Luke Kim

Stoicism is popular because apathy is the sickness of our age and stoicism glorifies it. Stoicism is cope for living in a dying society. Stoicism is managed decline. You need to become anti-stoic. You need to become so passionate it’s self-destructive.

DuckDB is not the right tool for high-frequency writes, streaming ingestion, or OLTP workloads. Knowing where a tool fits is as important as knowing what it does. It is an analytical query engine, not a transactional database.

I don’t know if row-level security was a mistake as some people are now saying. But I do believe that the many-small-databases architecture that we’re building for good for security because physical isolation is simpler to enforce.

RLS was a mistake and folks exposing that level of complexity to less technical users is asking for trouble. It was a mistake in Firebase. It’s a mistake in Supabase. It will be a mistake in the next product too. I personally - even knowing how to secure it - would never touch it. It’s the worst security footgun you can imagine. One small mistake and your data is available to the world.

Imagine Slack, but built from scratch in 2026