| ▲ | bflesch 3 days ago |
| Big ick from my side. Manifest-style marketing blog post talking about revolutionary things but it seems their main metric is in the image above the post: "hey, we've raised $22M in funding". Landing pages of both spiral and vortex are GPU-hugging animations and void of any technical information. Empty nothing-statements like "machine scale". They claim 100x improvements but don't link any metrics. Maybe this is a "don't hate the player, hate the game" situation but somehow the collective of likeminded AI engineers decided to upvote this post to #1 on HN. |
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| ▲ | msteffen 3 days ago | parent | next [-] |
| There's this: https://bench.vortex.dev/, which links to https://github.com/vortex-data/vortex/tree/develop/bench-vor.... I haven't tried pulling the repo or anything but it seems like they might be runnable? Of course I don't know what benchmarks or performance metrics they might have for the db layer, but it is something. |
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| ▲ | indoordin0saur 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] |
| > Vortex is designed to support decoding data directly from S3 to GPU, skipping the CPU bottleneck entirely. If this is true I'm inclined to believe their claims. |
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| ▲ | bflesch 3 days ago | parent [-] | | MY PERSONAL BOTTLENECK between S3 and GPU is my credit card and not some new cargo module by some already-rich AI engineer and a fancy marketing website that must've cost a couple hundred grand. And if this module provides a benefit I'm sure it will find its way into our stack, just like PostgreSQL did. And PostgreSQL never had $22M to begin with - no shiny marketing, just technological skills. The whole "donated by spiral" on the vortex.dev website also gives big tax write-off vibes. IMO best case is that this will be a mongodb scenario, but with the current track record of tech grifters enshittifying everything they might find a creative new way. | | |
| ▲ | xyzzy_plugh 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | > The whole "donated by spiral" on the vortex.dev website also gives big tax write-off vibes. I've never heard of this sort of OSS work being used as a tax write-off. Could someone please either clarify, or enlighten me? | | |
| ▲ | bflesch 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Look at the website linked in the vortex website footer: https://lfprojects.org/
It has all the bells and whistles of using an expensive law firm. I have no idea who exactly is behind this, but to me it does definitely not seem like a no-name open source genius, I assume it is some lucky AI grifter. They have two nicely designed, expensive marketing websites. They have all the legal documents for the parent LLC in Delaware. The delaware corp "donates" the multi-million-worth tech to linux foundation, and uses it as tax write-off to offset gains from some other lucky AI grifter play the person did. Just the chuzpe to self-compare yourself to something like PostgreSQL is what gets me. Why can't they just be rich and leave people doing actual work for the benefit of our common good be. No, they must make big blog posts claiming they are the next big thing after PostgreSQL. So many red flags.. | | |
| ▲ | aduffy 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Believe it or not, this is how the Linux Foundation organizes itself. It's more legwork than something simpler like Apache Foundation. Basically in the US you need a legally recognized entity to hold intellectual property. "Donating" the project involves setting up a "Series LLC" that is nested underneath the top-level Linux Foundation corporation, and donating the IP into it. Checkout https://docs.linuxfoundation.org/lfx/project-control-center/... and ctrl-f "LF Projects, LLC" | | |
| ▲ | bflesch 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Oh, thanks for pointing that out. I got it all mixed up. But I think my argument still stands. Linux foundation is a 501(c)(6) nonprofit, see https://www.linuxfoundation.org/legal/bylaws So you might still be able to do an "intellectual property transfer" to them and use it as a tax write-off. The "LF Projects LLC" is then the new owner, only the operating company who has the ongoing hosting contracts for the websites. Edit: Not sure if a donation to 501(c)(6) can be used as write-off without using some other legal loopholes. Quick AI search told me that only 501(c)(3) can do the donation tax write-off thing. I'm sure there are some good tax lawyers behind this, who am I to understand it as a mere mortal I am just jealous. | | |
| ▲ | aduffy 3 days ago | parent [-] | | We don't get a tax write-off. The motivation is to move the IP and trademark into a separate organization so it's no longer owned by Spiral. This means we can't re-license it later, we'd have to fork it, because the Vortex trademark and all that is controlled by LF. | | |
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| ▲ | aduffy 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | > The whole "donated by spiral" on the vortex.dev website also gives big tax write-off vibes. Donated is the Linux Foundation terminology. Sadly the last time I filed a tax return there was no way to itemize a Github repo. Alas. | | |
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