I completely understand why, but on the other hand democracy relies on citizens being informed about what's happening. The risk is that one day, you wake up and there is no democracy any more.
Reading the news and being informed are two separate things. Being an informed citizen, the kind that democracies need to survive, also requires 1) being informed of history and 2) understanding issues in depth.
People who consume a lot of news tend to have very shallow understanding of a broad range of current events. Worse they tend to be passive receivers of news instead of active seekers of information with intent to understand the world.
As a result, they are very susceptible to manipulation through selection of what makes the news they tend to consume. They become passive pawns in political power struggles.
I'd like to get a little pedantic here and suggest it's not reading the news that's so problematic, it's 1) watching it, and 2) scrolling it. Not that print can't be effective propaganda, but it's less optimized to the task than 1 and 2. The passive pawns can't get enough of either.
On one hand I can see where you can draw this argument from. But on the other hand I don't think daily consumption of the huge quantity of news that exists is necessary for having a decent political opinion, especially given that most news is inflammatory junk (at least in my country). I just don't need a 5 page breakdown of every single event that some corpo decided to shove down our throats.
Also - and maybe I'm naive for this - I don't really need news to inform my political opinion because the current state of affairs is so far from my ideal world. Like no matter what could reasonably occur in the news, I still know who I'm voting for on polling day.
> I completely understand why, but on the other hand democracy relies on citizens being informed about what's happening.
The point being made by the author is that "following the news" nowadays has nothing to do with being informed. Instead, it became about being constantly bombarded by a barrage of noise and nonsense to constantly grab your attention.
So instead, by finding a monthly publication giving him an overview of the local, European and world news, the author is looking for a filter removing all the unnecessary noise. And the month granularity should be more than enough to allow him to be informed about important changes.
I completely agree. The author is incredibly naive on the "I asked myself how much of this actually affects my daily life". If there's one thing that absolutely affects your life, it's politics. Maybe not today, and maybe not immediately in a meaningful way, but it will affect you.
I completely disagree. The past 50-70yr of "people ought to care and be involved" type sentiment has resulted in mostly only the people who have nothing better to do and no serious problems having an outsize effect and in some subject areas completely dominating the political discourse to the detriment of literally everyone else and western society generally.
You mangled Jefferson a bit. He wrote about education, not news. He didn't imagine the the non-stop firehose of slop and advertising and propaganda we endure and call news. What passes for news today describes the opposite of critical thinking and education.
No evidence supports your sentiment. Find an example of democracy that arose from citizens "being informed about what's happening." The Athenians limited democratic participation to a small educated elite. The American Founders had the same instinct, excluding more people than they included.
Demoracy dies in front of our eyes right now, in the USA, the most media-saturated culture in history. You might blame that on an ignorant and uncritical population. You might call them uninformed, or misinformed. As Jefferson understood the problem doesn't come from people not reading the news, but rather people not educated enough to understand, think critically, or even care.
I feel like this, I honestly wish newspapers weren't bunk and there was a good "week in review" way to get the news. I find myself Doom scrolling to much.
The fact that this is downvoted really says it all. "I don't read the news" is pretty much dependent on one's profession being insulated from changing events. Which is not surprising why it's a popular opinion amongst technocrats that would rather not have democracy in the first place.
For the rest of the news, I am considering subscribing to a magazine that covers important events in Germany, the EU, or the world every few months. This kind of format filters out short-term noise and fear-driven stories.
Elections happen even less frequently than this. If your democracy disintegrates with less than a few months of warning, you were probably invaded and noticed even without the news; At this point, that would probably lead to a civil emergency notification on your phone, and by design that happens even without any apps installed.
As we said in the UK in my childhood, "Today’s news is tomorrow’s chip* paper".
In October 2024 I would not have guessed that we'd ever see masked agents killing people on the streets of major US cities, or the US administration immediately accusing the victims of being armed terrorists. Things can change rapidly. By allowing things to get this bad, we have unfortunately forfeited our right to pretend things can't change rapidly. Let's plug in; fix this situation; and then folks can go back to ignoring the news.
Last year, legal immigrants were fine. Today, their kids are kidnapped and used as bait to take them to Alcatraz. And that's not even the identity I'm mostly referring to.
Very cool stance OOP, thank you for identifying yourself as the type of centrist heaven will reject at the gate and angels will never get tired of the reaction to the shrug.
When learning basic math, you shouldn't use a calculator, because otherwise you aren't really understanding how it works. Later, when learning advanced math, you can use calculators, because you're focusing on a different abstraction level. I see the two situations as very similar.
What abstraction levels do you expect will remain only in the Human domain?
The progression from basic arithmetic, to complex ratios and basic algebra, graphing, geometry, trig, calculus, linear algebra, differential equations… all along the way, there are calculators that can help students (wolfram alpha basically). When they get to theory, proofs, etc… historically, thats where the calculator ended, but now there’s LLMs… it feels like the levels of abstractions without a “calculator” are running out.
The compiler was the “calculator” abstraction of programming, and it seems like the high-level languages now have LLMs to convert NLP to code as a sort of compiler. Especially with the explicitly stated goal of LLM companies to create the “software singularity”, I’d be interested to hear the rationale for abstractions in CS which will remain off limits to LLMs.
The "liberal" in "liberal democracy" has nothing to do with the current common meaning of "liberal" - ie, left-wing - in the USA, as it comes from classical liberalism. In short, liberal democracy means a democracy based on rule of law, separation of powers, election of representatives, freedom of speech and freedom of the press.
In theory I agree with you, in practice I do not. This is one of those terms where the precise meaning is being, or has already been, lost. For instance in the overwhelming majority of rhetoric around the lines of this article, populism is framed as being in an adversarial relationship with liberal democracy. Yet that is, from a precise interpretation of 'liberal democracy', quite nonsensical.
The entire system of democracy, of any flavor, is fundamentally populist. But populism trends towards values that are not what one would consider left-wing by US standards. And so far as I can tell, that is the only real basis for the claim of its supposed adversarial relationship with liberal democracy. It is framing "liberal" as being left-wing and US-centric left wing, and not simply of liberty.
While "liberal democracy" has a very clear meaning, "populism" has very different definitions. I'm pretty sure that the definition you have in mind is pretty different from the ones I know, if you say that democracy "is fundamentally populist".
How would you define it? Or would you disagree that democracy, in its nominal form, is a political system where political action is driven by the will of the masses?
In a liberal democracy the "will of the masses" is applied indirectly, through the election of representatives, making laws, and then applying those laws and governing in accordance to those laws. To get elected, politicians and aspiring politicians tell electors all sorts of things. Some of them tell electors that their problems have simple solutions, which go against what the intellectual elites (scientists, doctors, engineers, lawyers etc.) recommend or say is doable. Those are what are usually defined populists. Some of them actually believe that "experts" lie for some agenda. Most of them know perfectly well that those simple solutions won't work, but say what they think electors want to hear. Not all politicians/parties act like that, even if it's common to have some populists in all most parties - because populism works.
It's unclear to me how the definition you're using isn't biased to the point of meaninglessness. Let me use an example. Politicians know full well we stand no chance of meaningfully impacting climate change for a practical reason - most emissions are coming from relatively adversarial countries.
If we try to encourage them to reduce emissions via some form of ongoing compensation then we asking them to impair their development in exchange for accepting putting themselves into an exploitable dependency relationship with us. They will simply never accept this, so at best it will be superficial gestures that have no real chance of having a meaningful impact.
So is the rhetoric around climate change, and politicians/parties running on claims of being able to impact it, populist, in your usage? I'd imagine not. But is there a 'clean' way to explain how this is excluded while maintaining any degree of meaningfulness of the term as you are using it?
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As for 'my' usage, I view populism as appealing to the genuine views of the masses, mostly in contrast to efforts to suppress or reshape them. It can certainly include demagoguery (which is largely what you're describing, but with a peculiar sort of bias built in), but it can also simply include leaders whose worldviews, or at least the worldview they espouse, happening to align largely with that of 'the masses.'
There is no such thing as "genuine views of the masses" which aren't shaped by anybody. "The masses" are made of people, all of which shape each other both at a micro and at a macro level, but the latter is disproportionately affected by mass communication - and, today, by digital social networks and their algorithms. Everybody has people who they look to for reference (ie, leaders) and that they trust on things which they don't know personally very well. Some leaders truly believe that you can eat your cake and have it too, and they tell their followers "trust me, and you'll have your cake and eat it too" - but usually these don't last long, because they're simply too stupid and/or ignorant. And this isn't an exclusive of the right or of the left: you have people who don't believe that carbon dioxide has a greenhouse effect, but you also have people who believe we can simply install solar panels and magically solve the mismatch between energy needs (temporal and geographical) and Sun irradiation.
Some other leaders know perfectly well that you can't eat your cake and have it too, and that in reality you need to make compromises between various things you would like to have - but they tell their followers the opposite, because they only care about reaching and then maintaining power. These are the demagogues, but they ally with the people from above and, together, form populist movements.
Then there are leaders who try to find the best compromise between the various things that "the masses" want/care about, and what reality allows to the best of our knowledge. Those are the non-populist, and they exist.
Well that's a rather political answer in that you're saying a lot, but avoiding the question, unless I'm expected to read into what you're saying, which can be interpreted in either way. I won't push it beyond to emphasize that I'm not picking particularly fringe arguments, as per your examples, I'm picking completely mainstream and normal rhetoric that you would hear from effectively 100% of politicians of a certain leaning.
As for 'genuine views' - contemporary politics is full of endless issues that if each person, absent any awareness of where we ended up, were to rank the importance - would end up nowhere remotely near the top. An obvious example is transsexual stuff. It's also comparably full of gaslighting on issues that may benefit the country, but hurt the people. For instance low skill immigration reduces wages of low-skill workers, while simultaneously 'growing the economy.' This is something which has been studied and confirmed endlessly, yet politicians and the media will do things like misrepresent studies or cite localized studies from 46 years ago to try to implicitly, sometimes explicitly, argue that it increases wages. It's complete gaslighting.
I view populism as stepping away from these sort of deceptions. Many if not most great presidents of the US in the past would certainly be derogatively framed as a populist now a days. JFK telling people we can go to the Moon if we truly focus on it, that America's resources can be spent better than trying to meddle in every single country around the world, and that a great country can only stay great if both the country works for the people but the people also work for the country? That certainly seems to fit the typical usage of the term now a days.
I considered that question just an example. Anyway, considering that China alone installed about 60% of the new renewable capacity in the whole world in 2024–2025, and that about 90% of new capacity is based on renewables both there and in India, I really don't see how your argument on that holds.
For low skill immigration, I fundamentally agree with you, and that's something I personally criticize left wing politicians a lot. I see the stance that Western countries can (and should) accept any amount of immigration as a left-wing form of populism.
Regarding JFK and the Moon, that's the opposite of populism - that's leading and shaping people's ideas and perceptions. How many Americans were thinking about going to the Moon before JFK made that an important issue?
It was indeed just an example, but a pointed one to try to figure out where your definition begins and where it ends. As for China's claims, beware of capacity factor. [1] Installed capacity is based on peak figures, whereas practical output tends to be a fraction of that for clean energy sources, but significantly higher for energy like coal. It makes it easy to make headlines that sound good, but don't mean what we'd think they mean, and China's not the only one doing this. In any case, CO2 levels are going to continue skyrocketing for the foreseeable future.
As for JFK - going to the Moon is something that people would somewhat naturally support. If they oppose it, it's going to be on political grounds, perhaps they think the money could be better spent in the current moment, and not because they literally just don't ever want to send people to the Moon. By contrast something like e.g. political correctness is the exact opposite. People are going to naturally oppose it, unless there is a political motivation behind supporting it. I also chose that exact example because of the comment you made about populists promising the Moon - it turns out that sometimes they deliver.
Sure, we're going to emit a lot of carbon dioxide for a long time, but we're talking about planet-level changes here, and changing the trend/trajectory has HUGE impact. At least if you care about future generations (I've got a daughter and several nephews, I don't know about you). Anyway, I asked chatgpt to estimate actual averaged capacity, and for China we have that nuclear+renewables (low-carbon) added 73% of new capacity in the last two years. I bet that the figure will become even better in the next years, as batteries and other storage methods become less expensive.
Regarding the Moon, are you sure that you're not equating "populist" with "what I personally like"?
To make a counterexample, what do you think about free universal medical care? Do you think that "the masses" would "naturally" want that, or not?
PS By the way, I'm far from what you would probably define "woke". I actually think that the excesses of wokism were a decisive contributing factor to Trump's win.
The capacity factor means you're also adding less energy than it might seem. Here is a nice graph of CO2 levels [1]. There's a breakdown by country a bit lower. The trend for CO2 levels remains quite sharp. And China is not the only factor. Asia, especially India, Africa, and many other places are due for ever greater levels of development and industrialization. For instance India has 1.4 billion people yet just 60% of the emissions of Europe. The entirety of Africa has less than 33% the emissions of Europe! These figures are not sustainable.
However, I am not that concerned about it, also as a family man. There's a finite amount of fossil fuels in the world, they will run out eventually, and become economically unfeasible long before that. So even if we do absolutely nothing, the world will likely be economically forced to start transitioning away, likely on a timeframe that is within our lives. Arguably it's already happening with places in the Mideast aggressively seeking to diversify their economies. In any case CO2 levels when dinos roamed the Earth and the oceans were full of life, were upwards of 1200ppm owing to natural processes. We're not going to hit anywhere near that even if we burn everything - in other words there's no scenario where we become Venus, or anything even remotely like it. Some places will become more hospitable, some will become less, optimal places for growing crops (and/or different types of crops) will shift, and overall there will be a lot more greenery. It's a pretty dumb experiment, but it'll be fine.
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On free healthcare - if we are speaking hypothetically of genuinely free health care at comparable quality then obviously everybody's going to want it. The problem is that those 'political objections' are pretty tough in this case. Obviously it won't be free - it'd be paid through taxes, and the government has already shown itself in a relationship with the healthcare industry where they are, at the minimum, uninterested in reigning in healthcare costs, and government operated systems invariably balloon costs.
Outside of free likely becoming quite expensive, there's also the issue of quality and availability. Countries that have had experience running 'free' healthcare systems for decades are increasingly running into problems in modern times with declining economic growth, declining fertility, increasing health issues (obesity, psychological, etc), and so on. Even Scandiland is seeing increasing trends towards privatization in healthcare, and that's with a vastly more appropriate population for such - much less corruption, healthier, preexisting high taxes, fewer social divisions, fewer people seeking to abuse the systems in place, etc. It is still working for them, but I'm not sure if it's indefinitely sustainable at current fertility/economic trends.
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And yeah, I definitely knew you weren't "woke" since they in general seem completely incapable of having a good old debate/discussion! I think the fear of 'wrongthink' makes people accept things that they wouldn't otherwise rationally accept which makes them unable to competently defend their views when speaking somebody of a different worldview.
Just two quick answers before we agree to disagree :)
* Life on Earth will survive any human-made change, even a full nuclear war. It's our society which won't survive if changes are too quick.
* Publicly ran healthcare systems in Europe and elsewhere are MUCH more cost efficient than the US private system, it's very easy to compare cost/performance, so the "government operated systems invariably balloon costs" is just false in this case. This isn't to say that private enterprises aren't more efficient in most cases, and the issue with private healthcare isn't that they're not efficient in terms of resources used - it’s just that maximizing profits and shareholder value when people’s lives are on the line means that you, as a health care customer, will be gouged for every penny they can get.
Brevity is a skill. Like Mark Twain wrote - I apologize for such a lengthy letter, I hadn't the time to write a short one!
In general I agree with you on both fronts - our disagreement is mostly going to be in the details and forecasts. For instance the impacts of climate change are already happening. Sea levels in parts of Florida have already risen more than 8 inches since the 50s. Yet beach front property is still selling for a premium. The point is that I expect it's going to be gradual enough that society will have time to adapt, even if the change over an extended period of time may be quite significant.
And I also completely agree that the healthcare systems pretty much anywhere in the world, government or privately operated, are dramatically more efficient than the US private system. But I don't think you can expect that to change if the government starts operating it. Medicaid's savings requires studies to measure since it's nominally more expensive/person than private healthcare. What savings there are, after a bunch of adjustments and assumptions, seem mostly explained by paying healthcare providers less per service, which is why a sizable chunk of places don't accept it. It doesn't really scream 'yeah, let's make this global and mandated' to me.
That said, I had a Norwegian friend visiting me over here in the other side of the world. He ended up getting an ear infection and went to the most premium local hospital to get it sorted out. Final charge to him = $0, even internationally. Enough to make anybody absolutely jealous, but I'm going to have a hard time believing America might be able to land on this Moon. Cheap and efficient just isn't the American way.
By the way, the emergence of LLM coding tools could make it even easier than before to reduce that dependence, as the cost of reproducing many of the mature technologies is going to cost less than it would have before. Ironically, doing that may require using US tools (like Claude Code), at least for now, but it could be a very interesting evolution/opportunity for Europe.
> the emergence of LLM coding tools could make it even easier than before
I find this highly optimistic. It will take years, maybe decades for EU to replace US clouds and tech. And if they're going to do it with LLMs, then it will take billions of euros in devs and tokens (again, all going to US tech companies).
Meanwhile, USA continues to strategically re-home TSMC to Arizona whilst simultaneously make huge investments to invigorate Intel and Micron.
Over the last decade USA and China have doubled-down on massive investments to out-compete each other while the EU seems like it's struggling to understand where to even begin.
> USA continues to strategically re-home TSMC to Arizona whilst simultaneously make huge investments to invigorate Intel and Micron.
Oh don't worry, Trump's already kneecapped both of those for a decade to come from 2025's actions alone. Y'all got time to catch up.
China, much scarier. But we all kinda let that happen over 30 years. Too late to complain now. I'd say we work together but uhh... I think we both understand (or rather, fail to understand) modern US policy these days.
What can I say, I expected more than what they actually offer. A Redshift job can fail because S3 tells it to slow down. How can I make this HA performance product slower given its whole moat is an S3 based input output interface.
As a compute engine its SQL capabilities are worse than the slowest pretend timeseries db like Elasticsearch.
Are you trying to treat an OLAP database with columnar storage like an OLTP database? If you are, you would probably have the same issue with Snowflake.
As far as S3, are you trying to ingest a lot of small files or one large file? Again Redshift is optimized for bulk imports.
Redshift does not fit into aws ecosystem. If you use kinesis, you get up to 500 paritions with a bunch of tiny files, now I have to build a pipeline after kinesis that puts all of it into 1 s3 file, only to then import it into redshift which might again put it on s3 backed storage for
Its own file shenanigans.
Clickhouse, even chdb inmemory magic has better S3 consumer than Redshift. It sucks up those Kinesis files like nothing.
Its a mess.
Not to mention none of its
Column optimizations work and the data footprint of gapless timestamp columns is not basically 0 as it is in any serious OLAP but it is massive, so the way to improve performance is to
Just align everything on the same timeline so its computation engine does not beed to figure out how to join stuff that is
Actually time
Aligned
I really can’t figure out how anyone can do seriously big computations with Redshift. Maybe people like waiting hours for their SQL to execute and think software is just that slow.
Really good to hear that. We've had AWS reps trying to push RedShift on multiple occasions after we've done our research and selected Clickhouse for our analytical workloads. Every time we have a meeting with them for some other reason - the topic of RedShift returns, they always want to discuss it again.
You realize “the pipeline” you have to build is literally just Athena SQL statement “Create table select * from…”. Yes you can run this directly from S3 and it will create one big file
I have a sneaking suspicion that you are trying to use Redshift as a traditional OLTP database. Are you also normalizing your table like an OLTP database instead of like an OLAP
And if you are using any OLAP database for OLTP, you’re doing it wrong. It’s also a simple “process” to move data back and forth between Aurora MySQL or Postgres by federating your OlTP database with Athena (handwavy because I haven’t done it) or the way I have done it is use one Select statement to export to S3 and another to export into your OLTP database.
And before you say you shouldn’t have to do this, you have always needed some process to take data from your normalized data to un normalized form for reporting and analytics.
Source: doing boring enterprise stuff including databases since 1996 and been working for 8 years with AWS services outside AWS (startups and consulting companies) and inside AWS (Professional Services no longer there)
Why are you doing this manually? There is a built in way of doing Kinesis Data Streams to Redshift
These things cost money, Redshift handling live ingestion from Kinesis is tricky.
There is no need for Athena, Redshift ingestion is a simple query that reads from S3. I dont want to copy 10TB of data just to have it in 1 file. And yes, default storage is a bit better than S3 but for an OLAP database there seems to be no proper column compression and data footprint is too big resulting in slow reads if one is not careful.
I mentioned clickhouse, data is obviously not OLTP schemed.
I don’t have normalized data. As I mentioned, Clickhouse consumer goes through 10TB of blobs and ends up having 15GB of postprocessed data in like 5-10 minutes, slowest part is downloading from S3.
I am not willing to pay 10k+ a month for something that absolutely sucks compared to a proper OLAP db.
Redshift is just made for some very specific, bloated, throw as much software pipelines as you can, pay as much money as you can, workflows that I just don’t find valuable. Its compute engine and data repr is just laughably slow, yeah, it can be as fast as you want by throwing parallel units but it’s a complete waste of money.
Thanks for having this discussion with me. I believe I don't want a time series database. I want to be able to invent new queries and throw them at a schema, or create materialized views to have better queries etc. I just don't find Snowflake or Redshift anywhere close to what they're selling.
I think these systems are optimized for something else, probably organizational scale, predictable low value workloads, large teams that just throw their shit at it and it works on a daily basis, and of course, it costs a lot.
My experience after renting a $1k EC2 instance and slurping all of S3 onto it in a few hours, and Redshift being unable to do the same, made me not consider these systems reliable for anything other than ritualistic performative low value work.
I’ve told you my background. I’m telling you that you are using the wrong tool for the job. It’s not an issue with the database. Even if you did need an OLAP database like Reddhift, you are still treating it like an OLTP database as far as your ETL job. You really need to do some additional research
I do not need JOINs. I do not need single row lookups or updates. I need a compute engine and efficient storage.
I need fast consumers, I need good materialized views.
I am not treating anything like OLTP databases, my opinion on OLTP is even harsher. They can’t even handle the data from S3 without insane amounts of work.
I do not even think in terms of OLTP OLAP or whatever. I am thinking in terms of what queries over what data I want to do and how to do it with the feature set available.
If necessary, I will align all postgresql tables on a timeline of discrete timestamps instead of storing things as intervals, to allow faster sequential processing.
I am saying that these systems as a whole are incapable of many things Ive tried them to do. I have managed to use other systems and did many more valuable things because they are actually capable.
It is laughable that the task of loading data from S3 into whatever schema you want is better done by tech outside of the aws universe.
I can paste this whole conversation into an LLM unprompted and I don’t really see anything I am missing.
The only part I am surely missing are nontechnical considerations, which I do not care about at all outside of business context.
I know things are nuanced and there’s companies with PBs of data doing something with Redshift, but people do random stuff with Oracle as well.
And you honestly still haven’t addressed the main point - you are literally using the wrong tool for the job and didn’t do your research for the right tool. Even a cursory overview of Redshift (or Snowflake) tells you that it should be used for bulk inserts, aggregation queries, etc.
Did you research how you should structure your tables fir optimum performance for OLAP databases? Did you research the pros and cons of using a column based storage engine like Redshift to a standard row based storage engine in an traditional RDMS? Not to mention depending on your use case you might need ElssticSearch.
This if completely a you problem for not doing your research and using the worse possible tool for your use case. Seriously, reach out to an SA at AWS and they can give you some free advice, you are literally doing everything wrong.
Clickhouse is column based storage, I can also apply delta compression, where gapless timestamp columns basically have 0 storage cost. I can apply Gorilla as well and get nice compression from irregular columns. I am aware of Redshift's AZ64 cols and they are a let down.
I can change sort order, same as in Redshift with its sort keys, to improve compression and compute. Redshift does not really exploit this sort-key config as much as it could.
My own assessment is that I'm extremely skilled at making any kind of DB system yield to my will and get it to its limits.
I have never used Redshift, Clickhouse or Snowflake with 1 by 1 inserts. I have mentioned S3 consumers (a library or a service, optimized to work well with autoscaling done by S3, respecting SlowDown -- something Redshift itself is incapable of respecting -- and achieving enormous download rates -- some of the consumers I've used completely saturate the 200Gbps limits of some EC2 machines at AWS). These consumers cannot be used in a 1-by-1 setting, the whole point is to have an insanely fast pipelining system with batched processing, interleaving network downloads with CPU compute, so that in the end, any kind of data repackaging and compression is negligible compared to download, so you can just predict how long the system will take to ingest by knowing what your peak download speed is, because the actual compute is fully optimized and pipelined.
Now, it might just be Redshift has bugs and I should report them, but I did not have the experience of AWS reacting quickly to any of the reports I've made.
I disagree, it's not a me problem. I am a bit surprised after all I've written that you're still implying I want OLTP, am using the wrong tool for the job. There are just some tools I would never pick, because they just don't work as advertised, Redshift is one of them. There are much better in-memory compute engines that work directly with S3, and you can create any kind of trash low-value pipelines with them, if you reach mem limits of your compute system, there are much better compute engine + storage combos than Redshift. My belief is that Redshift is purely a nontechnical choice.
Now, to steelman you, if you're saying:
* data warehouse as managed service,
* cost efficiency via guardrails,
* scale by policy, not by expertise,
* optimize for nontechnical teams,
* hide the machinery,
* use AWS-native bloated, slow or expensive glue (Glue, Athena, Kinesis, DMS),
* predictable monthly bill,
* preventing S3 abuse,
* preventing runaway parallelism,
* avoiding noisy-neighbor incidents (either by protecting me or protecting AWS infra),
* intentionally constrained to satisfy all of the above,
then yes, I agree, I am definitely using the wrong tool but as I said, if the value proposition is nontechnical, I do not really care about that.
> My own assessment is that I'm extremely skilled at making any kind of DB system yield to my will and get it to its limits.
Yes an according to my assessment I’m also very good in bed and extremely handsome.
But there is an existence proof seeing that you are running into issues yet millions of people use AWS services and know how to use the right tool for the job
I’m not defending Redshift for your use case, I’m saying you didn’t do your research and you did absolutely everything wrong. From my cursory research of Clickhouse, I probably would have chosen that too for use case
I did not do anything wrong. I had no choice with Redshift and had instructions from above. I made it work really well for what it can do and was surprised how much it sucks even when it has its own data inside of it and has to do compute. As a completely closed system, it's not impressive at all. It has absolutely shameful group-by SQL, completely inefficient sort-key and compression semantics, and absolutely can't attach itself to Kinesis directly without costing you insane amounts of money, because as you already know, Redshift is not a live service (you won't use it by connecting directly to it and expect good performance), it's primarily a parallel compute engine.
Your assessment of me is flawed. You haven't really shown any kind of low-level expertise on how actually these systems work, you've just name dropped OLTP OLAP as if that means anything at all. What is Timescale (now TigerData), OLTPOLAPBLAPBLAP? If someone tells you to use Timescale, you have to figure out how to use it and make the system yield to your will. If system sucks, it yields harder, if system is well designed, it's absolutely beautiful. For example, I would never use Timescale as well, yet you can go on their page and see unicorns using it. I have no idea why, but let them have their fun. There's successful companies using Elasticsearch for IoT telemetry, so who am I to argue I wouldn't do that as well.
There's nothing wrong with using PostgreSQL for timeseries data, you just need to know how to use it. At some point, scaling wise, it will fail, but you're deciding on tradeoffs.
So yes, my assessments have a good track record, not only of myself, but of others as well. I am extremely open to any kind of precise criticism and have been wrong bazillion times and I take part in these kinds of passionate discussions on the internet because I am aware I can absolutely be convinced of the other side. Otherwise, I would have quit a long time ago.
It's solar generation which doesn't work in winter in Ukraine, not the heat pumps. And as Russia is targeting Ukraine's energy infrastructure as their main tactic, with the goal of getting the population to accept Putin's domination to avoid freezing to death, the heat pumps would only be useful if local solar worked.
Isn't this the actual definition of vibe coding?
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