Hacker News: KrugerDunnings

New comment by KrugerDunnings in "PostgresML raises $4.7M to launch serverless AI app databases based on Postgres"

KrugerDunnings — Thu, 25 May 2023 17:59:33 +0000

I already told you I don't want to talk about this here and now. It is not dumb but it is disrespectful to demand explanations from strangers, like I have time for this.

New comment by KrugerDunnings in "PostgresML raises $4.7M to launch serverless AI app databases based on Postgres"

KrugerDunnings — Thu, 25 May 2023 16:54:32 +0000

Well it's there in the name, they add machine learning to Postgres. They are not the only ones doing this, I am working on a similar idea and I don't think all of us are as misguided as the crypto bros of 2022. This is as much about Postgres as it is about AI. No one has yet successfully communicated what those in the know are seeing, and it is sort of hard to explain but relational databases are a good match for AI. Personally my strategy is to try to build compelling application instead of an infrastructure play, but to each its own and I wish them the best.

New comment by KrugerDunnings in "Rio: Terminal app built over WebGPU, WebAssembly and Rust"

KrugerDunnings — Wed, 24 May 2023 17:35:01 +0000

That be fine also. I've been playing around with sixel and it's a great way to add plotting to a repl.

New comment by KrugerDunnings in "Rio: Terminal app built over WebGPU, WebAssembly and Rust"

KrugerDunnings — Wed, 24 May 2023 16:03:38 +0000

I'd love some sixel support to embedded graphics in the terminal

New comment by KrugerDunnings in "The Rise of Somatic Therapy"

KrugerDunnings — Tue, 23 May 2023 17:18:13 +0000

Stimulating different parts of the body stimulates different parts of the brain[1]. Through cross talking neurones this might influence parts of your brain to be rewired differently and relieve some over burdened circuits, just like it might happen with traumatic events, but the rigour and precision by which this can be done is still very much an open question.

[1] https://twitter.com/chrost_hugo/status/1660788882559078400/p...

New comment by KrugerDunnings in "Why are so many giants of AI getting GPTs so badly wrong?"

KrugerDunnings — Mon, 22 May 2023 23:25:44 +0000

Universal grammar in the way that Chomsky suggested, a sort of structure all humans must have in there brain, is not a thing. But I believe there is something like the "universality of grammar" where the human vision system or motor system can have a grammatical quality to them. In that sense that there is ambiguity in which tree structure represent the world. I've seen this in many places but I am not sure if someone has put this into (better) writing.

New comment by KrugerDunnings in "Does AI mean we don't need the Semantic Web?"

KrugerDunnings — Sun, 21 May 2023 11:32:39 +0000

Well I am at least glad that someone name drops someone other then TBL.

New comment by KrugerDunnings in "0+: A double digit Sharpe HFT strategy"

KrugerDunnings — Sun, 21 May 2023 00:57:25 +0000

Interesting, everstrike is a option market that sells a type of option they call an everlasting option. They say it was co-invented by non other than SBF: https://www.paradigm.xyz/2021/05/everlasting-options

New comment by KrugerDunnings in "Does AI mean we don't need the Semantic Web?"

KrugerDunnings — Sat, 20 May 2023 16:19:44 +0000

Chapter 2 Verse 1: https://www.w3.org/TR/rdf11-primer/

New comment by KrugerDunnings in "Does AI mean we don't need the Semantic Web?"

KrugerDunnings — Sat, 20 May 2023 14:40:08 +0000

The big lie about the semantic web is this ridiculous notion that it is machine readable just because it has an unambiguous grammar to parser and has ontologies to disambiguate homonyms.

New comment by KrugerDunnings in "Current architectural best practices for LLM applications"

KrugerDunnings — Thu, 27 Apr 2023 23:49:02 +0000

Sentence embeddings have been great for improving semantic search, but I am still struggling with finding relevant documents for numerical values. Questions like "what people where born in 1992" or "people with at least 4 children". One thing I can do is pre-process the data by transforming the date of birth into boomers/zoomers/millenials and the like but this does not help on the question side if people don't know what to ask

New comment by KrugerDunnings in "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Pronouns"

KrugerDunnings — Tue, 25 Apr 2023 13:42:16 +0000

Lets break down the three clains in reverse order:

1. Are there primitive societies of hunter-gatherer that are not self aware, as in they don't pass neurological test that measure this?

2. From a evolutionary perspective what is the advantage of this sexual dimorphism and given that this advantage exists why did this advantage disappear afterwards and become present in both sexes. Are there any other traits where woman are shown to have larger divergence. I thought men where the "weak" sex in this regard.

3. If consciousness is recent then how do you explain conscious trails and self awareness in lower primates, is this also a case of convergent evolution?

New comment by KrugerDunnings in "Most of us won't be inventing little languages (2004)"

KrugerDunnings — Mon, 17 Apr 2023 11:27:39 +0000

Yes, in my career I've seen a OO extension of C written in XML that required a custom eclipse plugin to write. A language where you defined a function like: function foo() while (...) ... end while; if (...) ... end if; end foo, because those guys loved the C++ style of putting comments at the end of control structures. Finally there was the language you had to write in excel that was exported to CSV that in turn was used to generate XML that was parsed before compile time to generate java code with System.out.println and was finally loaded at runtime through some dynamic loading. I never had any respect for these people as engineers, I was very KrugerDunnings early on in my career but I don't think I was to entirely to blame for always knowing better.

New comment by KrugerDunnings in "Low Code Software Development Is a Lie"

KrugerDunnings — Sat, 15 Apr 2023 12:47:33 +0000

There are a lot more middle man then that, a lot of CEO and CTO i've met had an almost active disintrest in anything technical or even practical knowledge of there product, not knowing the priorities is in there own backlog or not knowing what an init system is or does but ask you how to start a process when a computer starts. Unbelievable what people complain about in meetings without having googles that problems in MONTHS. Most people just secretly hate technology and will grasp at anything that gives them an excuse not to care.

New comment by KrugerDunnings in "Yes, it's OK to be mad about crime in San Francisco"

KrugerDunnings — Wed, 12 Apr 2023 16:40:43 +0000

I once tried helping a drunken homeless man that was throwing up blood at 1 in the morning when I was on my way to the office to pick up some paperwork. My phone died the moment I took it out of my pocket to call an ambulance. I spend the next 30 minutes trying to get the guy help including calling the intercom of a hospice/clinic around the corner. I ended up talking to another homeless woman who impersonated a doctor on the intercom of the hospice to get them to call an ambulance.

New comment by KrugerDunnings in "SQL Maxis: Why We Ditched RabbitMQ and Replaced It with a Postgres Queue"

KrugerDunnings — Tue, 11 Apr 2023 18:01:06 +0000

It is easy to avoid multiple workers processing the same task: `delete from task where id = (select id from task for update skip locked limit 1) returning *;`

New comment by KrugerDunnings in "Not Forgotten: ChatGPT isn’t the only important trend in technology"

KrugerDunnings — Tue, 11 Apr 2023 13:45:59 +0000

This is a depressing list, I was expecting some interesting new bio engineering process or dunno quantum chemistry this or that for easier synthesise of whatever, but instead it was either marginal improvements like wasm or total BS like blockchain/cloud. AI/ML is probably the only interesting thing happening in tech at the moment, it has been getting more attention in the last year but that is because it has honestly enabled a lot of people to do things they could not do before. Personally I think that there is also a lot of things happening in computer graphics but the money has been miss allocated on creating virtual places instead of making the real world better.

New comment by KrugerDunnings in "Building a Database in the 2020s (2022)"

KrugerDunnings — Sun, 09 Apr 2023 02:53:03 +0000

There is just so much, I've thought of writing some blog post about it but there is already a lot of content out there because pg is a big community with a lot of people doing interesting things and I don't know if what I know is unique and not just parroting others peoples stuff.

But ok sure I can give you some pointers to cool stuff. Sometimes it are just architectural patterns that are easy to do like upsert statements in sql using `on conflict`, or writing a task queue on the cheap using `for update skip locked limit 1`. Replace 90% of your crud api controllers with `postgrest` and use row level security for everything, AI is not going to steal your job category theory is. From a operations and scaling perspective it pays dividend to learn about `explain analyse` but did you know they also have `stats` that can help the analyser optimise queries based on statistical relations of different columns. I've also been looking into how to "branch" a database instead if just doing a backup, it does require some ZFS tricks but that is also just pure power and not something you find with a cloud file system. There are also just a ton of extension for timeseries or vector embeddings, or write your own in Rust using `pgx`. Like I said way too much to write here, I don't use all of this in production but I just keep finding these gems while working on my own project. There is a strong OSS ecosystem with lots of teams giving there own spin on pg and that is welcomed if you have a opinion of your own and still want to learn from others. You need motivation to go this deep but in contrast to other esoteric knowledge I have mastered companies are also willing to pay for it.

New comment by KrugerDunnings in "Building a Database in the 2020s (2022)"

KrugerDunnings — Sun, 09 Apr 2023 01:47:34 +0000

I've been building a Postgresql extension in the last months for some functionality that was needed and have learned a ton about the internal workings of this database. All very scary and complicated sounding stuff but I feel privileged to be able to do this because the things you learn are just pure gold. My attitude before this was that of the ideal customer of a cloud database, someone who was scared of sql and preferred to hide behind the complexity of a ORM. Not anymore, now I write thousands of lines of sql and laugh to myself like a maniac.

New comment by KrugerDunnings in "DevOps uses a capability model, not a maturity model"

KrugerDunnings — Thu, 06 Apr 2023 13:24:20 +0000

Lately I've been made to understand that DevOps or Software Engineering is not for me, capability/maturity models, processes written in anything other then code, or metrics this and that just ism't me. We can argue about the meaning of words all day long but like I said this just isn't me. Some of us just prefer to say close to the metal (as in reality with all its complexity that escapes the precision of words and that is totally ok) and are deeply suspicious of any excessive abstractions. There must be others like me, so I am in search for my tribe, and I want to know what do we call ourself, maybe we don't want to call ourself anything, but where can we meet, who want to hire us, please tell me if you know, Thanks!