hodgesrm

For similar reasons I have used ET for the US Eastern Time Zone for years when scheduling meetings. If you care about the time relative to GMT or other people’s time zone, calendar software takes care of that nicely.

I'm curious why the ontology-driven approach is better than just loading records like log and trace data into some variation of SQL tables with full text indexes ad/or Bloom filter indexes. That's how most log management systems work. It's pretty effective, especially for very large datasets.

> As far as I know, they never sent thanks in any form.

It concerned me more that Mark Zuckerberg regarded the Metaverse as something even desireable at all. In Snowcrash it's an escape from a dystopian real life--popular only to the extent that the alternative was so awful.

Not everyone agrees. As Satan said in Paradise Lost, “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven."

The Linux Kernel is not necessarily the most interesting target for LLMs, since it gets a huge amount of attention. I would be interested to hear what people find in less prominent projects. For completeness that includes proprietary code stored in GitHub.

In our company we found real security issues in proprietary code using Opus 4.6/4.7. Obviously typical attackers might have difficulty finding these without code access but Claude was finding real CVEs, which we fixed.

p.s., This is an argument for not trying to deal with security problems by neutering the LLMs. To the extent LLMs are effective it weakens security.

Edit: added p.s.

> I'm currently reading The Count of Monte Cresto and, boy, it's turning out to be quite the epic tale of revenge(no spoilers please!).

Once you get done, try The Three Musketeers. It's both romantic (like Monte Christo) and also really funny, not dark at all. Dumas was an amazing writer, backed by August Maquet, who wrote the first drafts on both novels.

> The language of the night, essays by Ursula Le Guin

That sounds really cool! I love Ursula Le Guin but had never heard of this book.

> Most people never learned BASIC, let alone at 8.

I learned it at age 12. It was pretty much as the author described, except in my case the "computer" was a Texas Instruments teletype, a phone, and a 300 baud modem. Plus a booklet with reddish cover introducing the BASIC language and how to connect to our school account at Washtenaw Computing Services. That was the beginning of a life-long journey with computers.

Why the hostility? The author has stated that he believes AI will alter how we think about operating systems. I don't think that's actually true, but I can see how this line of inquiry could lead to discoveries about how AI will change the line between installed software created by others and software that is "created" by users themselves. It's reasonable to suppose those discoveries in turn will result in new products. I wish him well and hope to hear more.

Using BYOC management reduces the costs significantly. The big cost in analytic SaaS offerings is generally compute, which vendors mark up significantly. (They keep margins low on storage.)

Disclosure: My company Altinity offers BYOC management of ClickHouse.

The relationship depends on the use case and is not linear. For web analytics and log management ClickHouse is a great replacement for ElasticSearch, for example.

I didn't appreciate Pippi Longstocking fully until I read Stieg Larsson's "Girl with the Dragon Tattoo." Occasionally covers are better than the original song.

It's perhaps no coincidence that the opening theme song of the Fincher (Mara/Craig) version of the movie is an outstanding cover of "The Immigrant Song" by Led Zeppelin.

Given the long lines and the mud this year my "idea" would be to skip future festivals.

People go on leave regularly for health reasons, and Fidji Simo has been quite open about her health. Unless you have evidence of your claim, the official explanation is simplest. That's especially the case here since firing someone on health leave can expose you to lawsuits under labor law in the US and many other countries.

Thanks, I see that Lahars are technically associated with volcanoes as another comment noted. They have a variety of causes of which glacial collapse is one. [0] The term jökulhlaup describes a flood originating from a glacier, for example draining of a glacial lake. [1] It now seems the Nepali flood was triggered by a landslide onto a glacier.

As a practical matter the effects are pretty similar. Rainier has had lahars and jökulhlaups in the past.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lahar

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%B6kulhlaup

I've been in Bay Area tech for 35+ years and this pretty much sums it up. AI has upset software economics at multiple levels, including forcing an increasing number of companies out of business. On the other hand it's hard to imagine a better time if you like new technology and have the grit required to win in very competitive markets.

Pro tip for people moving north; don't buy land in the valleys around Mt. Rainier. This type of flood (also known as a lahar) has occurred there many times. The mudflows reached the harbor of Tacoma in the past. [0] I expect we'll see at least one new one in our lifetime, as the glaciers have been greatly affected by rising temperatures.

[0] https://www.usgs.gov/media/images/mt-rainier-lahar-hazard-ma...

Michigan also dropped their mandate for ACT / SAT to obtain admission. So, yes, I would say that's pretty broken. Combined with systematic grade inflation American universities as a whole are removing any real feedback about student preparation, level of effort, or ability.

> I'm actually really interested in hearing about a large enterprise running vendor code that would even entertain the idea the vendor could automatically update the entire deployment without their direct involvement.

A better word than "involvement" is "knowledge." We operate BYOC installations of managed ClickHouse and allow customers to pick upgrade windows. It's not that different from doing upgrades yourself. It's also important to remember that SaaS products upgrade without user intervention and often without user knowledge. That's one of the characteristics of the SaaS model.

> I think the most important aspect here though, and the most subtle one, is the issue of deployment and operational complexity. For BYOC to work well, the vendor really should be designing for it from the beginning.

This is definitely correct. We made a design decision early on that environments for managed databases (i.e., the data plane) are dedicated Kubernetes clusters for each tenant. Data plane services fit in the single K8s cluster and can be installed in 20 minutes or less over the network.

The Omnistrate article makes a great point that there are different flavors of BYOC depending on how much control users want. We have two variants: (a) fully managed stack in its own VPC where we install and run everything and (b) managed databases on user-supplied Kubernetes.

The fact this plan is called a "Hellscape" is horrifying. I wonder if that's Pentagon remarketing to bring an existing plan on-brand with the new Department of War.

The thinking in this article seems muddled to me. Historically there are two fundamental models for rivalries between powerful economic actors and national governments.

* Regulatory capture - AI Labs [partially] capture government functions, i.e., take over. In practice this equates to oligarchy.

* Nationalization - Government takes over AI labs through some form of direct or indirect control (e.g., dirigisme).

The article discussion does not seem to consider either of them. And the idea that AI labs would act in the interest of citizens at large seems laughable. In practice it looks like California Forever [0], which is quite the opposite.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Forever

edit: clarity

> I assume the native formats will always be faster / more optimized

Actually query on Iceberg is end-to-end faster on ClickHouse than MergeTree native format on disk. It's mostly a matter of how much compute you throw at it. Native MergeTree still wins in cases that depend on use of indexes to reduce I/O but scan speed is no longer an issue.

> Pet peeve: companies that appropriate a dictionary term for their name, e.g. Apple, Google (& Alphabet), Amazon, Oracle.

Hard disagree. Consider "Oracle," a truly inspired name for a database company. It's an admirable choice. Here's the computer science definition.

> In complexity theory and computability theory, an oracle machine is an abstract machine that can query a black box called an oracle, which is able to give an answer to any instance of a certain problem in a single operation.

There's also the wealth of linkages with classical oracles, e.g., Delphi, Cumae (technically a Sibyl), Dodona, etc. [1] Taken together, it's hard to think of a better name.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_machine

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle

How would you feel about an article if you knew the author circulated it to respected friends for review? That's another way to use LLMs. I do it all the time. LLMs are great sounding boards.

Similarly how would you feel about writing that the author passed over to an editor?

p.s., I'm just echoing the arguments of the orginal article's author, who has a talent for reductio ad absurdum.

edit: added p.s.

> The text is like: "The neon is pink. Her hair is blue. Her face is light. She smiles because she was made to smile, and somewhere beneath the awareness of that fact is the older, simpler, more animal truth: a face is smiling at you. Someone said your name. Someone said “you look lonely” and meant it as an invitation rather than a wound."

That sounds cool. It's also a style of SciFi writing--clipped sentences that juxtapose images and let you put together meaning. I wonder how long this sequence can go before the LLM messes up because it has limited understanding (if you will) of the underlying meaning of the images.

> I remember lamenting all through the 2010s that all the high paying jobs were basically ad revenue supported.

That's never been true for financial services, many of which offer very high-paying jobs for high-frequency trading, hedge fund management, market operations, etc. There are many other industries with high value IT jobs that are not ad-supported.

(Edit: typo)

I love Proust, but you need mental space to read his books. It also helps to be a little bored. That's hard to achieve while connected to the Internet.

> How's this any different than say, tractors, or the mechanical loom? After all, agricultural employment went from 90% in the past to 1% today.

Regarding US agricultural labor displacement.

* It happened over a period of 200 years or so in the USA. [0] That's a key difference.

* Starting in the late 1800s manufacturing rose to a peak of 38% in 1944. [1] This absorbed a lot of the available labor, often at better rates of pay than farm work. It's a common pattern in industrializing nations where manufacturing absorbs labor freed up by more productive agriculture. Manufacturing labor is no longer growing, so that cannot help with employment.

That's not to say it was pleasant for all concerned. I would argue, however, that black swan events like the Dust Bowl caused more disruption and trauma than the steady displacement of farm labor by technology.

[0] https://u.osu.edu/beef/2022/07/06/the-history-of-american-ag...

[1] https://humanprogress.org/trends/the-changing-nature-of-work...

Edit: clarity

What's the difference between pgdog and vitesse?

That’s what a small earthquake with a nearby epicenter feels like. The first time it happened to me it felt like a tree hitting the house. (“Small” is circa 3.0 magnitude.)