Joel Labes

@joellab.es

1474 Followers 92 Following

I don't know how to be data driven and at this point I'm too afraid to ask. DX at dbt Labs | Wellington NZ 🥝

Screenshot of The Verge's headline "A humanoid robot-shaped bubble is forming, China warns" superimposed on an ai-generated image of a giant bubble wand creating a robot
A screenshot of the linked article: Another time, I asked what it thought of my day. (Because really, how does one strike up an organic conversation with an always-listening AI?) It responded by saying, “What makes you think I have thoughts on your day, Vee?” That’s a weird response considering it’s the entire pitch behind the device.
A modified screenshot of a tweet. [Compiler waiting room] Me: [chanting] types, types– Other logical plans: types, TYPES Execution engine: [pounding her clipboard] TYPES, TYPES, TYPES!
A screenshot of dbt Explorer with the `+transactions` selector. It shows all parent nodes of the transactions model, plus a purple node showing that transactions is used by a downstream project.
This is exactly what's happening with dbt. When it started, it was beautifully simple: just write SQL with some Jinja templates. But as data teams started building more complex systems with dbt, their needs adapted with it. We needed better error messages, faster compile times, better IDE integration. The acquisition of SDF is dbt really growing up. And this isn't a bad thing – it's necessary. When tools become critical infrastructure, we need to grow more sophisticated to meet the needs of their users. But there's something subtle and important happening here that most people are missing. The really interesting part isn't that dbt is adding features – it's that we’re adding understanding. SDF's technology doesn't just run SQL faster (which solves a core user problem in dbt), it also makes the process of developing with dbt much more pleasant and metadata rich.
All of the benefits laid out above are being realized in production today by SDF’s existing customers. But it will take some work to get all of these capabilities integrated into dbt, and this won’t happen overnight. Our first goal is to get SDF’s SQL parsing capabilities integrated into dbt. These capabilities will enable meaningful improvements to the dbt developer experience, and we want everyone to have access to them. While SDF won't be included as part of the Apache 2.0 code base, we plan to make meaningful parts of SDF’s capabilities available to all dbt users—whether you’re using dbt Core or dbt Cloud. As we work through integration details we’ll share more about how this will work. *But if you use dbt today, you’ll be able to use this new tech.*
A screenshot of the table of contents: The GPT-4 barrier was comprehensively broken Some of those GPT-4 models run on my laptop LLM prices crashed, thanks to competition and increased efficiency Multimodal vision is common, audio and video are starting to emerge Voice and live camera mode are science fiction come to life Prompt driven app generation is a commodity already Universal access to the best models lasted for just a few short months “Agents” still haven’t really happened yet Evals really matter Apple Intelligence is bad, Apple’s MLX library is excellent The rise of inference-scaling “reasoning” models Was the best currently available LLM trained in China for less than $6m? The environmental impact got better The environmental impact got much, much worse The year of slop Synthetic training data works great LLMs somehow got even harder to use Knowledge is incredibly unevenly distributed LLMs need better criticism
A screenshot of a tweet by audrey farnsworth which has been edited. It says "(opening my god damn bad take website) there better not be any god damn bad takes in here". bad take has been edited over the original text of the tweet.
A car with the number plate DRM666
The drowning high five meme. The drowning hand is labelled "low data quality". "testing" reaches out to help. In the third panel, it high-fives, captioned with dbt's testing syntax to add unique and not_null tests. The hand slips below the surface.
A photo of two signs at the entrance to a store. One says "firearms prohibited" and the other, larger sign says "we don't accept Apple Pay or Google Pay"
A screenshot of the Apple Event video at https://youtu.be/G0cmfY7qdmY?t=347 of a woman sitting in an aquarium environment writing on a MacBook Pro. The caption says "for example, if you're a researcher"