Sorry you’re being downvoted; you are correct. I love Postgres, but devs absolutely flock to it because influencers said to. At a job a while ago, my team put out a poll asking for devs opinions and reasons for their preferred RDBMS. Every single one said Postgres, but no one could elaborate as to why. One said “it’s more flexible,” which is true, but no one there was using ANY of its flexibility.
That’s the part that baffles me. You’ve selected a DB with native support for esoteric but useful data types like INET (stop storing IP addresses as strings in dotted quad!), and a whole host of index types beyond B+tree, but they’re never using them.
Read your RDBMS docs, people. They’re full of interesting tidbits.
I think you're looking at it from a weird angle...
"Every single one" in your team agreeing on a single specific technological choice is one of the rarest things I can image! Developers argue about libraries, frameworks, programming languages, services, etc., and I think it speaks for itself if Postgres is the thing that comes closest in bridging the gap at least on one layer in the tech stack. Postgres is a "conservative" choice with a very active community and extensible ecosystem.
Also, nobody is ever making use of their technological choice to its full extent, you'd rarely know what you'll need beforehand, and it's just nice not having to add other storage engines when that one feature request steps into your life.
The answer -- as it is with every version of "why is this JS so complicated?" -- is that frontend web dev:
- is the default way that most humans interact with computers
- is an extraordinarily broad problem space and solution space
- is something that basically every modern software company needs to do in some capacity, and with even a few developers, abstractions become desirable
I'm not saying there wasn't a better way for React to adopt FP principles. I certainly have my own gripes.
But to start a conversation with "why does the most widely adopted framework for the most broadly-used software interface in history have some rough edges?" seems, to me, to be sort of begging the question.
It’s already becoming politicized, in the lowercase-p sense of the word. One is assumed to be either pro- or anti-AI, and so you gotta do your best to signal to the reader where you lie.
The vast majority of people are consumers, not AI developers. Of course viral moments will be more consumer-oriented. It's easier to digest and reshare a Ghiblified-caricature than a research paper. But the content of that research paper will lead to the next viral moment years down the line.
I feel like you underestimate the degree to which AI developers are influenced in just the same ways as everybody else.
Capturing mindshare matters no matter how you do it. I would bet my life savings that more people will join OpenAI to work on their models as a result of the Ghibli moment than will join Google as a result of this particular (incredibly impressive!) Gemini iteration.
Because we’re humans! And we’re all pretty easily impressed, even those of us who actually build these dang things.
> I feel like you underestimate the degree to which AI developers are influenced in just the same ways as everybody else.
I feel like you're overestimating that. I work every day on developing LLM-based products, use them a lot while developing those, and have been doing so since November 2022 (beta release of GPT 3.5). So I should be a prime representative of the demographic you're talking about.
When a new frontier model is released, I run a series of tests, play around with it, and decide whether or not to use it based on that. Anything else would be ridiculously stupid, leaving either cost savings, product quality improvements, or development velocity increases on the table. We're not talking about databases or cloud VMs where there's a big switching cost. It's changing a model string and provider, so frictionless that it's a no-brainer.
We actually have some data that's on my side. Take a look at OpenRouter's model usage statistics. Note how OpenAI mmodels make up a tiny share on there, despite having more general mindshare on social media than all other model providers combined. Their data also shows people are very quick to switch when improvements to price/performance are released.
It's a bit like how vacuum cleaner specialists never use Dysons despite them having the most mindshare and overwhelming marketing budget. Regardless of vacuum cleaner specialists also just being normal people. Even if this one doesn't hold in your region, there's countless of these examples.
> It's a bit like how vacuum cleaner specialists never use Dysons despite them having the most mindshare and overwhelming marketing budget. Regardless of vacuum cleaner specialists also just being normal people.
Yes, but Dyson still crushes the market because it has the mindshare with non-specialists. That’s OPs point, uninformed people (the vast majority) will be impacted more by the “ghibli-core” memetic moment, and have a greater impact on future events than specialists who appreciate the Gemini 2.5 release
Back up the thread it was about the whole market, but then we started talking about AI developers (=the vacuum salesmen) and how much they're affected by the mindshare, which is also the part I quoted. The average consumer, absolutely, they all currently use GPT as the data shows, and are indeed led by Ghibli memes - though there's still plenty of time to change that by the huge players, á la Chrome eating all other browsers despite Microsoft's IE monopoly. AI developers though? Much less so.
the people who are qualified to work on the frontier of AI research are people with PhDs from leading universities who spend 80% of their day on arxiv reading CS papers, they don't learn about AI from Ghibli art on twitter. That's bread and circus for the masses. There's no correlation between who consumes that stuff and who builds the technology, if anything, the opposite. Leading edge chip designers at TSMC didn't end up there because they ended up playing graphic intensive video games
I just think you’re totally wrong about that, to be honest. It’s very strange to me to paint every AI researcher as an unfeeling robot who does nothing but read PDFs, who’s not remotely interested in how their work will ever be used by real people.
No, frontier model researchers are not learning about the concept of AI from Twitter.
But it’s one more piece of visibility, one more sense of “hey this company is actually doing stuff with their models,” that absolutely contributes to where these insanely in-demand people choose to do their work.
> Leading edge chip designers at TSMC didn't end up there because they ended up playing graphic intensive video games
What a baffling and wrong example! I mean, I guess I don’t know about TSMC specifically, but tons and tons of technologists have an origin story that rhymes with “I was really into computer games, then got curious how they worked”
This is my whole point: engineers are real people, and real people are fascinated by the uses of AI!
That's the people who can be hired and get paid big bucks right now. The comment is referencing people who might be inspired to start learning this stuff seriously.
Leading edge chip designers at TSMC didn't end up there because they ended up playing graphic intensive video games
Kind of a large assumption. I find it quite plausible that enjoying video games as a kid might lead to someone studying engineering as opposed to medicine or finance.
Particularly with technical writing, I think you can definitely get away with both.
“How I Reduced My Postgres Query Latency By 100x With A Single Index”
Even in the title, I can tell you the punchline (if you wanna make your DB access faster, use an index!)
but an interested reader still wants to figure out how exactly your solution works, and you can tell them some interesting details along the way
“just enforcing unique constraints does help certain data types, but it’s not a big performance boost most of the time”
while finishing on the kicker
“Since my hottest endpoint by far was for individual users querying orders which were still ongoing, I created an index on the user field for the orders table, and included a status filter in the index, which took p90 latency from 10s to <100ms!”
If your definition of “solved housing crisis” is “everyone can buy a home,” a ban on corporate ownership could help a little.
If your goal is instead “everyone has a place to live,” no, corporate ownership is not inherently problematic.
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