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Most startups can just scale your traditional separation of compute & storage here though. You’d be shocked how well duckdb against s3 scales for 99.9% of use cases

It's one thing to be able to scale database compute/storage; it's another thing to be able to partition it. It's extremely common for bad queries/access patterns to cause noisy-neighbor effects on other simultaneous accesses to the database, to the extreme of knocking the whole database over with timeouts/OOMs/etc.

Scaling out DB compute can only help with that to a (expensive) point; eventually, you end up wanting to either prevent the bad queries from being added to the system (DBA culture) or ensure that the bad query runs on database infrastructure that doesn't affect other queries. That's why partitioning DB compute (and storage: noisy-neighbor effects from a bad query at the storage layer don't require storage to be running e.g. a BookKeeper or whatever on a server; they can manifest as hot S3 keys or cloud object/block store rate limiting) is a necessary capability if your plan for dealing with a culture of "anyone can add any access pattern they want" is to scale the DB.


Iceberg & Delta Lake do partition the data. You can add as many DuckDB servers processing them as you want, each app can have as many as you need. You pay Amazon for all the I/O and let them worry about it scaling it.

I'm not saying there is no point of contention - depending upon your write patterns you have practical limits, but for reading data that is already stored you pretty much just pay more to do more and the rate of that cost is close to linear.

I'm sure there is a scale at which that pattern breaks, and I'm sure 99.9% of people reading this will never operate a system at that scale.


Sounds like a great way to give AWS infinite money

Iceberg addresses the hot s3 key prefixes. It places entropy in the prefix path per object so reads/writes are randomized over the bucket key prefix space.

It’s much less of an issue. Also, 99%+ of Aws customers likely don’t have enough QPS to hit the per prefix limits anyway


Most software developers now are absolutely ignorant of performance concerns. Just throw more compute at it until it works, and someone else will pay the AWS bill.

And later complain AWS was too expensive after they kept throwing hardware at it rather than writing an efficient query

And then hire a FinOps team to try and restrain the development team’s profligate spending.

Most enterprises are comprised of a high proportion of shit developers. So you need to work with what you got

I have AI confirm the logic works as expected, but review for system design.

Often in both web/backend I’ve found AI to produce overly duplicative code, or have aspects that could be hard to maintain. Generally less due to the AI, and more because of the prompt itself.

That and even if you’re going to AI slop it up, I’d still demand it be broken up into 1-2k LOC chunks or per meaningful “thing”. This also lets us gradually ramp the change to confirm it actually works earlier on


If the U.S. defaults it’s likely the economy would go to shit or see high inflation. Either way your f’d

Yeah, I'm just watching where on the fucked meter we're currently at. Happens slowly, then all of a sudden.

Trump says he will cease trading with top partners unless Fed lowers rates - https://www.cnn.com/2026/09/04/economy/trump-trade-fed - September 4th, 2026



the people in power now never read Hemingway.

Several of them barely even read, period.

Unless their name is on every powerpoint slide in a large font.


People complain about the kids not reading... I agree more with you. Boomer don't read either.

Bureaucracy is a major part of many corporate leader’s roles. That might not be the best sales line


And that is exactly why AI marketing touts ability to replace programmers, when in reality it is much better suited to replace middle management between client and programmers...


could have been a page with a static 'Yes' and a significant portion of time it'd be accurate.


Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2236/


It’s faster than trino and spark for 99% of your use cases. Only once the datasets reach the 100GiB to TiB range is trino/spark faster. Compute is scaling vertically faster than Data Eng/Analytics dataset growth, over time DuckDB will be the better choice.


No way spark is faster at 100 GB!


The more turnover the more leadership wants to keep talent. The more turnover the more hiring leadership needs to keep headcount.

Greater turnover is good for all employees and worse for employers


But greater turnover only occurs when people don’t want to stay.

It’s my observation a high-turnover business is often good for nobody. There’s more spent in retraining etc than if you just paid halfway-competent people properly instead of literally rolling the dice every year or more.


Yeah. Itd be ideal if companies could adjust their existing employees wages fairly. This alternative of people moving frequently creates a high turnover org which isnt efficient. But if employers dont compensate their existing employees fairly then high turnover is unfortunately the only way to go


> Itd be ideal if companies could adjust their existing employees wages fairly

They can.

Employee-owned companies do it all of the time.

Properly-ran privately-owned companies do it all of the time.

Who’s the odd one out?


Not just in employment; voting out incumbents improves economic growth for the majority: https://www.nber.org/papers/w29766

Since the early 1980s, start of the Millennial generation, inflation is 300%; takes $800k/yr to have the buying power of $200k/yr in the 80s

Millennials and GenZ have only ever known austerity and oligarchy.

And that Exxon computed the min-max of the climate trend back in the 1970s just says they know, given all the data, they know.

GenX edge lords don't give shiiiit

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/25/style/gen-x-generation-di...

I have zero respect for people >50 especially any in official policy roles. Zero fucks for anyone but themselves this whole time; ignored reality just like religious nutters and presumed political dogma would be on their side

Jokes on them; Millennials are even more convinced it all just goes black with death, fewer young people going into elder care jobs, population decline crushing those jobs... GenX can enjoy hobbling to their toilet unassisted with bed sores and gout. Fuck them too then


That's some pretty extreme bitterness. Good luck to you.


Don't know you, text on a screen, don't care.

American freedom; off the hook assuring a social safety net exists for you is pretty great.

Will go my entire life never having to worry if you end up buried in medical debt living in your car.


I mean, can you blame them? Look at the world the boomers damned us to.


Which is statistically better than any time in history for all ages.

*For long time periods, not cherry-picking small time periods.


I dunno, the Ute and Navajo folks I live near don't agree. A lot of the indigenous folks I know think we are living in a literal apocalypse.

Historically the way white folks have squared that circle has been to say that those folks aren't really people and simply don't know the joys of Christian city dwelling.

I can't make the math work, though.


And statistically worse in many ways. Statistics are just euphemism for history, prior observation; stats exist for both categories. We can write and carry on about wars we won and ignore Vietnam with stats just as we do English. It's just a language that lets us ignore physical reality like religious catechism; same biological ability to delude ourselves.

There's the whole ignoring externalities of capitalism and reality itself for toxic positivity thing.

Sure is great though watching where I grew up slowly become engulfed in wildfire smoke; something that never happened until 10 years ago.


I prior worked at Google, I can say they DO de-anonymize data. You’d be foolish to think some PM within the company wouldn’t use this for malice. L


"cookie sync" is the internal lingo


FYI, developers are rarely given such a rich UX mock.


I don't think I'd say rarely. Companies rarely allocate the design resources to produce that, but the companies that do are typically much larger, so the actual number of individual developers that get rich mocks is probably closer to 40-50%.


I’d say rarely in the sense that out of the 500 times (not really that much over 30 years) I’ve built similar things, I got UX mockups this detailed maybe 10% pf the time.


Depends who you work with, what's the intention, budget, etc. I'd agree this is a really good one.

I'm used to incremental Figma wireframe -> final product and working together with a designer.


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