2min chapter

Episode 845 - Ken Burns & Lynn Novick

WTF with Marc Maron Podcast

CHAPTER

The Battle of Laos

We dropped more bombs on the Laos portion of the Ho Chi Minh Trail than we dropped in Germany and Japan. It was an epic undertaking and it's probably essential to how they won the war. And by the cover of night, they're bringing in heavy artillery. We couldn't fly at night. So this is a huge tactical or strategic problem for our Air Force that we couldn't flying at night. The enemy isn't sitting there waiting to get bombed. They had women repairing the bomb damage because during the day we would bomb and they would have these tens of thousands of teenagers, girls out there filling up the bomb craters until they get bombed again.

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Episode notes

Speaker 2

So what is the thing that's controversial why would why do people not think that

Speaker 1

that should be part of the algebra. So a lot of people so one of the things that we we spent a lot of time doing was optimizing for this ability to transpose and to kind of treat rows and columns interchangeably we actually built a system that could handle hundreds of billions of columns and there just aren't that many systems in the world that can handle that many columns just because like you have to have metadata for all of your columns in most systems and we had a way basically of kind of having the metadata be inferred at runtime which is which is another another key aspect of the data frames but having these kind of like short but really really fat or wide tables is not something that's extremely common in the kind of world of databases and so that's that's kind of why it ended up being like okay the controversial if you would find this image you would find

Speaker 2

this machine learning though 100%

Speaker 1

yeah 100% yes it's extremely common in machine learning but databases don't like that's changing these days because databases are starting to do a lot more but databases have historically not been well optimized for doing machine learning workloads and so this idea of the transpose and the same world I think is yeah I mean databases would just crash if you try to throw throw a hundred billion columns into them and

Speaker 2

you