This is light on specifics, but is still directionally the closest anyone has come to describing my ideal future data platform. The founder Dan Sotolongo's work at Snowflake included Dynamic Tables which makes me think the proposal is basically this: a hybrid transactional/analytical database, with declarative domain-oriented schemas, with smart incrementally calculated updates, and a la carte performance characteristics (i.e. opt into row or columnar storage, or whatever indexing you like). Nathan Marz's Rama is also close to this vision but perhaps a little less accessible for many enterprises as it's more purely developer focused. The win here is that you have a single system with all your data, all the time, and can build on it however you like. Piecing complex new services together across multiple microservices is deeply painful - if you can give me a single smart platform for all my data, and make it work operationally, that feels like a big win.
Obviously a lot of this you can piece together today, in fact Snowflake itself does a lot of it. But the other part of the article makes me think they understand the even harder part of the problem in modern enterprises, which is that nobody has a clear view of the model they're operating under, and how it interacts with parts of the business. It takes insane foresight and discipline to keep these things coherent, and the moment you are trying to integrate new acquisitions with different models you're in a world of pain. If you can create a layer to make all of this explicit - the models, the responsibilities, the interactions, and the incompatibilities that may already exist, then mediate the chaos with some sort of AI handholding layer (because domain experts and disciplined engineers aren't always going to be around to resolve ambiguities), then you can solve both a huge technical problem but a much more complicated ecological one.
Anyway, whatever they're working on, I think this is the exact area you should focus on if you want to transform modern enterprise data stacks. Throwing AI at existing heterogenous systems and complex tech stacks might work, but building from scratch on a system that enforces cohesion while maintaining agility feels like it's going to win out in the end. Excited to see what they come up with!
Sotolongo's lineage is Twitter observability -> Google streaming -> Snowflake Dynamic Tables, which is a declarative, relational, query-optimizer-centric tradition. Marz's lineage is Storm -> Trident -> Rama, which is a procedural-dataflow, programmer-controls-the-plan, event-sourcing-centric tradition. Both are trying to unify OLTP + OLAP + application logic + reactivity into a coherent substrate, but they're coming at it from opposite epistemological poles. Rama says "give the programmer fine-grained control over partitioning, indexing, and dataflow, and trust them to design the right physical representation for their queries." Cambra, if your inference about Dynamic Tables is right, will almost certainly say "let the programmer describe the domain model declaratively and let the system figure out the physical representation." This is the classic Codd-vs-Codasyl split, recapitulated forty years later with much more sophisticated machinery on both sides.
If this is the right framing, then the two systems aren't really competitors despite solving the same problem--they're going to appeal to fundamentally different developer sensibilities. Rama is for people who want to think like Jay Kreps or Martin Kleppmann: the event log is sacred, physical data layout is a first-class design decision, and the programmer earns the performance benefits by understanding the system deeply. Cambra (if these assumptions hold) will be for people who want to think like database users: describe what you want, let the optimizer figure out how, intervene only when necessary. These are both defensible positions and both have historical track records of working. SQL's history shows the declarative camp has ecosystem advantages once the optimizer is good enough; Kafka/Rama's history shows the log-centric camp has correctness and observability advantages for event-heavy domains.
My dream is to build an "access + excel + Jupyter" alike combo, where you declare the full components of a RDBMS, ie: "create log, select * from index, create queue, etc".
I think what is missing is the ability to actual declare the major paradigms so is not "I create a job queue on top of a leaky table" but "I declare a job queue".
I think you should play modern board games, but can we agree that there are both good and also heinously bad lessons to learn from them? Far too many board games want to be computer games, and seem to think it's trivial to have 20 different piles of crap to set up at the start, and then a dozen different pieces of state to track in your little corner of the table during what will inevitably be a complicated five-phased turn. If your board game takes hours to learn and set up, and then half an hour to put away again at the end, I am just going to invest my time in a proper TTRPG that better repays the investment.
>Far too many board games want to be computer games
very concise way to nail the root cause of this problem. I dont think it is intentional. I am developing my own board game right now with my brother, currently playtesting with close friends with solid results, and due to growing up with video games I cannot tell you how often we have had to confront the urge to add a state tracker here or a system there or maybe if we use cards with stats on them then .. etc. because a lot of our love for games has been influenced by video games. We managed to overcome that and keep things fun and simple, but we also have the luxury of working on this over the past couple years in our spare time and not pressed to meet a deadline or other corporate constraints. By that I mean when we hit a wall that could be solved quickly by increasing the games complexity, we are able to step away for a while until a good idea hits us.
there is certainly some room to bridge the gap between video games and board games, to have systems the players dont need to learn but operate in the background while still enabling tabletop interaction - but i dont see how to do it on a budget, so maybe a future project. we need projector enabled coffee tables to get popular in general or something maybe
I reject anything that has an excessive "weight" on boardgamegeek. The vast majority of high "weight" games are board games wanting to be computer games, as you correctly pointed out. Of course, "high" is subjective but I got burned too many times by thick manuals with tedious set up that makes me want to not play the game before I even open the box.
I think the lesson to learn from this is that different people are different?
While most people are repulsed by the complexity of extremely heavy games, others will luxriate in them. There is a whole 40-year-old community built around Advanced Squad Leader, a game with rules so complicated that there's a 135-page tutorial to teach the Starter Kit version of the game [0]!
The board game industry creates many very mainstream games with wide popularity, and many games across a large number of niches that each have their own narrow appeal.
I think there has been a shift in what kinds of games get published that privileges a slim set of experiences that are possible in board games and risks narrowing the range of what people think a board game is capable of. I agree there’s a vast range of different player types and psychological rewards people get out of playing games, but I personally find myself increasingly uninterested in new game designs, because the designs I like are harder to sell to impulsive buyers, players who don’t want to play a game repeatedly, or players who will have difficulty playing games again if anyone has a bad time (which I totally get! But it means designs that might prompt negative emotions are not sought by many publishers). I wouldn’t even say “heavy” games are the problem (I disagree with OP about high time commitment being a problem, there’s many games like that that deliver commensurate value to me).
The article doesn't sell it that way. "You should play modern board games if ..." would be a different claim. The premise
> They provide interesting puzzles to solve, and you work in a technical role - some part of your brain must find that appealing
is something I do not relate to at all. Almost every time I am in a situation where I play board games, my intuition is to think about how you solve the game so that one side always wins or break the rules so that everyone loses, but almost never am I actually interested in investing the energy to get invested in the game itself, let alone the rules.
> he article doesn't sell it that way. "You should play modern board games if ..." would be a different claim.
Indeed, but neither does the article try say you should play games with "20 different piles of crap to set up at the start, and then a dozen different pieces of state to track in your little corner of the table during what will inevitably be a complicated five-phased turn", which is the comment I was responding to. It doesn't actually recommend any specific games at all, but those types of games are really a small subset of modern board games (of the games mentioned in the article, I think only Twilight Imperium and maybe Labyrinth would qualify).
> is something I do not relate to at all. Almost every time I am in a situation where I play board games, my intuition is to think about how you solve the game so that one side always wins or break the rules so that everyone loses, but almost never am I actually interested in investing the energy to get invested in the game itself, let alone the rules.
Okay, great, you have learned that board games aren't for you. This article is aimed at people who haven't tried modern board games: "I chose to introduce them to the world of modern board games in an attempt to encourage some of them to give them a go."
100% agree, I think the past 10-15 years of changes in the hobby have been profoundly negative.
- The trend towards videogame-ifying board games
- The trend towards "cozy" games, i.e. games that are not interactive, have no potential to produce negative emotions, and focus on a solitary optimization puzzle.
- The kickstarter-ification of games that focus on early release exclusives, excessive plastic, aesthetics over game design, etc.
I really urge players today to look at some of the games from the 90s to early 2000s if they're interested in getting into the hobby. Seek out some of the "classic" hobby games. Even some games predating that are fantastic, but you will also run into a lot of over-the-top simulationist war games during the 80s period.
I agree. I generally bounce off those sort of games.
I gravitate towards games that have simpler rulesets with deep gameplay. I’m a big fan of Reiner Knizia but also Phil Walker-Harding and David Thompson.
Humor aside, you're not wrong - spending an hour setting up and then 10 minutes per player to actually play was a lot more fun when I had a lot more free time
I don't think chess engines are a solved problem for some use cases. Yes you can make something strong, maybe even the strongest, but can you create a chess engine perfectly tuned to actually teaching a player? Instead of superhuman perfect lines and inscrutable long-horizon strategy, can you teach nearly optimal human play in a way that's actionable, modular and memorable? Can you improve on tournament prep for players against particular opponents or within a particular metagame?
Also, obviously it's your life, and we're here on Earth to fart around, but I have spent a good portion of my life dipping into one hobby after another, as my dad did before me, so I'm half speaking to myself when I ask this: why do you think you can't meaningfully contribute to any of these realms, even now? To me that sounds like some deep seated fear or doubt, some aversion to competition, some overriding bitterness. I'm slightly worried you'll just be back here in another couple of years trying to find another new hobby, unsullied by the efforts and achievements of others. You won't find that! I would actually suggest a particularly expensive hobby: going to therapy. Try that, and learn that you're already enough, and if your contributions are meaningful to you, that's all that matters. Happy to be way off the mark here though.
This. For those more into reading instead of straight to therapy, Barbara Sher's "Refuse to Choose!" book about living with a multitude of interests can be a good starting point.
Also, making (or maybe tuning) a chess engine to teaching sounds like an interesting challenge, actually.
I've been very impressed with Bazzite on my ASUS dual screen laptop. Honestly feel like hardware support is better (especially in the absence of crappy ASUS software) and nothing on Steam runs noticeably worse. Hard to imagine going back to Windows at this point.
Almost exactly, it's mostly how you use the REPL that differs, and then only because of what different editors prioritise. When I'm in Emacs, all my work happens against a running REPL - when I open or save a file, it's reloaded. Any tests loaded in the REPL rerun on every save, within that live instance. If I drop into the debugger, it's against that live instance. I can swap in mock components to a running system, go check stuff in a browser (even jack into a live webpage with ClojureScript), all in one long running instance. I have struggled to recreate this kind of setup as smoothly in Python with any editor (pytest doesn't want to run this way, and IPython's autoreload doesn't feel as reliable), but I do probably write more REPLy code in Python than most, so all my model training and optimisation runs during development happen in pausable background threads in IPython etc.
All that said, 90% of the time you still just eval a bit of a code to see what happens and that's the same between the two languages.
(you can theoretically pass "reload": true (or similar option) in launch.json for auto reload, tho I haven't felt the need to use that in my workflows.)
I spent part of my childhood in Winsford, a salt mining town in the UK (its other claim to fame being that it was where Neville Southall played before Everton). Every time I pass a yellow bin of salt for gritting the roads, I get to feel a little bit of nostalgia (before falling over because councils no longer have enough money to grit the roads and pavements).
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