written-beyond

Aaah you've got me excited and thinking about all sorts of ways this can fix the issue. I really appreciate your time for answering my questions, it's all very interesting.

Can't PgDog pull in the query planning and execution part from Postgres, and maintain a cache of the different indexes that are available pulled in from the different postgres shards and then follow through on the execution. This way PgDog could technically scale up to as many instances and keep postgres instances themselves as just a persistence backend?

However, I understand that at that point you're basically just making an entirely new database not really a sharding support service on top of postgres, you'd need to attempt to maintain feature parity with postgres which can turn into a maintenance pain.

Do you have any insights on how platforms like planetscale or cockroach are doing some of this stuff?

That's was my second question, how on earth can you replicate real world Postgres workloads that benefit the most from sharing.

Are there some specific standard Postgres test suites you run PgDog through to ensure it's compliant with Postgres standards?

You've mentioned NoSQL quite a bit, what sort of techniques do shard-able NoSQL database employ which makes sharding inherently easier? Do you attempt to emulate some of those techniques in PGDog?

Lastly how do you solve the problem of Postgres constraints, from what I've understood PgDog runs standard Postgres instances as the shard, if let's say one table in shard 1 has a foreign key to a record in shard 2 how do you prevent Postgres from rejecting that record since it technically doesn't exist on it's current shard?

Idk about the grammatical correctness of the punctuation, but I really enjoyed reading his writing. Never read something by him before, it was genuinely refreshing, specially given it was a glorified ad.

Can you elaborate a bit more on the challenges faced in making Postgres shard-able?

I remember that adding sharing to Postgres natively was an uphill battle. There were a few companies who has proprietary solutions for it. What you've been able to achieve is nothing less than a miracle.

idk man it's rare to fight the compiler once you've used Rust for long enough unless you're doing something that's the slightest bit complex with async.

You get to good at schmoozing the compiler you start to create actual logical bugs faster.

Can someone provide a true engineers perspective on the ADCs' on ESP SoC's?

I've heard a lot about people trashing it and most experienced engineers admit that it's finicky however if you have the knowledge you can make it work as well as any STM chip.

ESP32's are so interesting, they're the only major chip that (used to) have their own newish ISA (before transitioning to RISCV) and be so successful.

Interesting, I was a mildly heavy cannabis user in my very early teens but stopped short right before starting my junior year of high school. My use was mostly motivated by teen angst and peer pressure, I never really enjoyed it I always felt uncomfortably anxious and hyper sensitive.

This study shows that anxiety was identified in many of the participants of the study, which is pretty close to how I feel now. I am in general and anxious individual and I wonder if this was because of the marijuana use. Well it could also be how anxiety is pretty rampant in my family so could just be in my genes.

Don't shoot the messenger

That reduces the quality of the response though.

The best example for this are iot devices that share their data. Instead of reinventing the wheel for a dashboard for each customer just give them some docs and restricted access via a replica.

Aaaaaah I had a professor rave about Crystal Reports once. Didn't know it had such gilded history.

It would be a game changer, very interesting to see this grow. How did you get your PDF generation so good?

That's exactly what I meant. It's a specific replica instance with it's own security etc. but not necessarily a separate API you try to integrate too. APIs can stay for writes, but for reads you have the db

This is really nice, specially the pdf report generation.

I feel very moronic making a dashboard for any products now. Enterprise customers prefer you integrate into their ERPs anyway.

I think we lost the plot as an industry, I've always advocated for having a read only database connection to be available for your customers to make their own visualisations. This should've been the standard 10 years ago and it's case is only stronger in this age of LLMs.

We get so involved with our products we forget that our customers are humans too. Nobody wants another account to manage or remember. Analytics and alerts should be push based, configurable reports should get auto generated and sent to your inbox, alerts should be pushed via notifications or emails and customers should have an option to build their own dashboard with something like this.

Sane defaults make sense but location matters just as much.

Man you really nostalgia pilled me. It's lovely and a work of art.

What's the deal with the audio delay showing up for button taps until the icons have loaded?

Never thought of it that way, very interesting insight. I always thought those "K circle back" emails were fake but nope looks like they're very real.

Is this the gnu version of systemd?

edit: I know it's not a monolith like systemd but service/unit files are a core component of systemd

I can bet that a single standard instance of existing tool like codex and Claude Code to do whatever someone with a convoluted setup like that can. It could be marginally slower if you but it's all literally just English language text files.

I use codex almost everyday, none of that is necessary unless you're trying to flatten up your resume.

It's micro services all over again, a concept useful for some very select organisations, that should've been used carefully turned into a fad every engineer had to try shoe horn into their stack.

"Learn AI tooling"

What is there to learn, honestly? People act like it's learning to write a Linux driver.

The maximum knowledge you need how to write a plan or text file. Maybe throw in a "Plz no mistakes"

There's no specific model, a better one comes out every month, everything is stochastic.

THAT'S INSANE!

I always wondered if this could be possible. Like you fuzz a program, map out each possible allocation and deallocation and optimize the code with those hot paths and some statistics.

Very interesting project, would love some sort of write up on it.

Yes, this was 9 years ago there was no Vite.

I want to thank you dear poster and author, I feel genuinely refreshed reading a short interesting post sans status quo topic.

Waiting for the next part!

You need to understand the frustration behind these kinds of posts.

The people on the start of the curve are the ones who swear against LLMs for engineering, and are the loudest in the comments.

The people on the end of the curve are the ones who spam about only vibing, not looking at code and are attempting to build this new expectation for the new interaction layer for software to be LLM exclusively. These ones are the loudest on posts/blogs.

The ones in the middle are people who accept using LLMs as a tool, and like with all tools they exercise restraint and caution. Because waiting 5 to 10 seconds each time for an LLM to change the color of your font, and getting it wrong is slower than just changing it yourself. You might as well just go in and do these tiny adjustments yourself.

It's the engineers at both ends that have made me lose my will to live.

It's still okay to do that, LLMs models are literally terabytes big I'm sure they've crammed enough information in there and enough verification tools to be extremely accurate. Now whether the information matches your true internal intent, rather than the prompt, is another thing.

I've had friendships broken because people couldn't understand why I didn't appreciate their "hard work" on writing a series of 10 articles they wrote with Claude.

Mind you this person is an excellent writer, they had great success with ghost writing and running a small news website where they wrote and curated articles. But for some reason the opportunity for Claude to write stuff they can never have the time for is too great for them to ignore.

I don't care if you used AI for 99.99% of your research for writing the content but when I read your content it should be written by you. It's why I never take any article seriously on linkedin, even before AI, they all lack any personalization.

I never "learned" react because the "create react app" would literally never install for me in the early days. There were literally so many dependencies I never got it to build as a novice, I tried svelte everything worked and I got to spend that time building.

I can only speak for Svelte, in Svelte 3/4 it was so dead simple that I built my first basic webapp with 0 javascript, css or html experience in 3 days.

By week 2 I was trying out different UI libraries and css frameworks, that part was super rough though, back then lots of compat issues.

I saw a video of a Chinese phone that did something like that. Their implementation was a privacy and security nightmare but basically it shared a active feed of your screen with an LLM and would literally tap, type and swipe to achieve your objective. Like order these oodles from this app, it would only interrupt it's actions at payment processing screens.

Looked really cool and like the AI I've always imagined.

Writing the spec is becoming the default for pet projects. Which would be a good thing if the spec wasn't also partly written by an LLM.

You can already see people running into these issues, they have a spec in mind. They work on the spec with and LLM, the spec has stuff added to it that wasn't what they were expecting.

And again, I am not against LLMs but I can be against how they're being used. You write some stuff down, maybe have the LLM scaffold some skeleton for you. You could even discuss with the LLM what classes should be named what should they do etc. just be in the process so the entire code base isn't 200% foreign to you by the time it's done.

Also I am no one's mother, everyone has freewill they can do whatever they'd like. If you don't think you have better things to do than to produce 3-5 pieces of abandonware software every weekend then good for you.

I never said anything against using LLMs. You're projecting.

Any engineer worth their weight will always try to avoid adding code. Any amount of code you add to a system, whether is written by you or a all knowing AI is a liability. If you spent a majority of your work day writing code it's understandable to want to rely heavily on LLMs.

Where I'd like for people to draw a line on is not knowing at all what the X thousand lines of code are doing.

In my career, I have never been in a situation where my problems could be a solved by piecing together code from SO. When I say "spend those few minutes doing it yourself" I am specifically talking about UI, but it does apply to other situations too.

For instance, if you had to change your UI layout to something specific. You could try to collect screenshots and articulate what you need to see changed. If you weren't clear enough that cycle of prompting with the AI would waste your time, you could've just made the change yourself.

There are many instances where the latter option is going to be faster and more accurate. This would only be possible if you had some idea of your code base.

When you've let an agent take full control of your codebase you will have to sink time into understanding it. Since clearly everyone is too busy for that you get stuck in a loop, the only way to make those "last 10%" changes is *only* via the agent.

You don't, and as long as you're comfortable with that you keep prompting to dig yourself out of holes.

The problem is unless your ready to waste hours prompting to get something exactly how you want it, instead of spending those few minutes doing it yourself, you start to get complacent for whatever the LLM generated for you.

IMO it feels like being a geriatric handicap, there's literally nothing you can do because of the hundreds or thousands of lines of code that's been generated already, you run into the sunk cost fallacy really fast. No matter what people say about building "hundreds of versions" you're spending time doing so much shit either prompting or spec writing that it might not feel worth getting things exactly right in case it makes you start all over again.

It's literally not as if with the LLM things are literally instantaneous, it takes upwards or 20-30 minutes to "Ralph" through all of your requirements and build.

If you start some of it yourself first and you have an idea about where things are supposed to go it really helps you in your thinking process too, just letting it vibe fully in an empty directory leads to eventual sadness.