The winner was Daniel Quinn’s “Ismael”. Quite a remarkable book that probably never would have been published without this.

It used to only be available for big enterprises, but now there is a totally free version you can try out: https://www.exasol.com/personal

But one key differentiator is that they didn’t have the logistics to have soldiers. With no surplus to pay anyone, there was no way build up an army, and with no-one having the ability to tell others to go to war or force them to do so, the scale of conflicts and skirmishes were a lot more limited.

So while there might have been a constant state of minor skirmishes, like we see in any population of territorial animals, all-out totalitarian war was a rare occurrence.

The word “always” is carrying a lot of weight here. This has really only been true for the last 10,000 years or so, since the introduction of agriculture. We lived as egalitarian bands of hunter gatherers for hundreds of thousands of years before that. Given the magnitude of difference in timespan, I think it is safe to say that that is the “default setting”.

LLMs are getting pretty good at writing SQL. There is so much training material out there, and it is not that hard to validate the results. The real interesting question will be if they will be better at leveraging all the database specific dialects than tool like PowerBI. High-performance databases like Exasol often has a lot of specific features in their SQL dialects that generic tools and ORMs are not able to use, it will be interesting to see if LLMs can make that more accessible.

There they have a Judicial Committee, composed of both students and staff, and deal with issues through a process similar to courts in democratic society.

Interesting enough, both students and staff can be brought up for bad behavior, which is probably what makes the process respected enough to work.

It will be great with some more options in this space, especially if it makes a smooth transition from single-node/local interactions to multi-node scale-out.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44414585

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This is not true at all. A quick google for “hunter gatherer work hours” would tell you that they worked far less than we do today. 2-5 hours of what we would define as work a day, with the rest being mainly leisure.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44044161

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But I would never use one that forced me to express my queries in JSON. The best implementations integrate right into the database so they become an integral part of regular your SQL queries, and as such also available to all your tools.

In my experience, from using the Exasol Semantic Layer, it can be a totally seamless experience.

How would that work? You can only write off the amount you actually donate. Paying 100% to save 40% (or whatever your tax rate is) seems very counterproductive if the goal is to actually save money.

One of the few books where you look so differently at the world after reading it that you literally feel like a different person.