Headlines, like most journalism, ought to be neutral. Your reaction is valid; another reaction might be anger, that these CEOs are firing workers in service of funding corrupt (and now, fruitless) ambitions.
The issue with ltree is that it requires fanout on write when moving a node. The downside is you need to update every recursive descendant of the moved node to rewrite their ancestor path for the new location in the tree, so a move is O(subtree nodes), but you get to scan a subtree in using btree prefix search which is great.
That makes it good for relatively static and flat data like your label hierarchy, which probably receives a new label or a repainting within a tree relatively infrequently, and might have a p95 depth of 10. That makes it also a good fit for actual human (parent, child) relationships since parent-child change is usually infrequent and the total children per layer in the tree is also small.
For a tree like a Notion workspace where depth can be quite deep, and layers can easily have hundreds or hundreds of thousands of siblings, the cost at write-time when you reparent an ancestor in the worst case isn’t feasible.
For something like a social graph I’m not sure how to use ltree at all since a social graph isn’t a dag.
My startup yetto.app offers such an integration out of the box. We’re building a support tool that integrates with all sorts of communication platforms (email and Slack, but also GitHub, Jira, Zendesk, Linear, and SMS).
My startup, Yetto (http://www.yetto.app) is building a better way for support professionals to do their job. (Shameless plug but we always gotta hustle.)
We, too, are weighed down by how much space AI-focused companies are taking.
TBH looking at helpdesk software in 2025, I would expect new ones to be built AI first. It would be hard for me to consider one without at least some sort of LLMs helping with triage or at classifications of tickets, etc.
I never said we didn’t have AI :) Just that the vast majority of apps out there push AI agents, when a human will do just fine. We should be making the harder problems easier, not the easy problems faster.
We support parsing your entire help docs into a DAG, so support professionals can have easy access to the most relevant existing docs to answer an end user’s problem. We also provide summarization of incoming tickets so that support teams can understand quickly what the problem is.
I’ve toyed with doing sentiment analysis, but our experience with customers in the support space is that they want the AI to give them information and then get out of the way.
I found Breaking Free at random in a Brighton bookstore decades ago and it remains a cherished treasure. Glad to see someone else out there enjoyed it!
I picked it up from an anarchist stand at a comic convention in the late 1980s, where else! I don’t know where it is right now, and I’m not sure it’s a cherished treasure, more an amusing memento of my youth! Although I will be most annoyed if I can’t find it!
You may also be interested in https://github.com/gjtorikian/selma for high performance HTML manipulation. It’s built on Rust—Cloudflare’s lol_html parser to be precise.
