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)

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.

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

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.

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.

...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.

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?

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

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.

https://www.featurebase.com/careers

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.