From what I understand, Exasol is a very fast analytical database for traditional data warehouses.
My engine doesn't replace a data warehouse; it solves a type of table that data warehouses simply can't handle: tables with hundreds of thousands or millions of columns with an access model that guarantees interactive response times even in these extreme cases.
> society is reverting back to factory settings of human history, which has always been a feudalist type society of a small elite owning all the wealth
The word “always” is carrying a lot of weight here. This has really only been true for the last 10,000 years or so, since the introduction of agriculture. We lived as egalitarian bands of hunter gatherers for hundreds of thousands of years before that. Given the magnitude of difference in timespan, I think it is safe to say that that is the “default setting”.
Even within the last 10,000 years, most of those systems looked nothing like the hereditary stations we associate with feudalism, and it’s focused within the last 4,000 years that any of those systems scaled, and then only in areas that were sufficiently urban to warrant the structures.
Back then there were so few people around and expectations for quality of life were so low that if you didn't like your neighbors you could just go to the middle of nowhere and most likely find an area which had enough resources for your meager existence. Or you'd die trying, which was probably what happened most of the time.
That entire approach to life died when agriculture appeared. Remnants of that lifestyle were nomadic peoples and the last groups to be successful were the Mongols and up until about 1600, the Cossacks.
>We lived as egalitarian bands of hunter gatherers for hundreds of thousands of years before that.
Only if you consider intra-group egalitarianism of tribal hunter gatherer societies. But tribes would constantly go to war with each other in search of expanding to better territories with more resources, and the defeated tribe would have its men killed or enslaved, and the women bred to expand the tribe population.
So you forgot that part that involved all the killing, enslavement and rape, but other than that, yes, the victorious tribes were quite egalitarian.
> and the defeated tribe would have its men killed or enslaved, and the women bred to expand the tribe population.
I’m not aware of any archaeological evidence of massacres during the paleolithic. Which archaeological sites would support the assertions you are making here?
If you can show me archaeological evidence of mass graves or a settlement having been razed during the paleolithic I would recant my claims. This isn’t really a high bar.
> Where's your archaeological evidence that humans were egalitarian 10000+ years?
I never made this claim. Structures of domination precede human development; they can be observed in animals. What we don’t observe up until around 10,000 years ago is anything approaching the sorts of systems of jack_tripper described, namely:
> which has always been a feudalist type society of a small elite owning all the wealth and ruling the masses of people by wars, poverty, fear, propaganda and oppression.
> The idea that we didn't have wars in the paleolithic era is so outlandish that it requires significant evidence.
If it’s so outlandish where is your evidence that these wars occurred?
> You have provided none.
How would I provide you with evidence of something that didn’t happen?
Keep fighting the good fight. Asking for evidence should be the bar in conversations and too many people are willing to bend the truth to push their narratives (that the rich elites deserve everything, you were born a serf).
David Graeber wrote a great book called "Dawn of Everything" that really explains how newer techniques in anthropology have upended what we believe about modern humans.
There were 10,000+ people settlements found 30,000 years ago. The idea that humans have only developed "civilization" the last 5,000 years goes against what it means to be human. I mean we still have the same brains we did 200,000 years ago. People have always been smart, and more importantly, the book argues that humans have resisted nobility + kings since creation.
Population density on the planet back then was also low enough to not cause mass wars and generate mass graves, but killing each other over valuable resources is the most common human trait after reproduction and seek of food and shelter.
Last I checked there hadn’t been major shifts away from the perspective this represents, in anthropology.
It was used as a core text in one of my classes in college, though that was a couple decades ago. I recall being confused about why it was such a big deal, because I’d not encountered the “peaceful savage” idea in any serious context, but I gather it was widespread in the ‘80s and earlier.
The link you give documents warfare that happened significantly later than the era discussed by the above poster.
To suggest that the lack of evidence is enough to support continuity of a behaviour is also flawed reasoning: we have many examples of previously unknown social behaviour that emerged at some point, line the emergence of states or the use of art.
Sometimes, it’s ok to simply say that we’re not sure, rather than to project our existing condition.
Well, this one is at least pertinent to the time period we’re discussing:
> One-half of the people found in a Mesolithic cemetery in present-day Jebel Sahaba, Sudan dating to as early as 13,000 years ago had died as a result of warfare between seemingly different racial groups with victims bearing marks of being killed by arrow heads, spears and club, prompting some to call it the first race war.
Mesolithic (although in this case it may also be Epipaleolithic - I'm not an expert, though) is the time period that happens just after Paleolithic, the one that was being talked about.
It is a transition period between the Paleolithic and the Neolithic, with, depending on the area, features of both. In the middle-east; among others, (pre)history moved maybe a little bit faster than elsewhere, so in this particular example, which is the earliest case shown in the book you pointed out, it's hard to say that it tells about what happened before, as opposed to what happened after.
We were talking about the paleolithic era. I’ll take your comment to imply that you don’t have any information that I don’t have.
> but killing each other over valuable resources is the most common human trait after reproduction and seek of food and shelter.
This isn’t reflected in the archaeological record, it isn’t reflected by the historical record, and you haven’t provided any good reason why anyone should believe it.
Sure, nobody is claiming that hunter gatherers were saints. Just because they lived in egalitarian clans, it doesn’t mean that they didn’t occasionally do bad things.
But one key differentiator is that they didn’t have the logistics to have soldiers. With no surplus to pay anyone, there was no way build up an army, and with no-one having the ability to tell others to go to war or force them to do so, the scale of conflicts and skirmishes were a lot more limited.
So while there might have been a constant state of minor skirmishes, like we see in any population of territorial animals, all-out totalitarian war was a rare occurrence.
It seems like a problem that will self-correct. If too expensive housing is keeping couples from having children, then population will decline, which will free up a lot of housing stock making prices drop, and then people can afford having children again. Maybe it is just cyclical?
Population demographics is not zero-sum. Very soon the fraction of people who are too old to work will be larger than the fraction who can. We'll lose a shit ton of able, working bodies all across the board. This will tank the econony and quality of life for everyone.
This is the exact problem Japan is facing. You should go read up on how well that's "self-correcting" (it isn't)
SQLGlot is amazing. In many ways it helps erase the differences and bridge between dialects. It is so useful for moving complex queries between platforms.
The original idea idea behind SQL was to create a language that looked like English and allowed regular users to express their queries in something that resembled natur
Al language. Naturally it has evolved into something far more complex, but maybe today with LLMs it can get back to its origin,
LLMs are getting pretty good at writing SQL. There is so much training material out there, and it is not that hard to validate the results. The real interesting question will be if they will be better at leveraging all the database specific dialects than tool like PowerBI. High-performance databases like Exasol often has a lot of specific features in their SQL dialects that generic tools and ORMs are not able to use, it will be interesting to see if LLMs can make that more accessible.
Bullying is such a hard problem. The only school system I have seen dealing with it effectively is the Sudbury Valley schools.
There they have a Judicial Committee, composed of both students and staff, and deal with issues through a process similar to courts in democratic society.
Interesting enough, both students and staff can be brought up for bad behavior, which is probably what makes the process respected enough to work.
I usually start with PostGIS for single-node workloads and then switch to Exasol when I get to truly massive datasets (Exasol has a more limited set of spatial operators, but scales effortlessly across multiple nodes).
It will be great with some more options in this space, especially if it makes a smooth transition from single-node/local interactions to multi-node scale-out.
Exasol costs us a fraction of what we used to pay for Databricks, and that is even with us serving far more users than we used to do (from a data size perspective we are not at the petabytes scale yet, but getting there).
> they were working 90% of their waking hours. their work was their lives.
This is not true at all. A quick google for “hunter gatherer work hours” would tell you that they worked far less than we do today. 2-5 hours of what we would define as work a day, with the rest being mainly leisure.
I agree that using a semantic layer is the best way to get better precision. It is almost like a cheatsheet for the AI.
But I would never use one that forced me to express my queries in JSON. The best implementations integrate right into the database so they become an integral part of regular your SQL queries, and as such also available to all your tools.
In my experience, from using the Exasol Semantic Layer, it can be a totally seamless experience.
It used to only be available for big enterprises, but now there is a totally free version you can try out: https://www.exasol.com/personal
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