I agree, but it won’t be because we can’t do it. It will be easier than ever to achieve, but of course money for the tokens to do it will go toward some other aspect of the business. That the products get worse seems to be the rule.
The very first thing many people did with AI is start calling the automated tests it writes good enough to capture the desired behavior. Writing tests isn't a whole lot of fun for most, so now the thing that it is supposed to help ensure we're not evolving our software into piles of trash is, in fact, one of the most neglected parts of vibed out codebases.
I would be genuinely interested to see how it evolves the same program over a large number of generations. Given a whole lot of software is more a collection of programs rather than a singular "program", I have to imagine that the outcomes would be vastly different in shape when dealing with smaller targeted, articulable-in-a-few-paragraphs programs vs many-years-of-business-domain layered programs.
> Older flight attendants look really damaged by the job.
First off, this is just anecdotal and I know FAs who do _not_ look "damaged by the job". So, we're off to a bad start.
> The combination of irregular sleep, quite likely too much alcohol and sun in layover locations when younger.
Not all FAs fly crazy schedules. This comment then makes assumptions about where younger FAs fly, and suggests they all drink too much. More conjecture to back up a weak claim without any evidence provided.
> Plus radiation, and biological hazards like being around sick people and smelling farts all day. Being in an enclosed space is not that great for the lungs either, just being around people wearing perfume, is likely bad for the lungs
OK, so this article is about radiation. That is at least addressing the topic. Calling "smelling farts" a biological hazard is borderline ridiculous. "Being around sick people" is what nurses do all day. There are _many_, _many_ professions where _being around a lot of people_ is part of the job. It does not seem particularly notable here.
They end by saying that being in an enclosed space is bad for your lungs. Uh, ok. Maybe? Probably? How bad? Compared to what? Being outdoors in an area prone to air pollution?
Any flight attendants are going to have a disrupted schedule, that’s just inherent to the time change and travel.
The “farts” comment is juvenile, but the cleaners, oil fumes, respiratory illnesses and more that fill an airplane cabin certainly contribute to respiratory issues. Nobody’s saying nurses or stone masons aren’t exposed to different respiratory risks.
No, "any" flight attendants are not going to have disrupted sleep schedules. Many FAs sleep in their own beds consistently. Not all FAs fly long haul. Most of them _don't_ fly long haul routes. Domestic carriage is dominant.
Junior staff have less choice when it comes to flying routes where this kind of thing is true, but that changes as they gain seniority.
Cleaners, fumes, etc. almost certainly are not good for you, but the comment started from "look at all of these old haggard FAs" and I don't think any of the rest of this is particularly strong supporting evidence for that claim, even if I agree you shouldn't huff campfire smoke.
But it wasn't in the early cyberpunk works. When you consume them you can notice how important was the concept of "style", that characters were excited by the specific brands (implants, weapons, shaders, venues), associated them with social status etc. It was the 90s that brought contempt for brands to (paradoxically) mainstream.
It was a rare magical moment where consumerism receded - flannels were never about brands. Your band had to be "authentic" (and I hate that word) and anti corporate. It's the point in time where we all started hating ticket master.
It was replaced by GAP sweatshirts and Britney Spears, and you can draw a straight line to people waiting on lines for iPhones, your C suite in fleece vests and Taylor Swift.
it didn't recede, this kind of rebellion was what made it thrive (see the book The Rebel Sell, Why Culture can't be Jammed) or Deleuze:
“The death of a social machine has never been heralded by a disharmony or a dysfunction; on the contrary, social machines make a habit of feeding on the contradictions they give rise to, on the crises they provoke, on the anxieties they engender, and on the infernal operations they regenerate. Capitalism has learned this, and has ceased doubting itself [...] No one has ever died from contradictions. And the more it breaks down, the more it schizophrenizes, the better it works, the American way.
It wasn't a coicindence or betrayal that punk bands 'sold out', the punk part is exactly what made them sell out. Demand for authenticity, difference and individualism is what drives consumerism. The heart of consumerism is counter-culture.
the concept of selling out often seems seriously under-specified, and thus, like many things in our society, it becomes a tool for one set of people to improve their own status by attacking another set of people.
It is in the end a moral stance on what are the proper aesthetics, which is the kind of thing that manages to make both morality and aesthetics extremely suspect.
Nah, the aesthetics argument is a distraction. Engaging with art is engaging with another human being. Finding out that the other human being is, in fact, a corporation in a trenchcoat sucks. I would go so far as to label it a feeling of betrayal that leaks into everything else the artist touches.
Does anyone think The Rock has anything of substance to say about anything anymore? Do we think Post Malone isn't just trying to make a few more bucks after selling out entire genres?
Seeing Iggy fucking Pop shill insurance is genuinely painful.
Hear, hear! Cadillac using Led Zeppelin broke something in me.
I'm on the fence with the Beastie Boys getting used in movie fight scenes. They said they'd never do ads. Elevates the scenes, but it also elevates the IP of Disney and Paramount.
I think that is because it is a social value. It isn't meant to be a rigid rule; it's meant to be a guideline that can adapt to the needs of the situation. There has to be nuance in social values.
That's a very different situation. An individual "anchoring their identity" to a brand isn't doing so to earn money, which is why bands "sell out". It's just a choice they make about who they are, and I have to agree with GP that that seems tragically uncool.
This kind of post (Postgres! It's all you need!) is getting pretty tiresome. Postgres does not even come close to a full replacement for Elastic, and that's just the first bullet.
Looking down the list it is pretty easy to go: Yes, postgres can be used instead of that for extremely basic use cases, but it all goes out the window you actually need any of the power of these other tools.
I think it would be helpful if some of these posts included scale. There are almost always two groups talking past each other
- I run my B2B application, Postgres only, and it is perfect for my 50k MAU. No complaints, sleeping soundly with the low complexity and a two man team.
- I work at FAANG, where we have 1 billion DAU, and this is a joke. Would fall over immediately. The dedicated ops teams for Kubernetes, Elastic, and Redis have never complained about scaling issues.
I broadly agree, but would tweak those numbers a little for small B2B apps: I ran a small B2B application on a cheap VPS using PostgreSQL as a primitive messaging interface, and even on a small VPS 50k DAU won't even cause the machine to break a sweat.
Agreed, but many of the criticisms I am reading here are assuming high scaling requirements and invalidating the approach entirely. When there are many business domains that will comfortably fit within a modestly specced database instance.
Even just B2B vs B2C is a huge split. Plenty of specialized ERPs in the world that have relatively few "butts in seats" users but have a lot of data to work through.
Size of the data, read/write ratio, number of "requests"... lots of axes that change how much pain or not you're in by just pointing to pg
> Postgres does not even come close to a full replacement for Elastic
Size matters!
For most of the application out there elastic (or kafka or any other specialized tool) is just too much(and too costly). They can do fine with postgres or mysql. Actually, I'd argue that in a lot of cases even postgres is too much, probably sqlite is enough.
What do you know about full text search? Faceted search? Custom tokenization? It is wild to see people talk about Postgres fulltext like it’s all you could need, even for small apps.
I didn't say that is "all you could need", I said is "just fine for a lot of use cases out there", which implies that there are use cases where you could need specialized tools ...
The point is in general for people to just consider it, often people start out on their side projects or internal company projects and commission Elastic, Redis, Postgres, Kafka before even getting started. In reality they could fit it all into Postgres for a very long time.
Nobody is saying that a huge ecommerce store with complicated filtered search logic should throw away their Elasticsearch cluster and switch to Postgres.
If you actually start looking into these things, you often start looking at custom pg extensions, which means you just made the decision to "simplify" your stack by maintaining your own postgres cluster with custom extensions. This is just papering over the fact that you're increasing the complexity and saying "well it's still just postgres!" as you do it.
Installing & maintaining a Postgres extension is vastly, vastly simpler than running Elasticsearch and Kafka. Like, how could you even compare these things if you know what you are talking about?
Or maybe you are looking at it from "just swipe your credit card at AWS" perspective, in which case "just use Postgres" articles are for a different audience.
Running a small ES with dual save alongside your relational store is trivial. Kafka I will grant you is a lot to operate, but I would not choose Kafka unless I have a Kafka-shaped problem, and if it looks like that I would never, ever choose Postgres. Equating Kafka with “I need a queue” is a laughable comparison.
Not really, most popular extensions are available on GCP/AWS (https://docs.cloud.google.com/sql/docs/postgres/extensions) out of the box and there's many things that you can easily run in Postgres without extensions (Queue, KV store).
Sure, best not to overcomplicate early if you don't need it.
PG is great and I work with it daily, but it's also not a problem to think about scale early and at least have a notional plan for what to and how to know when scale is becoming an issue in your system as you're designing it. Even PG is overkill and sqlite is more than enough for some of my projects.
There are a lot of specialized tools available, but you definitely don't need to put every one in your toolbox. Experience and observation help you make those edits -- and of course there's almost always room for improvement, but "good enough" definitely exists (until it doesn't anymore :D).
This is the way. Notionally building a space/path to scale into architecture early, but delaying implementation of that scaling component until actually needed.
Then a system gets most of the benefits of not accidentally making it torturous to rearchitect for scale, without paying the headcount / complexity cost until it's needed.
I'm partial to Typesense, especially for smaller data sets, since it runs primarily in memory, is easy to use and is hella fast. For bigger data sets, I hear good things about Meilisearch.
You're right that vanilla Postgres doesn't come close to replacing Elastic. There are efforts to resolve this, though, like ParadeDB: https://github.com/paradedb/paradedb (disclaimer: I work for ParadeDB)
I see Tantivy mentioned in your readme but AFAICT there is no PG-Tantivy sync. I also see "native vector support is coming to our search index soon". Could you clarify?
What do you suggest for a language like Malayalam which has no native support, preferably with low RAM requirements?
I have a lot of troubles with a small private instance of Rocket chat, all due to MongoDb stuff, versions, migrations and backups. I bet almost all private instances of Rocket chat would be perfectly served with Postgres.
Posts like this can be tiresome, yet the general consensus among developers seems to be "yeah, Postgre/SQLite is ok for 99% of the cases, but MY case is going to be in the 1%, because I am going to be the next Facebook".
Fwiw, I, as someone who has worked on Postgres for a long time, also find it quite tiresome. Like there's plenty stuff I wouldn't use Postgres for, and I can probably get get more out of it than most.
Exactly - these recommendations often come with no context or scale provisions.
Yes Postgres can work in the small for a lot of things, it can even work at surprising scale if you use it according to its strengths.
But if you use it for things it doesn't shine at, at inappropropriate scale - you'll almost certainly run into issues. And resolving those can often be a bigger challenge than choosing a more suitable solution in the first place. But often I think younger/less experienced engineers just have to burn themselves, thus why this never seems to die.
Etsy suffers from the same review astroturfing and product category crowding that Amazon does, but the product categories tend to be narrower so it's never quite as bad.
Etsy is certainly _bad_, but getting to Amazon levels is a whole other animal.
I can't speak for Github's situation specifically, but I work in an org that is often cursed by "acting" leadership. People in these acting roles don't have a real mandate to do much other than follow orders, try not break anything, and keep the seat warm. They basic tread water, which in many environments is better described as drowning more slowly.
I can appreciate that, but GitHub was acquired nearly 10 years ago. Let's not sit around pretending that GitHub was some fully autonomous business unit when they had a "CEO". Maybe it was _better_, but I would still imagine it was still some form of "in name only". That's the just the nature of acquisitions.
It’s clear that they want this to be true so bad that they’re just not going to do it, and will spend a ton of money on quality gates and mitigation strategies instead of just reading some code.
