didgetmaster

Realize that the tech industry lives on hype. Every new piece of technology is 'going to upend everything'; according to those building it.

Us old programmers have live through about 100 of these hype cycles; so experience tells us to not panic.

AI is definitely a real thing like the internet, but it won't replace every programmer. Study it. Use it for things it is good at. Adapt to be useful in areas it is not good at.

It is very difficult, especially if you need it to be an instant success (i.e. replace your salary before you are homeless).

I have a project (a new kind of general-purpose data management system) that I have worked on for over 10 years. In the beginning, I hoped it would 'take off' and replace my salary. I was never able to quit my day job because it was so lucrative.

Now I am retired. I still work on it in bursts (spend many hours for a week to get something working, then don't touch it for a month); but I treat it like a hobby.

Maybe it will catch on (it does some amazing things with large data sets), but maybe it won't. I try to spread the word on forums or in my blog, but I am not a big marketing guy and there is so much noise out there that everything gets lost.

Good luck. You will probably need it.

Let me guess..you have an equal disdain for people who own hotels, rental cars, or work as an UBER driver.

All these things involve renting out something to fill a temporary need.

Better title: I just want local storage with a simple S3 interface.

Posts with links to paywalled articles should be identified somehow. (Flashing red title??)

I would prefer to just skip them, but they are not easy to spot.

Cancel culture is alive and well. There are many people who will boycott businesses, shun performances, or refuse to associate with someone whose views differ from their own.

This happens even if the product or service has nothing to do with anything political. It must be hard to shop when you feel like you have to investigate the backgrounds of everyone who might have built it.

If your dataset is small enough to fit in an Excel spreadsheet, then you probably are not looking for an alternative.

But if your dataset has millions of rows and you need something quick to help you slice and dice the data in a variety of ways to try and find valuable insights in it to drive business decisions; then maybe you are looking for something better.

BTW: creating pivot tables is just one of dozens of things my system can do. I am currently trying to figure out which features will attract the most customers.

Creating interactive pivot tables from large relational tables.

Many people know that a handy data analysis feature in Excel is to create a pivot table from a spreadsheet. But spreadsheets are limited to just a million rows. You can get around this limit by jumping through a bunch of hoops.

My system lets you easily create tables with thousands of columns and hundreds of millions of rows. (Just drop a CSV, Json, or other file on a window to create a table.)

Now you can create a pivot table from it with just a few clicks of the mouse. It is fast (I created a pivot table against an 8.5 million row table of Chicago crime data in less than a second.)

The resulting pivot table is interactive. Each cell (row/column intersection) has all the row keys mapped to it. Double-click on any cell and it will instantly show you all the rows in the original table that were used to calculate the cell. You can then analyze those rows further.

It also works well against much larger tables. I have tested it out against 25M, 50M, 100M, and 200M+ row tables.

You claimed that you had no choice but to become a Democrat. If that wasn't caused by coercion, then it certainly was a choice.

If I claimed that I had no choice but to become a Republican, I would be justifiably laughed at (even by fellow Republicans). Political views and affiliations are certainly choices.

Anyone can claim that their opinion is the only sane one.

I think you totally proved my point. Both conservatives and liberals will almost always look at pardons by a president from their own party much differently than those by a president from the other party.

Who exactly 'forced' you to become a Democrat? If that were real, I'm pretty sure it would have made the news.

That's all we need. Every election followed by a dozen impeachment trials initiated by the losing party.

Do you know ANYONE who thinks the same way about Biden's pardons as they do about Trump's?

I certainly don't.

Like most political arguments, if you listen carefully; those who advocate for or against pardons, only want them to go one way.

A pardon is only a protection against a 'vengeful administration' if that administration is not your party.

Pardons are only a miscarriage of justice if those pardoned don't share your ideology.

How possible is it these days to build a software business that is 'self-sustaining on their own revenue' without some decent funding up front?

Maybe I am wrong, but I don't think OP is suggesting that you actually create all the PPT slides and document everything before building a prototype or otherwise taking steps to start building a workable product.

But if the idea isn't fleshed out enough where you think that you could go through all that trouble; then maybe you are jumping the gun.

It sounds very similar to things like oil production, gold mining, and even farming. When the price is high, everyone wants in on the action. As supply explodes, the prices drop. Once prices get low enough, the costs to pump the next barrel of oil, find the next ounce of gold, or harvest the next acre of a certain crop; exceed the reward. When that happens, wells are shut down, mining operations suspended, and different crops planted. The cycle begins again.

There is no reason why a single data management system cannot be built that can do everything that either a file system or a database can do (I have been building one).

It is an object store called Didgets (i.e. Data Widgets). Each Didget has a specific type. One type is used to hold unstructured data like a file does. These Didgets are unsurprisingly called File Didgets. Other types of Didgets can hold lists (used to create hierarchical folders, music play lists, photo albums, etc.).

Others hold sets of Key/Value pairs which are used to create a tagging system for other Didgets or columns in a relational table.

Using a variety of Didgets, I have been able to create hierarchical file systems where a simple query can find one or thousands of files instantly out of 200 million+ based on the values of any tags attached.

In the same container (called a pod), it can store tens of thousands of relational tables; each one capable of having 100,000+ columns and billions of rows.

The system is 'multi-model' so it could manage hierarchical data, relational data, graph data, or anything managed by a NoSQL system.

It is not only versatile, but is incredibly fast.

This is a common dark pattern. Go through the hassle of disabling some 'feature' or service; and it just magically reappears at the next 'update'.

Microsoft is just one of the companies that routinely does stuff like that.

How long until the AI companies start charging more to people who use AI services, but live in areas that do things like this?

NIMBY causes energy prices to go up in areas that won't allow drilling, refining, nuclear or nat gas development, or power lines. When will the same happen for things like AI services?

What worries me is that good, efficient code will no longer be widely shared like before. Everyone will just write their own inefficient version of a general purpose function or library because Claude or some other AI coder made it cheap and easy.

An important element that Willison left out of his definition of 'good code' is efficient!

Software has an amazing multiplier effect. It can be copied to millions of machines and run billions of times each day. Code that wastes resources (time, memory, disk space, electricity, etc.) can become incredibly expensive to run, even if it was vibe coded in a day for a few dollars.

Has anyone taken a serious look at all the code being spit out by AI with regards to how efficient it is?

That is great advice if you set out to build a profitable business on day one.

But it seems to me that there are many projects out there like mine. You start building something because it scratches an itch you have. You think it would be fun to build. You keep adding features and fine tuning the code because you want to see something work better and/or faster than anything else.

Then one day you look at it and say: "I wonder if other people will think this thing is as useful as I do (and be willing to pay something for it)?"

It might still be a work in progress, but it does a number of very useful things, so you now have to put on your marketing hat or team up with someone who is good at that.

Jobs and Wozniak proved (at least in the 70s) that a great technical founder could team up with a brilliant marketer and build a huge company from next to nothing.

I seriously wonder if that can happen today. As a technical founder, I have tried to find a marketing partner for years. Every time it has failed miserably as each one proved unable to move the needle.

In my case, it could be the product, but I wonder who has seen success in this day and age.

I wonder if someone in Fance recently saw the Die Hard movie where thieves robbed the Federal Reserve Bank in NY.

Struggling to meet our basic needs is not a recent phenomenon. It has been a part of the human condition for millenia, not just decades.

Some people think that if we can just eliminate our 'struggles' by building AI tools to do the hard thinking or robots to perform all our labor; that civilization would become some kind of utopia. I don't believe that. Progress happens when we do hard things.

If you hand a broken calculator to someone who knows how to do math, and they entered 123 + 765 which produced an answer of 6789; they should instantly know something is wrong. Hand that calculator to someone who never understood what the tool actually did but just accepted whatever answer appeared; and they would likely think the answer was totally reasonable.

Catching an LLM hallucinating often takes a basic understanding of what the answer should look like before asking the question.

Just what we need...AI agents that will play our games for us!

It mirrors the venture capital business. Invest in 100 projects. Know that 90 of them will likely fail, 7 or 8 will break even, and just 2 or 3 will succeed. Hope that the successful ones are big enough to cover all the losses of the others plus some.

Obviously. It was a joke.