814 karma · joined February 12, 2014
LLMs earlier this year were surpassing numerous health related benchmarks when scored against human physicians. Only 2 months after this nature article Harvard posted that LLMs were now outperforming ER docs when given authority to order tests. https://www.harvardmagazine.com/ai/ai-outperforms-doctors-di...
The text of the speech is at https://www.pm.gc.ca/en/news/speeches/2026/09/17/prime-minis...
The wording is such that it sounds like he is pushing a very ambitious portfolio. It appears that the idea is to make this a model for a new alliance that will include other countries over time.
The other deals Canada has made with the EU have been very substantive. CETA was the first major trade deal that the EU passed.
He provides some details about the last minute demands that the US made including restricting Canada's ability to trade with other countries. He also refers to the US signature as being written in "pencil".
The reason I mentioned it is because it's a huge surprise to some people that... from the docs: "The ALTER TABLE prefix makes this syntax different from most other systems supporting SQL. It is intended to signify that unlike similar queries in OLTP databases this is a heavy operation not designed for frequent use. ALTER TABLE is considered a heavyweight operation that requires the underlying data to be merged before it is deleted."
There's also a "lightweight delete" available in many circumstances https://clickhouse.com/docs/sql-reference/statements/delete. Something really nice about the ClickHouse docs is that they devote quite a bit of text to describing the design and performance implications of using an operation. It reiterates the focus on performance that is pervasive across the product.
Edit: Per the other part of your question, why inserts create new parts and how they are merged is best described here https://clickhouse.com/docs/engines/table-engines/mergetree-...
The heart of Clickhouse are these table engines (they don't exist in Postgres) https://clickhouse.com/docs/engines/table-engines . The primary column (or columns) is ordered in some way and adjacent values in memory are from the same column in the table. Index entries span wide areas (EG: By default there's only one key record in the primary index for every 8192 rows) because most operations in Clickhouse are aggregate in nature. Inserts are also expected to be in bulk (They are initially a new physical part that is later merged into the main table structure). A single DELETE is an ALTER TABLE operation in the MergeTree engine. :)
This structure allows it to literally crunch billions of values per second (brutally, not with pre-processing, erm, "tricks" although there is a lot of support for that in Clickhouse as well). I've had tables with hundreds of columns and 100+ billion rows that are nearly as performant as a million row table if I can structure the query to work with the table's physical ordering.
Clickhouse recommends not using nullable fields because of the performance implications (it requires storing a bit somewhere for each value). That's how much they care about perf and how close to the raw data type it is that their memory allocation uses. :)
If you are at all interested in the current challenges being grappled on in this space, this does a great job of illuminating some of them. Many many interesting passages in here and the text transcript has links to relevant papers when their topics are brought up. Really like that aspect and would love to see that done a lot more often.
That said, some of the, erm, "new ways" to solve problems have been significant advancements. EG: Async/Await was a huge improvement over Combine for a wide variety of scenarios.
However, luckily in my case, it was caught immediately in the staging env since collisions caused exceptions.
Realizing when an expression is evaluated is pretty easy to miss. That code is probably live somewhere else right now surreptitiously causing issues.
I'm surprised that VSCode extensions don't have a permissions system (EG: "Request network access").
Sure, it's not going to trend on Apple Music... but it's the best we've ever done and a genuine step above previous efforts.
Edit: This no longer repros and only the correct solution works now from what I can tell.
The last time we measured an immediate 99% performance improvement over SNS+SQS. It was so dramatic that we were able to reduce job resources simply due to the queue implementation change.
There's a lot of useful and almost trivial features you can throw in as well. SQS hasn't changed much in a long time.
The multitasking will still be poor but perhaps Apple can do something about that when in docked mode.
That said, development likely remains a non-starter given the lack of unix tooling.
well... I must admit that was unexpected.
Would be awesome if these were donated somewhere like Wikipedia some day.
Staff couldn't even be disciplined without going through the union rep and everything was based on seniority... with no other reason.
That business no longer exists... its competitors that were non-unionized are still thriving.