+1 to the CMU database group channel. High quality content with excellent (not to mention often entertaining) presentation. The recent Quarrantine[0] and Vaccination[1][2] tech talk series’s have been especially interesting.
I wrote the 927 reference, not the commenter you're replying to. I agree with you both, though the joke wrote itself! Of course conferences don't "compete," no more than journals "compete," especially in a world where peer review is increasingly becoming open sourced; but that's what makes (made?) the joke slightly more amusing.
Perhaps the more substantive discussion is, when you increase access to publication, does quality increase? decrease? stay the same?
> Perhaps the more substantive discussion is, when you increase access to publication, does quality increase? decrease? stay the same?
An analogy would be with sellers and buyers in a market. If you make it easier to sell without decreasing the cost to the buyer of reliable information about the seller and product, what happens?
Examining Amazon might give us some clues. My belief is that it greatly shifts transaction costs onto the buyer, by forcing each buyer to do a great deal of research and credential-checking, rather than having that done by relatively few and relatively knowledgeable curators.
Someone (JWZ?) said "Linux is only free if you don't value your time". The same might be said about proliferating conferences.
For those who are interested in data from the analytics side, I'll note that DBT's Coalesce conference [1] just concluded. Their site has full videos and transcripts!
Sounds like Jamie is starting a conference that would be a good venue for Eves. I think the ethos of Eve was really about rubbing databases on everything and seeing what happened.
This conference really seems to be a future of programming conference moreso than a databases conference. Maybe I'll submit something! Good luck!
Yes that’s the one! It was Chris Granger’s project that Jamie worked on for a while (along with Josh Rob and Eric and myself). Eve came around at a time when Bret Victor’s videos were very popular and a lot of people were unhappy with the state of the web and programming in general.
Since then there’s been a pretty relentless if niche community growing around the idea. Eve is gone but the idea lives on in many different communities, and I think it’s clear the same spirit that spawned Eve motivates Jamie’s conference.
The primary venue for this kind of work has been the Live! workshop at SplashCon.
I’m digging the idea of the remote conference pattern in TFA: 10 min talk, followed by audio/video free form chat, to simulate the dynamism of a meatspace conference.
Would this post be considered marketing? A teaser? Whatever it is, I strangely enjoyed it a lot. It's a perfect appetizer to get the juices flowing on thinking about the next generation of application software and how databases can enable that.
I think currently in the industry we are stuck in a hyper pragmatist, "value extraction" holding pattern and there is going to be a next generation of applications at some point that will be, at least partially, enabled by some of the advances discussed here.
In my mind at least, the actual "web3" or the next major generation of applications is not going to be this goofy decentralized blockchain gimmick factory.
It will consist of AR applications that you literally "wear" and let them enhance your reality in physical space, in real useful ways.
These applications will have a whole other level of latency and stability requirements because when they are quite literally in your face the user is going to have increased sensitivity to any latency or jitter.
Interesting! Yea I've recently been very interested by the idea of "programming" in a database vs files. I've only gotten more interested as I've seen bits of the idea shown like with Unison or a demo of running clang via serverless functions.
Sqlite and more databases... are a solution to things. I'm excited to see what this conference turns out to be like.
According to my experience, the in-person conference is much better. A lot of eye contact, more feedback during the talk, and a more active Q&A session.
The virtual conference always ends up just like a Youtube channel...
It is hosted by Andy Pavlo which is of my idol in the database world.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHnBsf2rH-K7pn09rb3qvkA