The problem of the Global Village is that there is nowhere else to explore. At the old times you would walk the Earth and you’d know that if you explore more there are more to learn.
With our modern day media, everyone knows about Hemingway, Bob Marley, Ubuntu in the Africa, Sakura, Namiki… There is hardly something you would see that would revolutionize your world.
And I think that has been what I have wanted to give the world. I wanted to be someone who had a whole new world, a whole world full of new things, so much new, so revolutionary that it would bring back the lost “aura” that Walter Benjamin said the age of replication has destroyed.
And you can only do this by building in the dark, by refusing to have media coverage, by being a lighthouse in the fog. It is only great in that sense. And people get that sense. Me and my work are one of the last things “not-known-to-be-known”.
Now college in France is a little different. You have this thing that Napoleon created that’s called Grande École, which means big school, and you have two or three years of preparation in order to enter those schools. So that’s the whole college, somewhat equivalent. So I went to Rouen for those preparative classes and then there’s an exam, multiple exams, actually and I landed in this big school, which is called École Nationale Supérieure de l’Enseignement, ENS, École Normale and that was in near Paris.
I said, well, maybe I should try physics. So I took a year of quantum mechanics, which I thought was a thing to learn in physics and it was a total disappointment, because I did pass the exam at the end of the year, because I had all this math background. But I didn’t understand a thing. So I was very disappointed, because I wanted to learn and understand and I didn’t. So I said, okay, math’s too hard. Physics is too hard. I’ll do what I know how to do, which is computers.
I remember I built a compiler at that time, and it fit in a rack of cards and my big fear was not that I had a bug in the compiler, but that I’d trip while carrying my set of cards. That would have been the end of the compiler.
The future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed.
DoltLite is a fork of SQLite. Everything above the B-tree layer is the same. That means the SQL parser and analyzer, the file system interaction layer, and test harness are stock SQLite. With other Dolt products we had to implement a SQL engine on top of version-controlled storage. Building a SQL engine is hard. With DoltLite we got one for the cost of writing a version-controlled storage engine in C.
The B-tree layer is swapped out for a Prolly Tree backed by a single file chunk store. Prolly Trees are content-addressed B-trees. This magical data structure powers the version control functionality in all Dolt products.
That means you get all the version control features of Dolt and Git in a SQLite package. Have you ever wanted to branch, merge, and diff SQLite? DoltLite is for you. Or maybe even more importantly, have you ever wanted a conflict aware SQLite sync engine powered by Git-style push, pull, clone, and fetch? DoltLite is for you. You can even use DoltHub as your sync backend.`