I was under the impression that recursive CTEs make the SQL spec Turing complete. Not that it makes any practical difference, it's still very difficult to use for "general purpose" programming, and still very practical to use for data processing / management.
Last year I read about some database researcher who implemented AoC in pretty standard SQL.
I live in a city where I can be fairly certain that I will not be the victim of a robbery. I don't need to carry a weapon or otherwise appear defensible. This type of crime simply does not exist here (or only to a very limited extent). That is “freedom from.” If I had the right to carry a firearm to defend myself in the event of a robbery, that would be “freedom to.” These two forms of freedom can be distinguished in a very clear-cut way. One allows you to do certain things. The other ensures that negative events do not occur. In North America, the cultural focus seems to be primarily on “freedom to.” But I would consider it a massive restriction of my freedom if I could not walk through my neighborhood at night without worry, even if I had the right to carry a firearm for protection.
Your semantic sleight of hand cannot reflect the difference between someone who feels safe because they believe they can and are allowed to defend themselves against danger (freedom to defend oneself) and someone who feels safe because they believe there is no danger (freedom from danger). However, there is a clearly discernible qualitative difference between these two freedoms. Otherwise, there would be no difference in terms of freedom between walking through Caracas, Tijuana, Port-au-Prince, or Pietermaritzburg with a firearm in your pocket and walking completely unarmed through Abu Dhabi, The Hague, or Trondheim.
There's tremendous difference. Imagine I put a 5' high fence every 3 feet on a sidewalk. You still have the freedom to walk down the street, but no longer have the ability to do so. This is why the Bill of Rights is framed in terms of limitations on governments as opposed to guarantees of rights.
For instance, the Bill of Rights doesn't grant you the right to free speech. You already naturally have that. It instead makes it unconstitutional for the government to try to hinder that right. By contrast the USSR and China both had/have guarantees of freedom of speech in their constitution, but they mean nothing because obviously you have freedom of speech by virtue of being able to speak.
You having the freedom of speech says nothing about the ability of the government (or private companies in contemporary times) engaging in actions making it difficult to exercise that speech without fear of repercussion. Or as the old tyrannical quote goes, "There is freedom of speech, but I cannot guarantee freedom after speech."
This may be how you personally interpret these things, but it is not how it has been interpreted universally for many centuries now. The freedom to do something has nothing to do with how easy it is to do, or even the absolute viability. For a basic example of the latter, every US citizen by birth has the freedom to become President some day, yet of course it is literally impossible for more than 0.000006% of people to achieve that within their expected lifetimes.
This is why constitutional guarantees of rights, the world round, are generally completely meaningless.
>The freedom to do something has nothing to do with how easy it is to do, or even the absolute viability.
Are you confusing me with someone else?
> For a basic example of the latter, every US citizen by birth has the freedom to become President some day, yet of course it is literally impossible for more than 0.000006% of people to achieve that within their expected lifetimes
I have no idea what this has to do with my point and you have not adequately explained the relevancy either.
Yes, you can, if you consider that liberty and freedom are functions of society and not nature. In this sense, dying from old age is not being unfree.
To stay with your example, one is bascically the absence of limitations (negative freedom), ie. the freedom to walk the street. The other is the presence of possibilities (positive freedom), ie. there needs to be a street to walk it.
>> There is a difference between "Freedom to do something" and "Freedom to not have something happen to you". […]
> There's no difference. You can't formulate that distinction coherently.
The historian Timothy Snyder just wrote a book on the difference between Freedom from and Freedom to:
> Freedom is the great American commitment, but as Snyder argues, we have lost sight of what it means—and this is leading us into crisis. Too many of us look at freedom as the absence of state power: We think we’re free if we can do and say as we please, and protect ourselves from government overreach. But true freedom isn’t so much freedom from as freedom to—the freedom to thrive, to take risks for futures we choose by working together. Freedom is the value that makes all other values possible.
Freedom to walk anywhere means someone can walk onto your property ("done to you") You can curtail that freedom, because you are essentially giving up ("inability to do something with stuff someone else owns") some freedom to get some other freedom ("ability to own stuff that will not be used by strangers").
It's a tradeoff. A good one. Tradeoff of say "nobody's anything is private now because that allows govt a slightly easier time to catch criminals" is not a good tradeoff.
Freedom to walk the street means no police will stop me when I try to walk the street. Freedom to not be hindered from walking the street means police will stop other people from stopping me.
On the other hand, if one site is down you might have alternatives. Or, you can do something different until the site you needed is up again. Your argument that simultaneous downtime is more efficient than uncoordinated downtime because tasks usually rely on multiple sites being online simultaneously is an interesting one. Whether or not that's true is an empirical question, but I lean toward thinking it's not true. Things failing simultaneously tends to have worse consequences.
I don't think there was very much abuse of "not just A, but B" before ChatGPT. I think that's more of a product of RLHF than the initial training. Very few people wrote with the incredibly overwrought and flowery style of AI, and the English speaking Internet where most of the (English language) training data was sourced from is largely casual, everyday language. I imagine other language communities on the Internet are similar but I wouldn't know.
Don't we all remember 5 years ago? Did you regularly encounter people who write like every followup question was absolutely brilliant and every document was life changing?
I think about why's (poignant) Guide to Ruby [1], a book explicitly about how learning to program is a beautiful experience. And the language is still pedestrian compared to the language in this book. Because most people find writing like that saccharin, and so don't write that way. Even when they're writing poetically.
Regardless, some people born in England can speak French with a French accent. If someone speaks French to you with a French accent, where are you going to guess they were born?
Even if that were comparable in size to the conversational Internet, how many novels and academic papers have you read that used multiple "not just A, but B" constructions in a single chapter/paper (that were not written by/about AI)?
Clearly your perception of what is AI generated is wrong. You can't tell something is AI generated only because it uses "not just X - Y" constructions. I mean, the reason AI text often uses it is because it's common in the training material. So of course you're going to see it everywhere.
Find me some text from pre-AI that uses so many of these constructions in such close proximity if it’s really so easy - I don’t think you’ll have much luck. Good authors have many tactics in their rhetorical bag of tricks. They don’t just keep using the same one over and over.
The style of marketing material was becoming SO heavily cargo-culted with telltale signs exactly like these in the leadup to LLMs.
Humans were learning the same patterns off each other. Such style advice has been floating around on e.g. LinkedIn for a while now. Just a couple years later, humans are (predictably) still doing it, even if the LLMs are now too.
We should be giving each other a bit of break. I'd personally be offended if someone thought I was a clanker.
You’re completely right, but blogs on the internet are almost entirely not written by great authors. So that’s of no use when checking if something is AI generated.
What I remember about our evaluation of DuckDB in 2024 concluded that (1) the major limitations were lack of range-scan and index-lookup performance (maybe w/ joins? or update where?), and (2) the DuckDB Node.js module segfaulted too much. Perhaps the engineers somehow missed the ART index it could also be the restriction that data fit in memory to create an index on it (our test dataset was about 50gb)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQL:1999
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