> How could I not use the cloud?

Funnily enough, one of my side projects has its (processed) primary source of truth at that exact size. Updates itself automatically every night adding a further ~18-25 million rows. Big but not _big_ data, right?

Anyway, that's sitting running happily with instant access times (yay solid DB background) on a dedicated OVH server that's somewhere around £600/mo (+VAT) and shared with a few other projects. OVH's virtual rack tech is pretty amazing too, replicating that kind of size on the internal network is trivial too.

And not from a lack of trying, and definitely not because you don’t care?

Because to me, that’s what masking means: constantly checking yourself because you do care, and you do like people, and the last thing you ever want to do is hurt or upset someone, and yet sometimes you do, and that sucks, and you learn from it, file it away in your mind for next time, and wake up the next day with the same happy-go-lucky optimism you do every day until the world beats it out of you.

While there are possibly noble goals behind your suggestion, in practise this puts anyone outside the mainstream in the category of “other,” people to be managed separately. I’ll leave to your imagination how much work is often put into supporting these “other” assignments and how up-to-date they’re kept va the mainstream.

> Complaining about this is like me complaining about people drinking milk since I’m lactose intolerant.

If this is genuinely your approach, you are being part of the problem; if taking a step back to reassess feels like too much work, I’d encourage you to explore why it feels that way, what emotions is this bringing up internally?

I’ve also found them surprisingly difficult and non-intuitive to train, eg deliberately including bad data and potentially a few false positives has resulted in notable success rate improvements.

Do you consider BERTs to be the upper end of traditional - or, dunno, transformer architecture in general to be a duff? Am sure you have fascinating insight on this!

(For my purposes, I went with local running, generating walking-distance isochrones across pretty much well the entire UK)

That depends on your definition of "clear and simple" and "address" :) While a lot boils down to use case - are you trying to navigate somewhere, or link a string to an address? - even figuring out what is an address can be hard work. Is an address the entrance to a building? Or a building that accepts postal deliveries? Is the "shell" of a building that contains a bunch of flats/apartments but doesn't itself have a postal delivery point or bills registered directly to it an address? How about the address the a location was known as 1 year ago? 2 years ago? 10 years ago?

Park and other public spaces can be fun; they may have many local names that are completely different to the "official" name - and it's a big "if" whether an official name exists at all. Heck, most _roads_ have a bunch of official names that are anything but the names people refer to them as. I have a screaming obsession with the road directly in front of Buckingham Palace that, despite what you see on Google Maps, is registered as "unnamed road" in all of the official sources.

> Addresses don't change often

At the individual level, perhaps. In aggregate? Addresses change all the time, sometimes unrecognisably so. City and town boundaries are forever expanding and contracting, and the borders between countries are hardly static either (and if you're ever near the Netherlands / Belgium border, make a quick trip to Baarle-Hertog and enjoy the full madness). Thanks to intercontinental relative movement, the coordinates we log against locations have a limited shelf life too. All of the things I used to think were certain...

If someone hasn't done "faleshoods programmers believe about addresses," I think its time might be now!

Edit: answering myself with https://www.mjt.me.uk/posts/falsehoods-programmers-believe-a...