Technologies: Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, Vespa and practically every DB under the sun. Language agnostic but the bulk of my work has been in Java/Kotlin/Scala, Python, and some Typescript. AWS, NLP, LLM, Transformers.
About me: experienced software engineer passionate about search technologies. Looking to break into proper machine learning (I have experience) and/or build something interesting/meaningful. Long-time backend developer, inexperienced in backend. Been navigating the startup space lately, but it is time to give up and focus on finding something permanent.
This behavior is pretty much the state of the American two party political system. For example, Democrats had countless attempts to make abortion a constitutional right, but if they did, they could no longer count on using that subject for fundraising against the "enemy". Using Democrats as an example, both parties are guilty.
Vector search is not exclusively in the domain of text search. There is always image/video search.
But pre-filtering is important, since you want to reduce the set of items to be matched on and it feels like Elasticsearch/OpenSearch are fairing better in this regard. Mixed scoring derived from both both sparse and dense calculations is also important, which is another strength of ES/OS.
Curious about the lack of Vespa, especially given the thoroughness of the article and its long-time reputation. OpenSearch is also missing, but perhaps it can be considered being lumped in with Elasticsearch due to them both being based on Lucene. The products are starting to diverge, so would be nice to see, especially since it is open-source.
For the performance-based columns, would be also helpful to see which versions were tested. There is so much attention lately for vector databases, that they all are making great strides forward. The Lucene updates are notable.
I spent 3 months in South Africa, primarily in Cape Town. Visted Mabu Vinyl, but sadly did not purchase anything (was backpacking, so traveling light). Owner was lovely.
The documentary is not exaggerating the fact that Rodriguez was immensely popular in South Africa. Heard his music playing on iPods in bars, young 20 somethings that not only listened to him, but so did their parents.
The movie does exaggerate his disappearance. Rodriguez toured Australia, so he knew he had some popularity.
A few years later, I met the owner of Light in the Attic records, the reissue label that repressed Rodriguez's albums. They acquired the rights before the documentary, and even they were amazed at the popularity of his music after the movie. He told basically that Rodriguez paid for his house due to the sales.
What's interesting is that we, South Africans, had no idea that he wasn't a worldwide sensation, because he is so commonplace in our culture that we assumed he was a mega-star.
In SA, were his fans mainly white, Coloured, or Black, or did he have an appeal across the country's ethnicities? (If the latter, I would be surprised, because when I cycled across SA for several months and stayed with members of all three groups, their respective communities' tastes in music seemed very different.)
That is indeed surprising, because one thing I was told time and time again in SA -- and mostly by white people -- is that there simply wasn't white opposition to apartheid outside of a tiny handful (and old white people claiming today to have opposed it back then are hardly to be taken seriously). But Sixto records went platinum, so his audience must have encompassed many more white people.
Well, "people with a progressive viewpoint" is not exactly the same thing as "organised opposition".
The first is nigh inevitable for some percent of the population. The second is not. In fact a repressive state will turn it's efforts into preventing such people connecting, organising, etc. Giving them the message that it is best for them to keep their heads down and keep quiet, and not join a "movement".
That is why, in repressive state, any non-state social movement would be viewed a potential threat, even if it claims to be not political at all.
> and old white people claiming today to have opposed it back then are hardly to be taken seriously
Sounds almost like you are trolling.
There are number of ways of opposition. Most people just want to get on with their lives though and you don't have the time nor energy to protest. There were tons of different viewpoints from all population groups. It's not as black and white as you've been reading on the Internet.
> It's not as black and white as you've been reading on the Internet.
As I said, my understanding has been formed by what I was told by local people while in SA. I have never actually read much about this matter on the internet.
I dunno about that, every time Sugar man or I Wonder started playing when I was growing up, someone would tell me "This guy isn't famous anywhere else! No-one even knows where he is!". I must have been told this factoid 20 times when I was a teenager.
That is what I assumed as well, until one day I got hit by a bug involving Extension Mechanisms for DNS (EDNS). Never knew it existed. All of a sudden DNS was failing and could not understand why. Took me a long time to fix the issue.
So many memories flooding back. We once had a party at Razorfish and I somehow got in touch with random downtown people who made weird alcohols. One of them was a woman who made legit absinthe from real wormwood back before absinthe was legal again, and the other one was a woman who made some sort of narcotic “milk” alcohol inspired by A Clockwork Orange. I’d be shocked if it wasn’t the same woman as this bar!
Since Open Source has been established in the tech ethos for a while now, any deviation has been met with derision. It seems like the community has been more tolerant of these "open" licenses as of late. While must of the hate for projects that do not fit the FOSS standard is mostly unwarranted, hopefully we are not moving quickly in the "open" direction.
Remote: Yes
Willing to relocate: No (for now)
Technologies: Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, Vespa and practically every DB under the sun. Language agnostic but the bulk of my work has been in Java/Kotlin/Scala, Python, and some Typescript. AWS, NLP, LLM, Transformers.
Email: https://url.dev/m/xpQpdwn/
About me: experienced software engineer passionate about search technologies. Looking to break into proper machine learning (I have experience) and/or build something interesting/meaningful. Long-time backend developer, inexperienced in backend. Been navigating the startup space lately, but it is time to give up and focus on finding something permanent.