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IBM to acquire Confluent

confluent.io

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Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#221

Post by School-Cotton »

NewJazz wrote: post #169
fatal94 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you're doing is fine for a homelab, or learning. But barring any very specific reason other than just not liking Kafka, its bad. The second that pattern needs to be fanned out to support even 50+ producers/consumers, the overhead and complexity needed to manage already-solved problems becomes a very bad design choice. Kafka already solves this problem and gives me message durability, near infinite scale out, sha…

Some people don't and won't need 50+ producers/consumers for a long while, if ever. Rewriting the code at that point may be less costly than operating Kafka in the interim. Kafka is also has a higher potential for failure than sqlite.

Okay, then those people don’t have to use Kafka. What is your point?

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#223

Post by hawk_ »

spyspy wrote: post #44
zkmon wrote: post #8

Kafka is already past it's prime time. Time for new solutions for the oldest problem - sending a message.

I'm still convinced the vast majority of kafka implementations could be replaced with `SELECT * FROM mytable ORDER BY timestamp ASC`

Yes but try putting that on your CV.

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#225

Post by kedean »

notepad0x90 wrote: post #103
prodigycorp wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ok, so does anyone remember 'Watson'? It was the chatgpt before chatgpt. they built it in house. Why didn't they compete with OpenAI like Google and Anthropic are doing, with in-house tools? Leadership in IBM also thought that Watson was like what what OAI/Anthropic/Google are doing now. It wasn't. Watson was essentially a ML pipeline over-optimized on Jeopardy, which is why it failed in literally every other domai…

Sure, but they were doing that stuff. They had ML people, infrastructure, marketing, branding,etc... already. Their product sucked, but they could have copy-catted OpenAI in 2022+ like everyone else.

I don't think that would have gotten them much of anywhere. They already spent a decade trying to find markets for Watson to fit and generally failing at it. The problem with Watson wasn't technology, it was that it had no direction.

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#226

Post by Lu2025 »

oersted wrote: post #108
embedding-shape wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely by now everyone, including non-developers and non-software people, know exactly what IBM is, and you don't sell to IBM/join IBM without knowing exactly what's about to happen. No one joins IBM today and thinks there will be a huge focus on customer satisfaction or focus on great product design, it's all about squeezing maximum profit out of products until you need to discontinue them because you chased away al…

Not wrong but the image that people are painting in the comments is getting close to a caricature now. The stuff IBM is doing on Quantum Computing is serious cutting-edge science and engineering for instance. The R&D they are doing on semiconductors on their 2nm and sub-2nm processes is also impressive and hardcore tech. They are doing a bunch of progress on post-quantum cryptography and homomorphic encryption. They'…

> The R&D they are doing on semiconductors on their 2nm and sub-2nm processes is also impressive and hardcore tech.

But they don't have production. How can they develop successfully without running silicon in a fab?

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#227

Post by jhallenworld »

framebit wrote: post #219
jhallenworld wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can measure it by how many management steps you, as an employee of the recently acquired company are from the CEO in the hierarchy. As time goes on, this number tends to increase. It used to be easy to see this in Lotus Sametime or something that had some form of employee directory.

Fun fact: there's an IBM/Lotus Sametime theme song. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=daitUOzVpvc The lyrics rhyme "PC" with "easy."

That's awesome. Before ~2007 they allowed you to use open-source Pidgin to connect to the Domino servers. A friend of mine and I used it to make a bot: if you sametimed me, you got Zork.

It reminds me of another IBM IT rule: they wanted your chat history (and email) older than two years to be all deleted for legal liability reasons. It was important to save your sametime chat history (an XML file) and export your email periodically if you wanted to keep this stuff.

This was actually better than Slack in one way- you could grep the files for things, and not have to rely on search within the tool.

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#228

Post by NewJazz »

School-Cotton wrote: post #221
NewJazz wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people don't and won't need 50+ producers/consumers for a long while, if ever. Rewriting the code at that point may be less costly than operating Kafka in the interim. Kafka is also has a higher potential for failure than sqlite.

Okay, then those people don’t have to use Kafka. What is your point?

I was responding to someone who was responding to someone that wasn't using Kafka telling them to use Kafka. What's yours?

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#229

Post by btown »

purplezooey wrote: post #224

Adjacent space, but can't help but wonder why Confluent did so much better than MapR

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20053188 and https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252468013/MapR-collapse-... have some context on MapR's demise.

IMO they were simultaneously worse situated for near-real-time stream processing and for S3-esque cloud storage, areas Kafka and Confluent excelled.

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#230

Post by kedean »

tgma wrote: post #143
oersted wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not wrong but the image that people are painting in the comments is getting close to a caricature now. The stuff IBM is doing on Quantum Computing is serious cutting-edge science and engineering for instance. The R&D they are doing on semiconductors on their 2nm and sub-2nm processes is also impressive and hardcore tech. They are doing a bunch of progress on post-quantum cryptography and homomorphic encryption. They'…

IBM shouldn't be thought of as a singular company. It is a conglomerate that does widely distinct things. Some enterprise boring profit squeezing, some shady scam "IBM blockchain on Z OS prevents viruses," some research/patent efforts elsewhere. That said the GP is spot on for this sort of acquisition we know what will happen and has nothing to do with 2nm research division.

> IBM shouldn't be thought of as a singular company. It is a conglomerate that does widely distinct things.

This. Employees in the various sub-companies and divisions usually don't even know who most of the executive leadership is outside their little world. There is no cohesive "IBM" anymore, and I don't think there has been for a very long time.

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