This is an image I took yesterday of a billboard “The algorithm is banned in China.”. I don’t get it. This one has “Ask” in the bottom of the image.
I remember a few months ago seeing “The algorithm killed Jeeves”, and it had no reference to “Ask” on it, so I assumed it was some reference to Google Killing askjeeves.com . Need to find that photo.
Found it. I took this photo below on Apr 20, 2007. Note: there is no Ask logo like the one above.
Clean data is one of those terms everyone uses and few define precisely. Row counts match? No nulls in key columns? Values within expected ranges? All useful checks — and all insufficient once you move from a table view to a visualization view.
Read moreSynthetic benchmarks have their place, but I have always preferred working with real data. Not client production data — that stays private — but publicly available datasets that reflect the messy shapes, skewed distributions, and indexing challenges you encounter in the wild.
Read moreI recently had the pleasure of presenting Planning your upgrade to MySQL 9.7 at COSCUP 2026 in Taipei, Taiwan. COSCUP (Conference for Open Source Coders, Users and Promoters) is one of the largest open source conferences in Asia, and the community there is always engaged and technically sharp.
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