I remember that engineering decision. You guys were pretty early customers for your throughput and durability requirements (we hadn't even added standby replication yet when you started your integration). We've come a long way in the years since then.
Neon is basically this same idea: postgres on a copy-on-write file system.
These aren't really "branches" though, they're hard forks. You can't merge them back after making changes. Dolt is still the only SQL database with branch and merge.
Regardless of whether this particular project goes anywhere, it's at least very interesting that Yegge has discovered a way to make multi-agent setups work better. Giving them discrete personas ("you are a senior database engineer with 30 years of experience") and narrower scopes makes them much more effective. This was surprising to me but makes a lot of sense in retrospect.
We build DoltDB, which is a version-controlled SQL database. Recently we've been working with customers doing exactly this, giving an AI agent access to their database. You give the agent its own branch / clone of the prod DB to work on, then merge their changes back to main after review if everything looks good. This requires running Dolt / Doltgres as your database server instead of MySQL / Postgres, of course. But it's free and open source, give it a shot.
It's not even content per se, it's much more insidious than that.
The comment I originally replied to likened tiktok to a printing press, but that's not quite right.
Imagine a printing press owned by an enemy that would subtly manipulate the text of whatever you tried to print. Or maybe it would omit entire articles from certain recipients of the newspaper, or reorganize the page layout to emphasize different things than the editor intended.
We wouldn't allow this hypothetical printing press controlled by a hostile foreign government to be sold in the US, we would be crazy to.
A US citizen distributing foreign media themselves is quite different than what is effectively a directly controlled broadcast owned by a foreign government.
The US government working with social media companies to censor Americans (and other people) on those platforms is also pretty bad, yes. My impression is that their influence is much weaker and more marginal than is the case with the CCP and tiktok, though. But I would be sympathetic to other countries banning US social media on the ground of US govt influence.
Whatever you think of our home-grown propaganda outlets, the US govt taking different approaches to foreign outlets should be uncontroversial. Unlike the CCP, US citizens have first amendment rights.
Tiktok isn't "some website", it is partially owned and controlled by the CCP, which influences what content gets shown to Americans. A majority of zoomers get most of their news and information primarily from this platform, which again is under the influence of a hostile foreign government. (TikTok also spies on US citizens for the CCP, but let's keep this restricted to the free speech argument about the ban).
We actually don't have to shrug and say "oh well, first amendment" with respect to propaganda outlets of foreign countries.