Mike Stonebraker

Computer science may well not be a growth industry going forward.

This is Mike Stonebreaker.

He's a Turing Award winner famous for his fundamental contributions to database systems like creating Postgres and more.

Query optimizer.

It's just algorithmically difficult.

Well, I mean, it's very easy.

He shared interesting technical takes from his experience.

On our benchmarks, large language models get 0%.

That wasn't the only thing Google was stupid about.

When I graduated, I had the good fortune of being hired at Berkeley.

And it was clear I had to, you know, continuing what I did for my PhD was not going to go anywhere.

Then, as well as today, you're way ahead if you get adopted by a mentor who knows the ropes.

So Gene Wong, who is still alive and still kicking, took me under his wing and said, well, let's do something together.

And this was 1971, which was the year after Ted Codd wrote his pioneering paper in CACM.

Gene Wong said, well, let's take a look at database stuff.

At the time, the competitors were a thing called the CODECIL proposal, which you're probably too young to have ever heard of.

And so it was a low-level spaghetti network proposal where you executed queries by following pointers.

And then the alternative was the IBM proposal, which was a thing called IMS, which is still available.

And it's hierarchical data.

Organized your data is trees.