called Lemon. He maintains a diagram language he wrote himself called Pikchr. He is a member of the Tcl core team and has been for over 25 years. He answers questions on Hacker News under the username SQLite. The project's public commitment is to support SQLite through the year 2050. A Christian engineer from North Carolina wrote a small database for missile destroyers and released it for free. It is now running inside every device in your house.

This means one thing: ads.

On today’s episode of, “The European mind cannot comprehend this”…..

We found another surreal place on our way. I know some people will say I’m too positive about everything I see, but this place was crazy. They had a shooting range in the store.

THE WORLD CONTINUES TO DISCOVER AMERICA ON THE EVE OF THE WORLD CUP 🇺🇸

Freddy’s final boss

First time experiencing this flyover Americans do before big sporting events and I have to say it goes kinda hard

Lookout Mountain near Chattanooga, TN🌳 An American next to us said this is the perfect sniper spot.

I love Americans. We were about to walk an hour to the stadium in the rain to save on an Uber, and the receptionist at the hotel we were parked in front of decided to drive us there.🙏

Dinner from Buc-ee’s at 1am😋

The travel group with Buc-ee🦫

The best discovery of our road trip has been a musician called Ella Langley. We had never heard of her before, but after hearing her on pretty much every country radio station, we’ve become big fans. She’s basically the soundtrack of our trip.

THE BEST GAS STATION.

I popped a 6mg Zyn and downed an entire Stumptown cold brew after lunch, and I can now see the angel sitting on everyone's shoulder in this Google Meet.

Remember when compilers would detect that someone was using it to build another compiler and silently inject bugs?

NEW: malware developers added nuclear & biological weapons text to to their spyware. Goal? To trigger LLM safety refusals... so that their spyware wouldn't be analyzed by an AI security scanner. Cleanest practical example I can think of for why over-indexing on first order safety alignment is risky. When closed (and open) models ship with aggressive refusals, they will be sprinkled with second-order blindspots that attackers will discover...and exploit. We are only in the earliest days of attackers leveraging these features, and it wouldn't surprise me if users systems that need to handle complex cybersecurity issues demand that models be less safety-blunted. In the weeds: @SocketSecurity's post also shows why intention matters in how you design a malware analysis pipeline to avoid prompt manipulation. H/T to colleagues that shared this with me socket.dev/blog/mini-shai-hu…

Analyzed a few public screenshots of Fable answers -- some commonalities and linguistic tells: "Sit with" framing "Sit with the fact..." • "Hold that idea for a moment..." The hidden-variable move "The real thing isn't X, it's Y." • "The bottleneck is actually..." Bold ranking claims "The single most important skill..." • "The biggest bottleneck is..." Epistemology everywhere "What do we actually know?" • "Modeling your own ignorance..." Mind-over-object explanations "What matters is what happens to your mind..." • "This changes how you think..." Memorable metaphor aphorism "A summary is to a book what a postcard is to a place." • Ends with a quote-worthy line. Essayist confidence Makes sweeping claims without citations. • Sounds like a thinker making an argument, not a researcher presenting evidence.

The riddle of Iron. The Neo-Assyrian Empire was the first empire to make wide use of iron; as such, it sought to tightly regulate and control the trade. In this letter, King Sargon II accuses a governer of selling iron to nomadic Arabs. The governor replies defensively, "I sell... [only] copper to the Arabs."

I haven't played with it yet -- but I get exact same feeling.

"sit with" is new LLM phrase tell. Was annoying before, worse now.