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Cesium DevCon 2026 talks are up, including a keynote from SQLite's creator

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Re: Cesium DevCon 2026 talks are up, including a keynote from SQLite's creator

#11

Post by sctb »

angry_octet wrote: post #5
dfabulich wrote: post #4

I watched Dr. Hipp's keynote. Here's my summary for folks who don't want to sit through it. (This is hand written, not LLM-generated.) Dr. Hipp suggests a definition of "AI" in which SQL planners are AI, defining AI as "any computing system that performs tasks typically associated with human reasoning, problem-solving, and decision-making." (He then explains briefly how SQL planners are runtime code generators. If yo…

I suggested something similar in an internal chat, i.e. using AI as a tool to help specify, debug and improve your code, rather than delegating all coding to it, and I think the collective response was essentially 'ok grandpa'. I think we have to expect the majority of SQL queries will soon be machine generated and machine tuned. The planner in database engines will use LLMs. There will be LLM chats to help you speci…

SQL is in a sweet spot of declarative, formal, and high level. It's basically a description of what the resulting dataset means, not just how to produce it. For ad-hoc queries maybe LLMs take over in the short term, and that's how I read your example. But for core, repeated business logic, human-written SQL seems to still hold value.

Re: Cesium DevCon 2026 talks are up, including a keynote from SQLite's creator

#12

Post by dfabulich »

abetusk wrote: post #9
dfabulich wrote: post #4

I watched Dr. Hipp's keynote. Here's my summary for folks who don't want to sit through it. (This is hand written, not LLM-generated.) Dr. Hipp suggests a definition of "AI" in which SQL planners are AI, defining AI as "any computing system that performs tasks typically associated with human reasoning, problem-solving, and decision-making." (He then explains briefly how SQL planners are runtime code generators. If yo…

The SQL planner is most definitely "AI", we're just so used to it that it's become trite to say so. I'm having trouble tracking down the version I heard about, but this essentially the "AI effect": "Every time we figure out how to do one of these tings, it ceases to be called AI and just becomes useful software" [0]. Part of the reason I'm dismissive of the current pushback against AI is that people have such a vague…

We get to define "AI" however we like, but a definition of AI that includes a SQL planner is so broad that it includes literally all complex software.

When I wrote that a broad definition of AI "obscures more than it reveals," I meant that lumping LLMs in with SQL planners and deterministic chess bots ignores (obscures) all of the details of their implementation.

But those implementation details matter. They have big implications on the uses, limitations, and risks of the software.

As I write this, one of the top stories on HN is a story about an OpenAI model accidentally hacking itself out of Hugging Face's sandbox. SQL planners don't do that. Chess bots don't do that.

That's not to say that saying "all complex software is kinda the same, and we can call all of it AI" doesn't reveal anything. There are some similarities that all complex software has, especially as we look back on the history of complex software and the impact it has had (or not had) on labor productivity.

But, IMO, what you discover by ignoring the details is less important than what you discover by delving in.

Re: Cesium DevCon 2026 talks are up, including a keynote from SQLite's creator

#13

Post by tremon »

abetusk wrote: post #9
dfabulich wrote: post #4

I watched Dr. Hipp's keynote. Here's my summary for folks who don't want to sit through it. (This is hand written, not LLM-generated.) Dr. Hipp suggests a definition of "AI" in which SQL planners are AI, defining AI as "any computing system that performs tasks typically associated with human reasoning, problem-solving, and decision-making." (He then explains briefly how SQL planners are runtime code generators. If yo…

The SQL planner is most definitely "AI", we're just so used to it that it's become trite to say so. I'm having trouble tracking down the version I heard about, but this essentially the "AI effect": "Every time we figure out how to do one of these tings, it ceases to be called AI and just becomes useful software" [0]. Part of the reason I'm dismissive of the current pushback against AI is that people have such a vague…

I feel that if we're supposed to call a SQL query planner AI, then any compiler that targets more than one architecure (including JIT compilers that optimize for the current processor's cache configuration) should be included as well. And if we're going to be that broad in terms of adaptable command execution then we should be similarly broad in terms of command interpretation, which says to me that all HTML parsers and rendering engines should similarly be classified as AI. After all, SQL queries still follow a very rigid structure and any non-conformant query will be rejected, whereas web engines are very good at recovering from non-conformant HTML input.

Re: Cesium DevCon 2026 talks are up, including a keynote from SQLite's creator

#16

Post by lmz »

abetusk wrote: post #9
dfabulich wrote: post #4

I watched Dr. Hipp's keynote. Here's my summary for folks who don't want to sit through it. (This is hand written, not LLM-generated.) Dr. Hipp suggests a definition of "AI" in which SQL planners are AI, defining AI as "any computing system that performs tasks typically associated with human reasoning, problem-solving, and decision-making." (He then explains briefly how SQL planners are runtime code generators. If yo…

The SQL planner is most definitely "AI", we're just so used to it that it's become trite to say so. I'm having trouble tracking down the version I heard about, but this essentially the "AI effect": "Every time we figure out how to do one of these tings, it ceases to be called AI and just becomes useful software" [0]. Part of the reason I'm dismissive of the current pushback against AI is that people have such a vague…

Postgres has a Genetic Algorithm based query optimizer in it: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/geqo-pg-intro.html
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