Yep, this is what I think about when “scaling” is mentioned. Maybe I’m too distributed-compute brained, but throwing CPU at a db isn’t what I was hoping would be the answer.

I think for databases horizontal scaling for writes only makes sense once vertical scaling stops working. It comes with high complexity, annoying limitations, and often higher cost.

Horizontal scaling for reads on the other hand is much easier. If you have multiple replicas for high availability, you might as well put them to work. It can also reduce the risk for read heavy tasks interfering with transaction processing. You can even go a step further and replicate to a database that's optimized for analytical tasks.

Horizontal scaling for stateless applications (e.g. web servers or job processors) is often easier and more robust than vertical scaling, with little to no downsides.

The point of distributed computing is to do computing that you can't do on a vertically scaled system or to increase availability.

If you're doing it for other reasons it's usually a mistake.

The advice I’ve gotten is that you want to move computation to data that is already distributed. The cost of moving large amounts of data usually dwarfs compute costs (usually, not always), and so the performance win comes from distributing the computation and then (depending on the problem) centralizing aggregate results.

Another pretty good reason to do distributed computing is to move the computation closer to where the data is or where the data will be consumed.

Does the Wacom show the actual result of the writing, or do you need to look at the screen? This feels like a bad solution to needing an electronic notepad.

It's a touchpad, of course the result shows up on the laptop screen, and the user doesn't even look at the touchpad anymore, just as digital artists don't now. Honestly not sure why commenters here are acting like it's some huge deal to use a touchpad for note taking and that one has to get an iPad when there really is no need.

Wacom have been selling "pen displays" for years, at least since ~2013. You can buy a brand new one for $300.

The pen. 95% of the way our son does assignments now.

He’s off to university in Fall ‘26, and I’m waffling between getting him an Air and keeping his current iPad, or getting a neo and new iPad. Probably go the former because of the long term cost effectiveness of the Air.

I’ve had my shoulders “cleaned up” arthroscopically, and the pain is still a major preventer of movement. I would love to stay on the mats longer with something that doesn’t harken to medieval times. So excited at this prospect.

It does get better with physio and exercise. Took me twenty years to recover full (100%) pain-free mobility. It still occasionally finds itself in an uncomfortable spot that can be self-freed, but it can now hold muscle tone across the fascia.

Literally got my current job through a mufo on X, so I feel obliged to stick to it for the same reasons. That being said, I’ve curtailed a lot of my time on it and other social media. The results have been positive.

Avante - https://github.com/yetone/avante.nvim. Admittedly I haven't had time to keep up with it's changes and as a result have gone back to VS Code + Copilot, but it's very well integrated last I did use it.

I gave Avante a fair try for about a week and my opinion is that it's not really ready for big time yet. Lots of bugs, slow, and cumbersome. Now I just use Claude Code in a separate tmux pane and its great.