Ron Wolf ron-wolf

SQLite was thought of as a toy for many years until we all realized it was actually nice to use a database as a library, even server-side. And yet...

It's a big dependency, despite what you think. In no universe is 150,000 lines of C code "lightweight".
Like with all SQL databases, you have an impedance mismatch: the way you store data in memory is completely different than the table structure a SQL database forces on you, leading to tons of glue code.
It's mutable, so it can't undo or time travel, and it can't read while a write is happening (even in WAL mode...reads can't happen during checkpointing!).

To solve these problems, I'm building a database called xitdb:

At only about 4,000 lines of code with no dependencies, xitdb is actually lightweight. You could reimplement it in another language pretty easily.
It exposes rich data structures rather than a SQL interface, so the API is very similar to the in-memory data structures you already use in your program.

Some remarks on Large Language Models

Yoav Goldberg, January 2023

Audience: I assume you heard of ChatGPT, maybe played with it a little, and was impressed by it (or tried very hard not to be). And that you also heard that it is "a large language model". And maybe that it "solved natural language understanding". Here is a short personal perspective of my thoughts of this (and similar) models, and where we stand with respect to language understanding.

Intro

Around 2014-2017, right within the rise of neural-network based methods for NLP, I was giving a semi-academic-semi-popsci lecture, revolving around the story that achieving perfect language modeling is equivalent to being as intelligent as a human. Somewhere around the same time I was also asked in an academic panel "what would you do if you were given infinite compute and no need to worry about labor costs" to which I cockily responded "I would train a really huge language model, just to show that it doesn't solve everything!". We

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	İ i̇ İ LATIN CAPITAL LETTER I WITH DOT ABOVE -> LATIN SMALL LETTER I, COMBINING DOT ABOVE -> LATIN CAPITAL LETTER I, COMBINING DOT ABOVE
	Ω ω Ω OHM SIGN -> GREEK SMALL LETTER OMEGA -> GREEK CAPITAL LETTER OMEGA
	ẞ ß SS LATIN CAPITAL LETTER SHARP S -> LATIN SMALL LETTER SHARP S -> LATIN CAPITAL LETTER S, LATIN CAPITAL LETTER S
	K k K KELVIN SIGN -> LATIN SMALL LETTER K -> LATIN CAPITAL LETTER K
	Å å Å ANGSTROM SIGN -> LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH RING ABOVE -> LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A WITH RING ABOVE
	ϴ θ Θ GREEK CAPITAL THETA SYMBOL -> GREEK SMALL LETTER THETA -> GREEK CAPITAL LETTER THETA

	Lowercase -> uppercase -> lowercase:
	ῗ Ϊ͂ ῗ GREEK SMALL LETTER IOTA WITH DIALYTIKA AND PERISPOMENI -> GREEK CAPITAL LETTER IOTA, COMBINING DIAERESIS, COMBINING GREEK PERISPOMENI -> GREEK SMALL LETTER IOTA, COMBINING DIAERESIS, COMBINING GREEK PERISPOMENI

	/*
	Copyright (c) 2024 Rendello

	Permission to use, copy, modify, and/or distribute this software for any
	purpose with or without fee is hereby granted.

	THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS" AND THE AUTHOR DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES WITH
	REGARD TO THIS SOFTWARE INCLUDING ALL IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY
	AND FITNESS. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHOR BE LIABLE FOR ANY SPECIAL, DIRECT,
	INDIRECT, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES OR ANY DAMAGES WHATSOEVER RESULTING FROM

	From e4db4f07e77feb1c126e7afbf441e9eae34b4e57 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
	From: Kelvie Wong <kelvie@kelvie.ca>
	Date: Sun, 2 Oct 2022 13:23:25 -0700
	Subject: [PATCH] Add a lockdown_hibernate parameter

	This allows the user to tell the kernel that they know better (namely,
	they secured their swap properly), and that it can enable hibernation.

	Signed-off-by: Kelvie Wong <kelvie@kelvie.ca>
	---

	#!/usr/bin/env bash

	#
	# NixOS install script synthesized from:
	#
	# - Erase Your Darlings (https://grahamc.com/blog/erase-your-darlings)
	# - ZFS Datasets for NixOS (https://grahamc.com/blog/nixos-on-zfs)
	# - NixOS Manual (https://nixos.org/nixos/manual/)
	# - Original gist by @nuxeh (https://gist.github.com/nuxeh/35fb0eca2af4b305052ca11fe2521159)
	#

	"""
	MIT License

	Copyright (c) 2023 David Buchanan

	Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
	of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal
	in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights
	to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell
	copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is

	===========
	; A072257: a(n) = ((6n-17)4^n - 1)/3.
	; -6,-15,-27,21,597,4437,25941,136533,677205,3233109,15029589,68506965,307582293,1364546901,5995058517,26127717717,113100805461,486762960213,2084490794325,8887718991189,37749899220309,159795689903445,674367131702613,2838206015165781,11915774014084437,49914895870022997,208666782734832981,870695927958295893,3626898899909039445,15084056351939581269,62642068416972019029,259791645704742851925,1076060070966390510933,4451814236455238456661,18397552756179659478357,75951394266153460520277,313250310030353132508501,1290780171984369691743573,5314236415389307413812565,21861408571364544242603349,89863485924687435319825749,369125350255666774676952405,1515187027250335232298407253,6215490613912013463556019541,25480932475290743991673640277,104399609979733736516492809557,427501960233217988265164232021,1749621922190004121857428903253,7156944013788545162616803513685,29261601355268295351215565657429,119581706621529640207855669040469,488468031287944396043396301804885,1994436944359

	In addition to a significant decrease in hepatic lipid accumulation in the IOE group, which inhibited energy intake by propionate enrichment, hepatic lipids were also significantly reduced in the mice in the IOP group, which was largely enriched with butyrate. Compared with the IOE group, IOP had a stronger regulatory effect on hepatic metabolism and triglyceride metabolism and higher levels of TCA cycle in the host. In addition, butyrate has the ability to promote browning of white adipose tissue (WAT) to brown adipose tissue (BAT).^[@ref39],[@ref40]^ WAT stores energy, whereas BAT uses energy for heating and consequently host energy expenditure increases.^[@ref41],[@ref42]^ However, adipose tissue weight does not change after WAT browning.^[@ref43]^ Therefore, the weight of adipose tissue of mice in the IOP group dominated by butyrate was greater than that of the mice in the IOE group dominated by propionate.

	In conclusion ([Figure [7](#fig7){ref-type="fig"}](#fig7){ref-type="fig"}C), the improvement of ob