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pmcf

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I think Google doesn’t turn Gemini loose on docs the same reason Apple doesn’t turn AI loose on your phone. It’s just not reliable enough to let 99.99% of the world use it. Those of us on the bleeding edge have been fine tweaking and working with inconsistencies. If you put a lot of work in, you get a productivity boost. Think of the family member you are “tech support” for. (You know who you are) would you recommend that to them? Yeah. Me neither.

Line of sight issues are simply a wattage issue. A gigawatt laser is impervious to rain, a bird, a flock of birds, a bird and the tree it sitting in. Probably the entire forest. Let’s just say there are some solutions well in hand.

"The Navy is a master plan designed by geniuses for execution by idiots."

- Herman Wouk, The Caine Mutiny

This is completely true. 18-20-year-old kids launch and arrest aircraft on a carrier while simultaneously performing an underway replenishment, and it's just another day.

This was right before the gulf war so I may have met him! Assuming he was a gunners mate, that crew had a lot of moments of touching history. Besides mechanical computers, it’s a really dangerous place since they had to handle massive bags of flash powder.

My ship was near the USS Iowa when turret two went up. A sobering experience when you think how much risk the turret crews are in just by doing their jobs.

In 1989 I was a data systems tech on a Destroyer going through some overhaul at the shipyard in Pascagoula Mississippi. Moored right next to us was the battleship Wisconsin. Huge relic from WW2 but still going through modernization. A bunch of us that worked on combat systems got invited for a tour of their fire control systems.

Wow. Just wow. All mechanical computers calculating fire control solutions for the big 16 inch guns. The guys giving the tour were well beyond the age for regular military retirement. Come to find out, they were all reactivated because practical knowledge of the mechanical computers had since left the navy. That was a very cool day.

“Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.”

Python for analyzing data and crunching numbers? Awesome!

Python for serving HTTP? This could get expensive—the why, what, and choices teams have in deploying AI applications.

Beyond the VR thing. I keep thinking this could have more immediate impact on manufacturing and logistics. Imagine a delivery truck with this on the floor that could optimally organize packages dynamically.

Everyone complains about how expensive Splunk is but the amount of compute and storage consumed by processing logs is ridiculous.

I feel like we should be talking about the sad state of logging where we think it’s perfectly ok to dump millions of 10k stack trace dumps and think that should be cheap.

The Cassandra project recently[1] added vector search. Relative to a lot of other features, it was fairly simple. A new 'vector' type and an extension of the existing indexing system using the Lucene HNSW library. Now we'll be finding ways to optimize and improve performance with better algorithms and query schemes.

What we won't be doing is figuring out how to scale to petabytes of data distributed across multiple data centers in a massive active-active cluster. We've spent the last 14 years perfecting that, and still have work to do. With the benefit of hindsight, if you have a database that is less than 10 years old, all I have to say is good luck. You have some challenging days ahead.

1. https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/CASSANDRA/CEP-30...

Sure I can answer both. The OS scheduler CFQ is generally bad for high volume disk applications. Used deadline in this case. Amy's Guide is still a treasure trove of info and a solid recommended read: https://tobert.github.io/pages/als-cassandra-21-tuning-guide...

If you are using Spark in a bare metal cluster with spark-submit, the above advice applies. In Kubernetes, never use the default pod scheduler with analytic workloads. Great choices are Volcano(https://volcano.sh/en/) and Yunikorn(https://yunikorn.apache.org/). Also great and evolving projects to support and contribute if you can.