dave
@daveliepmann.com
513 followers 486 following 1.4K posts
berlin american abundance degrowther tech bro luddite ———————————— cargo bike & bahn dad prehistory fanboy
berlin american abundance degrowther tech bro luddite ———————————— cargo bike & bahn dad prehistory fanboy
![How do databases get scaling wrong? For decades, I assumed
each record had a "home" for its “current” value within a partition,
a block, or a data structure (e.g. B+Tree[8]). I assumed the DB had
to go to the record’s “home” to update and/or read the “current”
value. For more than 45 years, I didn’t question this assumption.
I repent? that belief. The BIG DEAL reads the past and verifies to
avoid conflicts in the future. There’s no NOW, no “current” values,
and no “home for a current value”.
How do applications get scaling wrong? Most OLTP applica-
tions synchronously aggregate application knowledge as it changes.
As systems scale, modifying records shared across users becomes
untenable due to increased contention. If an application cannot
aggregate changes synchronously, the best it can do is aggregate
knowledge gradually in later transactions. Scalable applications
coalesce their knowledge of the past slowly. They are also more
ambiguous about their commitments for the future. See §3.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:yxcp4vl2akrv7dlhzrvprxfj/bafkreielie33qyp4tqajd4lyvglfvihr2jvbo2t6rfnuulgitehl5s76ry)
![Is this good?
I don't want to sound like an AI coding assist booster. I still have fears around deskilling from relying on these tools too much. That's why I still bang my head against the wall trying to learn Rust.
In my mind there are different buckets for personal projects. One is things I do to learn and grow and the other is things I really wish existed. [2] This kind of project falls into the second bucket. Using AI coding assist to reify those projects is sort of a form of wish fulfillment. I never would have gotten to it, but now I can have the project. One less metaphorical book sitting unread on bookshelf.
In the end I think the important thing is not whether you are doing projects in bucket 2, but whether you are also still doing the stretch projects in bucket 1.
[2] Also other buckets, I don't want to imply those are the only two. ↩︎](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:yxcp4vl2akrv7dlhzrvprxfj/bafkreibkfmg22eovuxxtowp262vgy2i2xtflvlvruycrr3djq3yhuub2rm)
