RyanHamilton

It's long but it really expands the point of this article: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4SmgrAmdUQ

Could it be possible, these firms are optimizing for two things: a) Better performance. b) Gathering data from you to further improve performance later. I've also found the huge amount of planning rather than iteration frustrating. I've felt like I'm teaching a junior!

AI crawls your post, corrupts your idea or alters it to advertise a product and then passes that along. Still happy?

I built a passion reference site. A large part of that passion came from knowing and talking to the people I was helping. One person emailing or saying thanks would later help power me through to create more useful articles. Enriching openai/claude/ms/google and no thanks from an individual, has disincentivized me from writing more.

Can you expand how it redefined computing for you personally?

Is it about the users or the data the users generate. Pretty easy to see the day devs are replaced by the data they themselves generated. Companies are only going to get one chance to grad this data. Similar to the internet cutoff.

I would guess he's looking to compare the equivalent of fast-food to fine-dining or nutritious eating.

Very correct! Why internal dashboards keep getting rebuild: https://www.timestored.com/pulse/why-internal-dashboards-get... It took me a few years to home in on the exact idea you've captured and I work in this exact area. There's a middle layer between UI team and notebook experiments that isn't worth companies building themselves.

The article is ignorant of reality. "The typical under-13 social media user is not a sneaky kid. It’s a family making a decision together. " No, every other kid had it and the parent had no choice else their child would be ostracised. Their example of kids learning about volcanoes in youtube. Ha! Go look at the view number for mindless nonsense... Minecraft blabbering then find me a volcano with more child views.

Yes, the ability to command a kingdom was relative to the number of people with force you could convince AND pay to be on your side vs the others. With automation, drones and AI, you no longer need any convincing just capital.

The term is Institutional knowledge. "An organization's collective memory, encompassing the unique expertise, experiences, processes, and cultural insights built over time by its members, acting as a vital asset that guides operations, decision-making, and continuity, often residing in seasoned employees' tacit understanding but also in documented procedures and data. It includes deep technical skills..."

My favorite quote from this video, that I wish more languages would embrace is:

"I went from application to application trying to use the same techniques. The most encouraging thing is that they would work. After 2-3 years during which time the language had grown by accretion, it grew and grew, eventually I found it was shrinking.

    Essentially the idea was once you look at enough different applications you begin to see what is the general notion. So I came to generalisations that allowed me to take out whole chunks of special things I had put in.

    Furthermore to my surprise it turns out the general ideas are usually much simpler to understand than any of the special cases."

QStudio is a tool for SQL analysis. Banks and hedge funds had been paying for it but this year we decided to open source it so that more people can use it. Like DBeaver/DataGrip it provides code highlighting, supports 30+ databases etc. but it also allows 15+ chart types with customization, excel export and table formatting.

I've tried to refrain from commenting but your comment pushed me over the edge. I either want to dismiss your comment as ignorant that amazon is just a shopping cart or ignorant that you even need cloud technologies until you have 1000s of customers. But I must concede there's a chance you fall in that middle area and I'm wrong. It's < 5 percent. But yeah sure.. we have a scale problem and you're right you've identified the nonsense cloud technologies that won't fix it. I'm glad you chimed in to convince us but to build our own for 5000 customers.

Congrats on releasing and steadily improving. What was the most unexpected thing you learnt lately?

I would agree it's both. Ideally we would make many games restricted access and most games games less addictive. At this stage the only viable plan I can think of is for parents to join a cult or cult like group where the parents are dedicated to restricted screen time and enforcing outdoor play. One parent alone can't make it happen. Maybe the quakers were onto something. :)

This is a sympton of something worse. The bigger issue: Roblox isn’t the real problem, it’s filling the gap left by the disappearance of unstructured, unsupervised play in the physical world.

Kids used to build worlds, take risks, and form friendships outdoors. Now many have no safe places to roam, no peers outside scheduled activities, and no cultural permission to be on their own. So they do all that in Roblox instead.

You can tighten access control, but it won’t change the core dynamic: when real childhood spaces shrink, digital platforms become the default playground. Until kids have room to be independent offline, they’ll keep escaping online.

Less incentive to write small libraries. Less incentive to write small tutorials on your own website. Unless you are a hacker or a spammer where your incentives have probably increased. We are entering the era of cheap spam of everything with little incentive for quality. All this for the best case outcome of most people being made unemployed and rolling the dice on society reorganising to that reality.

Timestored | React UI Engineer (Data-Heavy UIs / SlickGrid) | Remote | Contract

POSITION NOW CLOSED TO APPLICATIONS.

We build Pulse, a real-time analytics UI used in finance: https://www.timestored.com/pulse/ Looking for a React engineer experienced with complex data UIs to help improve our grid layer (SlickGrid), add grouping/aggregations, and polish high-performance components. Work directly with the founder; flexible hours; contract with option to extend.

Code: https://github.com/timestored/pulseui

POSITION NOW CLOSED TO APPLICATIONS.

Can you provide an example of where facebook tried to do what most people would consider good that also required any >1% kind of sacrifice or risk on their part? My impression is their moto was win at any cost and ask forgiveness later (not because we mean that either but because it will reduce the legal penalties and make us look like normal humans.) In some ways watching Mark reminds me of the infamous cigarette cartel testifying.

If you want a desktop version check out qstudio: https://www.timestored.com/qstudio/help/duckdb-sql-editor it integrates duckdb functionality for parquet csv and to pivot data

Great phrase. "social media is barely a sharing platform anymore.. its just decentralized long-tailed broadcast media." really captures the essence of what is happening.

I'm less confident. Your description highlights a real problem but this particular solution looks like an attempt to shoe horn a technical solution to a political people problem. It feels like one of these great ideas that years later results in 1000s of different decoders, breakages and a nightmare to maintain. Then someone starts an initiative to move decoding from being bundled and to instead just defining the data format.

Sometimes the best option is to do the hard political work and improve the standard and get everyone moving with it. People have pushed parquet and arrow. Which they are absolutely great technologies that I use regularly but 8 years after someone asked how to write parquet in java, the best answer is to use duckdb: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/47355038/how-to-generate...

Not having a good parquet writer for java shows a poor attempt at pushing forward a standard. Similarly arrow has problems in java land. If they can't be bothered to consider how to actually implement and roll out standards to a top 5 language, I'm not sure I want them throwing WASM into the mix will fix it.

I've probably spent 400+ hours a year sharing content because I wanted to. However the wanted to, was partially because of the good feeling i got from knowing I was helping semi-specific people and then later meeting those people. It's sparked numerous interesting friendships and discussions. That latter part will no longer happen as the AI sits in the middle and becomes the known source. It has massively put me off creating more content. I wasn't creating content to generically help humanity move forward, I did it to help people similar to me facing particular situations. As that becomes diluted, the incentives won't hold to the same degree.

After AI scrape the ad free content, they'll probably turn around and show end users the AI summary with Ads. It never ends. The problem is a much deeper flaw at the heart of capitalism. Enshitification of everything.

It's as great as it ever was. I like it as its very stable and has a good model of interaction but if you want a modern embeddable map or embeddable chart stick with web interfaces. If you do go with swing definitely check out flatlaf to make it look modern.

Similar to you, based on years with databases I saw sorting as a huge advantage and often performed this step as part of optimizing any data access. I've tended to see the same pattern of problems over the last 15 years. Imagine my surprise when I read a blog post that showed not perfectly sorting your data could often result in faster overall result time for a wider range of queries. Duckdb: https://duckdb.org/2025/06/06/advanced-sorting-for-fast-sele... continues to surprise me with novel improved approaches to problems I've worked on for years.

Legally I think not being responsible is the right decision. Morally I would hope everyone considers if they themselves are even partially responsible. As I look round at young people today and the tablet holding, media consuming youth programmers have created in order to get rich via advertising. I wish morals would get considered more often.

kind of wished that Azure Data Studio (now discontinued) had directly supported loading CSV/TXT etc into an in-memory or temp db for queries and portability QStudio supports right click query csv,txt,parquet via duckdb. It also supports more exotic data sources like rest apis by placing the data into a temp table. I called it babeldb https://www.timestored.com/qstudio/csv-file-viewer

I have to agree, I've also suffered account problems. I was locked out from an email address I used for 20 years. It refuses to take my password which is still valid. I've changed phone number since 20 years ago so can't use that and the security questions were nonsense as I was a teenager. Originally my account never had phone number, they insisted I add it when they integrated my Skype account perhaps. So I didn't expect access to that phone number to be a strong ongoing requirement.