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If you're interested in this sort of thing with an SQL flavor, you may find the pgpdf PostgreSQL extension useful https://github.com/Florents-Tselai/pgpdf .

It's basically an SQL wrapper around poppler.

Except for the fact that big consultancies who receive most of the government contracts, have zero contribution to the open source ecosystem.

Technically yes, but they're used interchangeably nowdays. Plus, the official transcript mentions "Mytilene" so I wanted to follow that. Although I use Lesvos myself.

In 2021, during a visit to the Greek island of Mytilene, Pope Francis delivered one of the finest speeches I've ever read:

> This great basin of water, the cradle of so many civilizations, now looks like a mirror of death. Let us not let our sea (mare nostrum) be transformed into a desolate sea of death (mare mortuum). Let us not allow this place of encounter to become a theatre of conflict. Let us not permit this “sea of memories” to be transformed into a “sea of forgetfulness”. Please brothers and sisters, let us stop this shipwreck of civilization!

> We are in the age of walls and barbed wire. To be sure, we can appreciate people’s fears and insecurities, the difficulties and dangers involved, and the general sense of fatigue and frustration, exacerbated by the economic and pandemic crises. Yet problems are not resolved and coexistence improved by building walls higher, but by joining forces to care for others according to the concrete possibilities of each and in respect for the law, always giving primacy to the inalienable value of the life of every human being

Worth reading in full https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/speeches/2021/de...

With $GEMINI_MODE=gemini-2.0-flash I also got some decent results for libraries like simonw/llm and pgcli.

You can tell that because simonw writes quite heavily-documented code an the logic is pretty straightforward, it helps the model a lot!

https://github.com/Florents-Tselai/Tutorial-Codebase-Knowled...

https://github.com/Florents-Tselai/Tutorial-Codebase-Knowled...

It's decent enough. But you'd probably have to use a model like llama2, which may set your GPU on fire.

If you want to use Ollama to run local models, here’s a simple example:

from ollama import chat, ChatResponse

def call_llm(prompt, use_cache: bool = True, model="phi4") -> str: response: ChatResponse = chat( model=model, messages=[{ 'role': 'user', 'content': prompt, }] ) return response.message.content

It's also exciting that their code to actually reproduce these is also available. https://github.com/wccarleton/mesoneomalta

I'm working on spat https://github.com/Florents-Tselai/spat a Postgres extension.

spat is a Redis-like in-memory data structure server embedded in Postgres. Data is stored in Postgres shared memory. The data model is key-value. Keys are strings, but values can be strings, lists, sets, or hashes.

It's still alpha, but it works.

I tend to agree. The OOP-all-the-things mantra created many problems; lots of books were printed (more than necessary), and lots of evangelists made their name on unnecessary abstractions over abstractions. One might blame Java for that, but it's a chicken-and-egg problem.

The "New World" is re-discovering what the Balkans / Southern Europe have been doing for decades.

Makefile with make2graph to visualize DAGs.

Whenever I read something about Boston Dynamics now, I can't help but remember that scene from Silicon Valley (HBO) where Eric kicks BigDog https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BFnMBW95RZI

PostgreSQL 18 won't have many JSON enhancements - how much better can it get after all? And virtual generated columns will probably be the highlight of the release. But there's always some room for improvement. One long-standing pain point has been simply removing nulls from JSON arrays.

Here's a small patch that addresses a very common question in Postgres: "How do I remove nulls from a jsonb array?"

Of course, there are, but I guess this relies on the various System views (pg_*), like most monitoring tools, which have fine-grained control access if you create appropriate roles.

Apart from the usual advice to "start working on a patch to learn the internals," which is not as easy to do because it's a mature product and most of the low-hanging fruits have been reaped, I'd also suggest checking the extensions shipped with the main source tree under $top/contrib. Each one is self-contained and usually works with a subset of the internals. Some good ones: pageinspect, pg_buffercache, pg_prewarm, pg_statstatements, pg_walinspect

Parent probably means that email clients don't send the attachments (patches) with the appropriate content type (i.e. text/x-patch or text/x-diff) but use application/octet-stream.

Does converting to HTML first and then to PDF help?

I'm all for such an approach, but I also like Firebolt's approach with Lambda functions focusing on arrays. [0]

[0] https://www.firebolt.io/blog/sql-thinking-in-lambdas

That's not that easy to enforce in a system like Postgres. If you ship something you have to stay with it for many years. Thus, all possible angles have to be taken into consideration.

In the EU, we need some social contracts for those things. Multiple EU-funded projects are launched, consortiums between Unis and Private sector companies are created, deliverables are delivered, and grants are allocated, but the cumulative results haven't been that great, have they? That has happened for every "trend," from nuclear physics to "expert systems" in the 1990s to green tech, now AI, etc.

pgxicor is a Postgres extension that exposes a SELECT xicor(X, Y) aggregate function. XI can detect functional relationships between X and Y. You can use it as a more powerful alternative to standard corr(X, Y) which works best on linear relationships only.

Another Albanian thing worth mentioning is an extensive list of oil wells dispersed across residential areas see [0]. Family legend has it that my father almost drowned in one [1] when he was a kid, and a relative had to pull him by his nose to save him.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oil_and_gas_fields_in_...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visoka_oil_field

Shameless plug (who would have thought): I've played hide and seek in Albania and used a bunker as a hideout. AMA :D That's one of the few experiences I remember when I was 3-5yo.

I've been working on something Redis-y over the holidays, and it has reinforced my view that it's the epitome of a 20%- 80% tool. I've always used the 20%, but anything beyond that sounds useless unless you've encountered the requirement in a production environment. The challenges Redis has been solving for years, never really touched the research/academic community (even the 20%).

Even in the various taxonomies of DBS in the research literature, Redis was mentioned with a wave of the hand as an "in-memory" database, which undersells the important (for me) part of the "data structure" server.

Putting the "database" after Redis could be a marketing misstep. Because it puts you in the is-it-sql territory.

TL;DR: Redis is mostly appreciated by practitioners (web) developers. Academics find it lacking a theoretical foundation, so... meh.

People living in central/western Europe: You have no idea how fortunate you are to be able to hop on a train and ride to another major city in a few hours. We mortals of the southeastern Europe feel detached from the rest of the world.

Yeah, I know German trains occasionally are late, but I remember standing on the platform in Munich, envying those who could travel to Madrid or Brussels without going to the airport—security checks, yada.

Congrats on your PhD at Stanford, but some humility has to be part of the scientific process for sure. It looks like a lot of folks called "programmers" agree with the points in the post. If it's such a common experience that should tell you something about the state of affairs.

It's a blog post on the internet. Of course one should take it with a grain of salt. The same applies to any peer-reviewed article on software engineering for example.

Just yesterday, I was watching this interview with Adam Frank [0] one of the parts that stood out was his saying why "Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience" (I can't find the exact snippet, but apparently he has a book with the same title.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhZAXXI83-4

Haha,that, or it's a validation of the blowup.

Plug: Now that you know how they work, you can use them in your SQL queries too https://github.com/Florents-Tselai/pgQR