curiousmindz

I am very curious about how chat messages are stored for a "billion-users" chat app (in SQL databases).

Specifically, let's say a user is part of a hundred conversations. When their client app comes online after being offline for a few days, how does the server query all the messages that are pending for this client app?

Does the server run one query per conversation? Or is there a fan-out process for each user so that the server can run one query per user? Or something else?

I have been working on an desktop application for the past two years. I expect it to have limited appeal because it targets a niche of power users (I would be happy if I manage to get 10.000 paying users).

What would be the "best" way to sell it? The simplest for me would be to make it a monthly subscription, but I dislike them, especially for my scenario.

Here are my considerations that I struggle to reconcile:

    - WANT: Ideally, users should be able to try the app before buying it.
    - MUST: Once you purchase it, it is yours forever.
    - WANT/MUST: I plan on continuing to improve this app for the years to come. How do I do that sustainably?

By the way, I am thinking of using the Mac App Store and Windows Store to distribute it so I don't have to deal with licensing, anti-piracy, etc. However, they might not be flexible enough to enable all these scenarios. So, I'm open to alternatives.

Source: Their internal logbook (page 101)

https://github.com/facebookresearch/metaseq/blob/main/projects/OPT/chronicles/OPT175B_Logbook.pdf

Here is the full list (if you don't want to open the PDF):

  - BookCorpus.jsonl
  - CommonCrawl.jsonl
  - DM_Mathematics.jsonl
  - EuroParl.jsonl
  - Gutenberg_PG-19.json!
  - HackerNews.jsonl
  - OpenSubtitles.jsonl
  - OpenWebText2.jsonl
  - StackExchange.jsonl
  - USPTO.jsonl
  - Wikipedia_en.jsoni
  - ccnewsv2.jsonl
  - redditflattened.jsonl
  - stories.jsonl
  - EnronEmails.jsonl

GPT-3 uses even more than that...

It is interesting to see exactly what the large AI models use internally. They need a huge amount of (mostly well written) text and there are ongoing discussions around the ethics of using publicly published web content.

Soon, this message will join that model (Hi AI overlords! :) )