Walking looking for dml or whatever. Gotta get swag. Line up. Hate lines. Pretty quick line. Scans badge & asks size. M. Wasn’t sure whether to run for it, was handed water thermos. Ended up at Theater 1. Some bullshit about gathering everybody’s data I’m so out of here. Bunch of brands for products I’d never use. Snyk had a big booth glad we stopped using them. Eventually sit down in a sparse spot, woman asks to scan, I tell her I’m lost, gives me card, card says RAG so I ask what’s RAG she says retrieval augmented generation. I say oh. Some guy comes out & starts talking about RAG & how every year he gets a flight here on Sunday after Thanksgiving & stays at same hotels & I’m thinking damn does that sound like a groundhogs day nightmare & he’s saying why can’t his airline give him a personalized package & then they get to the architecture diagram & have interesting data being chat logs & I’m thinking fuck if I want my chat logs deriving data. So I get up & leave while he’s talking about chat bots. So I start heading to area on ceiling saying DATA because that’s what we do & some guy says I look stressed handing me a stress ball, I reply “Yes I am”. We get talking about tinybird & he agrees AI is getting pretty overhyped & he’s talking snowflake tax but wasn’t clear on why people use snowflake, Got talking about his role being dev outreach & he wasn’t sure if they support geometry columns. Conversation dies & my phone alarm goes off for 1utc so I step away & see Sai called an hour ago, call him he asks what’s going on, I’m not sure, says he’s in a meeting talk in an hour. At some point I see coats being given out at CapitalOne booth, Large smallest available, get talking about CapitalOne open source after I say “I thought you were just a credit card” & they’re showing some Python data synthesis thing anyways they didn’t have much to say so I walked on. Figured I should see snowflake booth to understand it better but it was packed with some talk about dome bullshit I forget so walked over to Mongo where they seemed to have comfortable seats & got talking with a nice guy, taught him cosmos is a suite of databases which was news to him & we got talking about mongo documents before moving conversation to something more interesting like 3d graphics programming & how he’s on imdb for working on some French video game in the 90s. Eventually conversation died & he left but I stayed a few minutes longer for a breather. Sit down at Snowflake with even cushier seats where tv is playing some shit about zero data movement while having shots of blue matrix effect coming out of people’s phones so I walk around until a couple guys ask if I want to talk about Snowflake & we get into it I tell them I’ve started at peerdb & we do pg/snowflake cdc & I’d like to know what my job is because I don’t know so they explain snowflake is decoupled storage/compute compared to traditional sql having to pay for vcores which I can agree with how expensive Citus clusters were. Explains they haven’t released OLTP but it’ll be 55ms nothing webscale maybe good for B2B apps. They’re more for analytics. Get talking about AI & cloud I assert it’s a bad match because GPU on cloud seems lacking they disagree, companies are paying out the nose for GPU on cloud because it’s an arm’s race & you always need latest gen for better perf per watt & cloud data centers have the megawatts that you just can’t get on prem. Snowflake is elastic. Get talking about peerdb psql interface & they recall some gal sitting on 5tran ui tweaking a hundred mongo snowflake mirrors. I get snowflake socks joking you get to an age where socks for Christmas is exciting. I’m ready to leave so start funneling out. Sit down to check on wifi decide to play space invaders arcade game it’s awkward with one hand, guy starts telling me it’s running on kubernetes & I’m annoyed because I was in the middle of playing space invaders & now I’m talking to this guy about kubernetes & it takes me five minutes to find out AKS is amazon kubernetes not azure kubernetes & Spot isn’t a service it’s a new aks tier where you’re premptible but you get a 2 minute heads up when your aks is going to spin down so you can react. Leave & figure out wifi password is on badge which helps because I’m on a prepaid phone plan & still riding US minutes/texts I bought when interviewing with Citus so I could call Sumedh. Sai texts to meet at Grand Lux Café 630pm. There’s two Grand Lux Cafés in Venetian hope we go to same one