jaffee

removing human cognitive friction is resulting in needless software complexity

This is kind of a hilarious statement just on the surface. Isn't removing burden from humans the whole purpose of software? How can you call the complexity "needless"?!

(the actual tweet seems to go into a bit more detail around being incentivized to find good abstractions)

This was the first thing I noticed. The first sentence is not a grammatical or sensical sentence as far as I can tell.

Also who are they expecting to get with a hiring window open for 4 days? People susceptible to manufactured urgency I guess... these are the tactics that phishing scams use.

client side of this kind of needs to be open source unless I'm running it on a dedicated machine and firewalling it from the rest of my network. Or the company needs to have a very strong reputation and certifications. curlbash and go is a pretty hard sell for me

And today in obvious headlines: "Game recognize game"

oh yeah, that's actually how I read it though now I realize it's nonsensical... like when someone says "I could care less" when they actually mean "couldn't"

You installed Beads, completely oblivious to the fact that it's basically uninstallable malware.

Did I miss something? I haven't used it in a minute, but why is the author claiming that it's "uninstallable malware"?

I was a big WFH proponent, but I found the thing that I hated the most was the commute. Actually being in the office is pretty nice (assuming you work w/ nice people, have good culture, good coffee, nice desk setups, etc).

I've made the switch to biking to work about half the time and it's freaking amazing. I turn 20-30 mins of absolute dead time where I'm spending money, polluting, and using up infrastructure into 50 minutes of getting healthier and having a blast. It's a great trade, especially if you were going to work out anyway... which you should, of course.

I'm effectively spending 25 extra minutes of my day to get a 50 minute workout and save some money, and not pollute, and not contribute to traffic problems, parking congestion, etc. etc.

It's not necessarily easy to make this happen, cycling safely is a whole other can of worms, you kind of need a shower at the office (or take it easier on an ebike), but the benefits are massive if you can do it.

Yegge was an early employee at Amazon and has been writing influential blog posts and developing massive software projects since before this guy was born. But sure, in his retirement he's pivoted to pump and dump schemes.

Internet -> Obvious value, more efficient communication, knowledge sharing, transactions etc.

AI -> Value is very obvious to me as a developer.

Blockchain -> ? What is the actual value? Something about decentralized finance and not having to trust anyone? And the tradeoff is every transaction costs $10 or more. It was always a dubious proposition with its "value" driven by speculative investment which fueled the hype machine.

Yeah there are parallels in that in all cases people got really excited about something tech and poured a bunch of money in, but the outcomes and actual amount of value derived can be wildly different.

What a joke this guy is. I can sit down and crank out a real, complex feature in a couple hours that would have previously taken days and ship it to the users of our AI platform who can then respond to RFQs in minutes where they would have previously spent hours matching descriptions to part numbers manually.

...and yet we still see these articles claiming LLMs are dying/overhyped/major issues/whatever.

Cool man, I'll just be over here building my AI based business with AI and solving real problems in the very real manufacturing sector.

1Password can be your 2fa and autofill those fields. It has a built in scanner which will look at your screen and read the QR code on the screen (no separate device needed).

text to servo movement

yeah this was super impressive. If this is at the point where you can put an arbitrary object in front of it and ask it to move it somewhere, that's going to be huge for industrial automation type stuff I'd imagine.

I do wonder how much of that demo was pre-baked/trained though. Could they repeat the same thing with a banana? What if the table was more cluttered? What if there were two people in the frame?

embedding vectors you've calculated from the code? If so, those are likely quite easily reversible

I don't think embeddings are generally reversible... you're usually projecting onto a lower dimensional space, and therefore losing information.

wait... but why did it work in the development environment?

Well... sure. But OpenAI and MSFT have gone to a lot of trouble to build up the mystique around GPT-4 by being secretive about its architecture and publishing papers with tantalizing phrases like "sparks of AGI" and so on. I think this type of thing provides a useful counterbalance.

This was my thought when we first wrote this back in... 2018 or whatever. The papers referenced sort of derive this technique in that way that feels rather roundabout. For the actual implementation we took the more direct approach... though I think we did switch from a twos complement to a sign/magnitude representation at one point which allows us to dynamically vary the bit depth used which can save some space and computation time.

As far as the performance goes, in this system, we represent almost everything with compressed bitmaps, so there's some advantage to using them for integers and range queries as well as the output of a range query is very naturally a bitmap which can easily be combined with more typical categorical bitmaps when evaluating more complex queries.

Depends what you want out of life and what career you're moving to... you can become pretty competent in a career in tech in just a few years and it will likely become lucrative pretty quickly. I feel that there will likely be increasing demand for programmers/engineers for decades to come. Check out Steve Yegge's youtube show for thoughts on this... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8332hz8c2s&list=PLZfuUWMTtM...

That's Sir Arthur C. Clarke to you!

Andrew, see if anything here catches your eye... we've got a few openings. You can email me at my username at featurebase.com.

https://www.featurebase.com/careers

Generally speaking, the nice thing about bitmap indexes is that you're able to access the data in a very granular way. If you have a WHERE clause that's calling out specific values, you only access the data which is pertinent to those values within a column, you don't have to scan the whole column. This is simply due to the structure of a bitmap index where you have a separate bitmap for each value in the domain of a column.

Furthermore, access patterns for bitmaps tend to be very linear and cache/prefetch friendly.

I think it's very feasible that adding SIMD could result in a real-world speedup in an otherwise well-optimized in-memory system. I agree if you need to go to disk, that will likely dominate the overall performance of a single query, but it may still be overall more efficient which can still help in a multi-user situation.

wait I'm thinking of fgprof.... this looks awesome too though

this thing is awesome, have used it many times to quickly track down tricky performance issues.

I wish there was a comparison to how dangerous the same commute is by car. I feel like you should also factor in the benefits of getting extra exercise twice a day for 20 years vs sitting still.

Though maybe the alternative is walking, not driving...

many! It was originally developed for marketing use cases- helping marketers understand up-to-date use her behavior and find interesting segments.

But really it's useful anytime you need low latency analytics on fresh data.

The full arrays do get expensive, although not too bad. I work at FeatureBase and we have a whole analytics DB built on a roaring variant... for perf reasons it's usually worth it to bias toward the bitmap representation when you get past about 2k set bits, though it does take a bit more space.

Great question! We have actually done some experiments with this in the past and will likely be rolling out features like this on top of Pilosa as part of Molecula https://www.molecula.com/is-your-data-ai-ready/

One does have to maintain some understanding of the how integer row and column ids are linked to what they actually represent.

Sometimes this is a function which might map (for example) row 3 to the letter 'd', 4 to 'e', and so on. Sometimes it has to be a lookup table which can be kept within Pilosa, or externally. Sometimes the IDs map directly to what they represent (day-of-month, year, passenger count, etc.)

So strictly speaking, not everything is a bitmap, but the bulk of the heavy lifting in terms of serving queries is computation on bitmaps.

Bit-sliced indexing is the clever magic here. This post goes very deep on it https://www.pilosa.com/blog/range-encoded-bitmaps/

But really, you use one bitmap for each binary bit of an integer, and it turns out you can generate arbitrary range queries on your dataset by doing various combinations of boolean operations on those bitmaps.

You definitely can... the feature set keeps growing. We have multi-field filtered GROUP BY now. It's amazing to see how flexible Roaring Bitmaps can be!

Pilosa is best used in conjunction with something like Kafka with (e.g.) separate consumers for Pilosa and a persistent data store.