It falls short because it is not made by you.
Believing wholeheartedly in something that tells you how to live will always fall short. The images and ideas held up by our belief systems are to possess the truth, instead of express it. There is no prescribed truth, no dogma you can blindly attach yourself to. Krishnamurti’s most well known statement is “Truth is a pathless land” and that is both an empowering and terrifying concept. So if meaning is important, where can we find it? It is running from you because you are chasing it. To hammer and distill it into something we can attach ourselves to, what else could be the point of life? Happiness? All the pleasure we can get? Meaning sounds ominous, but looking for only happiness or pleasure, short-term or long-term, will have you always chasing something. We are the only living beings that suffer disconnect from meaning but who can also make meaning appear. I have my own beliefs on religion and purpose and will share them soon, but regardless whether you believe the universe as senseless and empty or that it is ruled by a supreme being(s), we are still the ones accountable for our own life. This leaves us grasping for whatever we can that we think will give us meaning and answers. The feeling of security, by its definition, isolates us, alienates us from others and leaves us unable to realize our own denial of our true self. We misdirect our focus in order to feel secure. We need to realize that focusing on those outward choices is an easy way to not look at what is important. Too many choices can take us away of what’s actually happening. You are like literally the freshest ingredient. Just that when you put too much seasoning on something high quality and fresh you take away from the taste. This is not to say that these choices are wrong or should be demonized. A quick dopamine hit that we blindly take as caring. In fact, focusing on the customization of everything is what some might do to feel love, because they don’t feel it in themselves. We equate these choices with love–the more specific the more meaningful. How someone wants their coffee, their clothes, their love life, every aspect of an outward life can be customized. We evaluate Niffler on real datasets to demonstrate the effectiveness of the new engine in discovering PJ-views over pathless table collections.The overwhelming majority of people today are assailed by choices wherever they turn. We introduce algorithms for the main components of Niffler, including a signal generation component that helps reduce the size of the candidate views that may be large due to errors and ambiguity in both the data and input queries.
We then present Niffler, a system built to address the technical problem.
We present a reference architecture that explicitly divides the end-to-end problem of discovering PJ-views over pathless table collections into a human and a technical problem.
When the table collections are large and lack join information-such as when combining databases, or on data lakes-query by example (QBE) systems can help identify relevant data, but they are designed under the assumption that join information is available in the schema, and do not perform well on pathless table collections that do not have join path information. Identifying a project-join view (PJ-view) over collections of tables is the first step of many data management projects, e.g., assembling a dataset to feed into a business intelligence tool, creating a training dataset to fit a machine learning model, and more.