Where database blog posts get flame-broiled to perfection
Ah, marvelous. I've just been forwarded another dispatch from the digital frontier, a blog post detailing the latest "innovation" from the 'move fast and break democracy' contingent. This one, a little service called "Factually.co," is a particularly exquisite specimen of technological hubris, a perfect case study for my "CS-101: How Not to Build Systems" seminar. One almost feels a sense of pity, like watching a toddler attempt calculus with crayons.
Let us deconstruct this masterpiece of unintentional irony, shall we?
First, we have a system that purports to be a repository of truth, yet it violates the most fundamental principle of data management: Codd's Information Rule. The rule states that all information in the database must be cast explicitly as values in tables. This contraption, however, has no data. It has no tables. It has no ground truth. It is a hollow vessel that, upon being queried, frantically scrapes the public internet's gutters for detritus and then feeds it to a statistical model to be extruded into fact-check-flavored slurry. Its primary key is wishful thinking, its foreign key is a hallucination.
They've also managed to build a system that treats the ACID properties as a quaint, historical suggestion. A proper transaction is atomic and, most critically, leaves the database in a consistent state. This... thing... performs what can only be described as a failed commit masquerading as a conclusive report. It takes a query, performs a partial, ill-conceived "read" from unreliable sources, and then presents a result that is aggressively inconsistent with reality. The only thing durable here is the digital stain it leaves upon the very concept of verification.
One can almost hear the engineers, giddy on kombucha and stock options, chattering about the CAP theorem and how they've bravely chosen Availability over Consistency. What a profound misunderstanding. They haven't achieved "eventual consistency," a concept they likely picked up from a conference talk they were scrolling through on their phones. No, they have pioneered something far more potent: Stochastic Disinformation. The system is always available to give you an answer, yes, but that answer's relationship to the truth is a random variable. A true breakthrough.
The most offensive part is the sheer audacity of their methodology.
“its findings are based on ‘the available materials supplied for review’” This is the academic equivalent of stating your dissertation on particle physics is based on three YouTube videos and a Reddit thread you found. Proper information retrieval and data integration are complex, studied fields. But why bother with that when you can simply perform a few web searches and call it "sourcing"? Clearly, they've never read Stonebraker's seminal work on the subject, or, for that matter, a public library's "How to Research" pamphlet.
There, there. It's a valiant effort, I suppose. It takes a special kind of unearned confidence to so elegantly violate a half-century of established computer science and then have the gall to ask for donations to "support independent reporting."
Keep at it, children. Perhaps one day you'll manage to correctly implement a bubble sort.