bill_1992

@bill_1992@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why Big Tech's bet on AI assistants is so risky⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  This whole thing is basically a nonstory when you realize how much money is in tech. Meta changed their name and sank billions on an idea that everyone thought was stupid from the beginning, and they’re still fine.

  Putting a billion into the flavor-of-the-month that has like 10% chance to be the next big thing is a no-brainer when you’re printing multiple billions in profit doing nothing, and have a lot more cash on hand.

  The real story, is how wealth inequality and monopolies have essentially allowed the rich to waste tons of money chasing more wealth while having almost no incentive to provide value to society. Who gives a fuck about hallucination and prompt injection? It’s all trivial details that VCs are giving away billions to eventually solve.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is there something better than SQL?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  The point about a binary protocol is interesting, because it would inherently solve the injection issue.

  However, constructing an ad-hoc query becomes tedious, as you’re now dealing with bytes and text together. Doing so in a terminal can be pretty tedious, and most people would require a tool to do so. Compare this against SQL, where you can easily build a query in your terminal. I think the tradeoff is similar to protobuf vs json.

  You could do a text representation (like textproto), but guess what? Now injection is an issue again.

  Another thing would be the complexity of client libraries. With SQL client libraries, the library doesn’t need to parse or know SQL - it can send off the prepared statement as-is. With a binary protocol, the client libraries will likely need to include a query builder that builds the byte representation since no developers are going to be concatenating bytes by hand, which makes the bar higher for open-source libraries. This also means that if you add a new query feature to your DB, all client libraries will likely need to be updated to use the feature.

  And you’re still going to need to tune and optimize queries for this new DB. That’s just the nature of the beast: scaling is hard especially when you can’t throw money at the problem.

  Quite frankly, it’s a lot of hard tradeoffs to not need to use prepared statements or query builders. Injection is still is an issue, but it’s been “solved” as much as it possibly can.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is there something better than SQL?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve been using Jooq to build my queries (and run them). Beats the hell out of writing prepared statements in strings.

  Not sure what power I’m missing though, I’ve been able to do everything via Jooq that I want to do.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Chad scraper⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Everyone loves the idea of scraping, no one likes maintaining scrapers that break once a week because the CSS or HTML changed.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI Is Starting to Look Like the Dot Com Bubble⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s Silicon Valley’s MO. Just half a year ago, people were putting crypto BS in their products.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Today 10 years ago I got a Firefox OS phone⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Same, having competitors to Android and iOS would be great.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨'FUCK SPEZ': Reddit Users Unite to Turn r/Place Mural Into a Protest⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  If you were a company, you might think twice before advertising on a site that has their users actively, publicly, and loudly trashing on the CEO.

  Isn’t this just wishful thinking? Let’s be 100% real for a moment, those people posting fuck spez on r/place aren’t doing it because they’re moving or have moved to an alternative, they’re doing it because they are addicted to Reddit and can’t stop using it. The true protest is moving to an alternative like Lemmy.

  If I’m an advertiser, all I see is a very captive audience. This isn’t like the Twitter situation, where your ads will be shown to increasingly objectionable content. In fact, with all the users begrudgingly downloading the official Reddit app, the value of advertising on Reddit may be going up not down.

  That being said, Reddit has never been a good place for advertising outside of a few niches, and that hasn’t changed, so in the long run Reddit most likely won’t survive. But in the short run, I don’t think this is the victory lap.