What? I get so much joy out of learning the details of careers of people in different industries than me. I had an hourlong conversation with someone the other day who is in the high-end rug business…where he sources from, how he deals with difficult clientele, how he gets new leads, what it’s like visiting the remote villages where the rugs are made, etc. And another one with a hedge fund quant, and a separate one with a professional dancer. These are some of my favorite conversations to have with people.
> The issue is that "83 per second" is multiple orders of magnitude off the expected level of performance on any RDBMS running on anything resembling modern hardware.
This is just not true, there are so many scenarios where 83/sec would be the limit. That number by itself is almost meaningless, similar to benchmarks which also make a bunch of assumptions about workloads and runtime environments.
As a simple example if your queue has a large backlog, you have a large worker fleet aggressively pulling work to minimize latency, your payloads are large, you have not optimized indexing, and/or you have many jobs scheduled for the future, every acquire can be an expensive table scan.
(This is a specific example because this is one of many failure scenarios I’ve encountered with Graphile that can cause your DB to meltdown. The same workload in Redis barely causes a blip in Redis CPU, without having to fiddle with indexes and auto vacuuming and worker backoffs.)
This comes up every time this conversation occurs.
Yes, PG can theoretically handle just about anything with the right configuration, schema, architecture, etc.
Finding that right configuration is not trivial. Even dedicated frameworks like Graphile struggle with it.
My startup had the exact same struggles with PG and did the same migration to BullMQ bc we were sick of fiddling with it instead of solving business problems. We are very glad we migrated off of PG for our work queues.
There are good arguments for it, but it's also not a coincidence that they happen to align with Google's business objectives. Ex it's hard to issue a TLS cert without notifying Google of it.
That will not work with many of the world's most important documents because of information density. For example, dense tables or tables with lots of row/col spans, or complex forms with checkboxess, complex real-world formatting and features like strikethroughs, etc.
To solve this generally you need to chunk not by page, but by semantic chunks that don't exceed the information density threshold of the model, given the task.
This is not a trivial problem at all. And sometimes there is no naive way to chunk documents so that every element can fit within the information density limit. A really simple example is a table that spans hundreds pages. Solving that generally is an open problem.
> How many degrees of freedom do you real need to represent API cost.
The amount that your users care about.
At a large enough scale, users will care about the cost differences between extraction and classification (very different!) and finding the right spot on the accuracy-latency curve for their use case.
Last time I used GraalVM, there were huge holes in what language features were supported, compiling dynamic code was hit-or-miss, and also its cross-compilation story was not good (requires you to compile it on the target architecture). Perhaps my information is out-of-date now?
An unsigned integer will never be negative, that intent is expressed clearly and correctly. What the operational semantics should be is unclear, because of the tradeoffs involved in signaling an error.
In terms of the C standard, "3-4" for unsigned ints is modular arithmetic, and the "wrong thing" is assuming that it will do anything other than wrap around. This is very clearly defined, and implied whenever you see an arithmetic expression on unsigned integers.
Decentralization doesn't mean isolation and that nobody is cooperating. It's a centrality measure. More decentralized networks have less nodes that hold outsized importance in the network.
If a majority of banks and businesses agree to block transactions of a known terrorist, is it collusion or cooperation? I don't see a meaningful distinction at that point, other than the negative connotation of "collusion" poisoning the well. Which is why I referred to "cooperation" instead.
They have different tradeoffs.