Last week I attended Postgres Conference Seattle 2024 as a speaker for two sessions. The first, titled “What’s our Vector, Victor?” discussed the merits of the pg_vectorize extension for Postgres. The second, titled “Kubernetes Killed the High Availability Star” served an advocacy piece for the ultimate deprecation of Postgres High Availability tooling in general. On day two of the event, I ended up having a long conversation about system architecture with Harry Pierson from DBOS.

There seems to be a lot of debate on both sides of the political aisle, and I’m far from a disinterested observer. While I strive to remain objectively detached in most circumstances, I’ve found that this particular election cycle makes that impossible. Being the polarizing figure that he is, the fundamental reason for this is obviously Donald J. Trump. This isn’t click-bait; I’m not voting for him. The reason for that is much more nuanced than some might expect, so I feel it’s important to explain my reasoning.

I never got around to it, and I was going to write about how my birthday went last week, but I just experienced a kind of “Eureka” moment. It was a nice day where Jen and I went to brunch at Original Pancake House, did a bit of shopping for pants and other necessities, and then had dinner at Baxter’s Grille. I had a ribeye (of course) and I indulged myself with their flourless chocolate truffle cake.

I woke up from a dream this morning where someone from my past was being incredibly unfair to me. At some point, I exploded in rage and started to yell about said injustice, and referenced being autistic. This being a dream, the person felt really bad about how they were treating me, and that’s about all I can remember. It’s very common for my dreams to “prime” me for the rest of the day, so of course I spent the next hour or so pondering my past as a result.

This is a verbatim conversation I had with an older LLaMa 3 model hosted on my PC via Ollama a few days ago. It started because I wanted a translation for the name of an X account named gatos fazendo gatices, and it just kind of spiraled from there. The topic eventually touched on how AI could be improved, the effects on society, and the nature of cognition itself. It’s clear the LLM has a tendency to restate the question as part of the answer, or at least mine was.