Recent submissions

Comment · 9 months ago
True, in that case it should just adopt the noexcept status of the object it holds.
Comment · 9 months ago
I would argue performance-noexcept-move-constructor should always be on. Move constructors should almost always be noexcept since they typically just move pointers around and don't do allocations normally.
Comment · 10 months ago
The scale and stakes of the investment now are much, much higher now than in dot com. Likewise, don't assume I'm more bearish than I am. But enormous investment requires more benefit than has been realized.
Comment · 10 months ago
Quite a large bubble. The burden of proof for demonstrating the enormous economic value LLMs are providing really is yours. Sure, there are anecdotal benefits to using LLMs, but we haven't seen any evidence that in aggregate businesses across America are benefitting. Other than AI companies, the stock market isn't even doing well. You would think that with massive expected efficiency gains companies would be doing better across the board. Are businesses that use AI generating significantly higher profits? I haven't seen any evidence of it yet (and I'm really looking for it, and would love to see it!). It's pure speculation so far.
Comment · 10 months ago
I'm not saying LLMs are useless. But the value they have provided so far does not justify covering the country in datacenters and the scale of investment overall (not even close!).

The only justification for that would be "superintelligence," but we don't know if this is even the right way of achieve that.

(Also I suspect the only reason why they are as cheap as they are is because of all the insane amount of money they've been given. They're going to have to increase their prices.)

Comment · 10 months ago
Firstly, it's not really good enough to say "our employees use it" and therefore it's providing us significant value as a business. It's also not good enough to say "our programmers now write 10x the number of lines of code and therefore that's providing us value" (lines of code have never been a good indicator of output). Significant value comes from new innovations.

Secondly, the scale of investment in AI isn't so that people can use it to generate a powerpoint or a one off python script. The scale of investment is to achieve "superintelligence" (whatever that means). That's the only reason why you would cover a huge percent of the country in datacenters.

The proof that significant value has been provided would be value being passed on to the consumer. For example if AI replaces lawyers you would expect a drop in the cost of legal fees (despite the harm that it also causes to people losing their jobs). Nothing like that has happened yet.

Comment · 10 months ago
The thing that drives me crazy is that it isn't even clear if AI is providing economic value yet (am I missing something there?). Right now trillions of dollars are being spent on a speculative technology that isn't benefitting anyone right now.

The messaging from AI companies is "we're going to cure cancer" and "you're going to live to be 150 years old" (I don't believe these claims!). The messaging should be "everything will be cheaper" (but this hasn't come true yet!).

Comment · 10 months ago
Comment · 2 years ago
Yes, that's true. And not even ClickHouse considers their MergeTree engine to be an LSM-tree (see https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickHouse/blob/bfc0260f359a0c...).

That doesn't make it wrong, or a bad architecture. It still takes ideas from LSM-trees, and it has similarities. But it can't be called an LSM-tree.

Comment · 2 years ago
I actually think you're describing a WAL.
Comment · 2 years ago
The original purpose of an LSM-tree is to take I/O off the critical path of a write (there are other reasons to use them though, for example reducing space amplification).

I would argue that by definition an LSM-tree buffers committed writes in memory, and that means you need a WAL for recovery.

If you are going to immediately flush the memtable then IO is on the critical path. And if you have fine grained updates you'll end up with lots of small files, which seems like a bad thing. It could be reasonable if you only receive batch updates.

Comment · 2 years ago

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