jinjin2

It’s an amazing book. One of the few that actually changes how you see the world. Recommended.

I’m mostly using Exasol these days (the concurrency and smooth scaling to multi-node is just too seductive), but with the introduction of Quack I might take another look at DuckDB. I’ll have to see how well it handles many agents reading and writing to it concurrently.

Ted Turner also created the Turner Tomorrow Fellowship Award, which was a half a million dollars literary prize for coming up with a book that offered “creative solutions to humanity's urgent problems".

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

Sure, nobody is claiming that hunter gatherers were saints. Just because they lived in egalitarian clans, it doesn’t mean that they didn’t occasionally do bad things.

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.

> society is reverting back to factory settings of human history, which has always been a feudalist type society of a small elite owning all the wealth

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”.

It seems like a problem that will self-correct. If too expensive housing is keeping couples from having children, then population will decline, which will free up a lot of housing stock making prices drop, and then people can afford having children again. Maybe it is just cyclical?

SQLGlot is amazing. In many ways it helps erase the differences and bridge between dialects. It is so useful for moving complex queries between platforms.

The original idea idea behind SQL was to create a language that looked like English and allowed regular users to express their queries in something that resembled natur Al language. Naturally it has evolved into something far more complex, but maybe today with LLMs it can get back to its origin,

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.

Bullying is such a hard problem. The only school system I have seen dealing with it effectively is the Sudbury Valley schools.

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.