augustl

"Duplex responding to a sync" makes me oddlly emotional. The AI (or "she", as I'm inclined to say), answers the question "are you here" with:

> Yeah, I'm here

I don't know why, but a machine dynamically saying "I'm here" in a completely naturally sounding way and in a very dynamic context really hits me,

I'll definitely look into Gnome Flashback. I'm not all that happy with Gnome 3. It often fails to restore my windows when attaching an external monitor at work, and the caffeine extension for keeping the display on during presentaitons etc somehow managed to lock up Gnome entirely when suspending. A sign of a unhealthy plug-in architecture, maybe...

Good to hear, I look forward to it!

As a seasoned LTS user, would you recommend waiting for 18.04.1?

Afaik they rolled back wayland, 18.04 uses Xorg. So maybe that's why.

Oh, that's really cool! I had no idea this existed. Thanks a lot!

I plan to try, at least!

There's an ppa for the latest emacs and fish shell anyway. Maybe I can find a ppa for git. My other editor, IntelliJ, updates itself. Spotify also has its own repo.

If you really want to upgrade, you can run `do-release-upgrade --devel-release` (or just -d), which will get you from 16.04 to 18.04. Apparently, 18.04 is considered an development level release from the perspective of 16.04?

(I don't really know what I'm talking about here.)

I plan to run LTS on my laptop from now on, so that I get a stable desktop environment. I used to be a sucker for running the latest and greatest, but I guess I'm too old for that now.

I wonder how my applications will fare. I would like to have the latest version of Firefox, emacs, git, and so on. It's the desktop environment and OS itself I want to be as stable as possible. I'd also like to get the most recent kernel, I think, since the kernel is pretty darn stable and rarely has regressions, at least in my experience.

I also learned that there's an official plan for 18.04.1, to be released July 26th. This is the release that will prompt 16.04 LTS for an upgrade. In other words, the official upgrade path for an LTS is to wait for the first patch release, and not upgrade immediately. So I'm considering waiting to update from 17.10 until 18.04.1 is out.

Ah, that makes sense. I've never added an index myself, but essentialy Datomic has to rewrite the main index tree. In other words, all of the stored data, since there is no data stored outside of the covering indies. So I wouldn't be surpised if that causes some down time if you have lots of data in your database.

That looks very interesting! Do you have a recommended point of entry for a non-academic practitioner like myself? :)

It's difficult to implement this by hand, though. What you'll have in storage are encoded blobs of chunks of some kind of sorted set tree structure. So if you are to poke the data directly like that, I would assume it is much easier to just do an offline backup and a restore, and filter the data in the restore process somehow, which I believe is possible.

An interesting point to add is that Datomic can also write to Riak. But since riak lacks an atomic CAS, zookeeper is used alongside Riak.

What do you refer to when you say that Datomic inherits the speed of indexing a huge table? The query engine works by fetching blocks of data from storage and placing the blocks in a lazy immutable tree structure that are the indices of Datomic. They are also covering (the indices is where the actual data is stored). So it's not like the query engine runs queries on the huge table stored in mysql or postgres, it's used more like a key/value store. Case in point: you can put memcached between the datomic client (peer) and any of the supported storage engines. So Datomic piggybacks on very little other than the actual capabiliy to safely store data.

Forgot to add. The built-in excision API is similar to crypto shredding, in that all the metadata is retained, it's just the values themselves (in Datomic's EAVT structure) that are removed. So a lot of metadata is still retained.

Interesting, keep 'em coming!

Historical information is not part of datahike, now and it's not on the roadmap as far as I can tell. But perhaps one day :)

Mentat is built for embedding, not for large applications. Datascript is in-memory for browsers.

But you're right, it's not fair to say that there's not been any effort! :)

Yup. You don't create your own views, you get a generic query engine and generic indices instead. On top of all the other benefits, like cheap as-of time travel.

We've been using the free version in production for many years now :)

I am regularly alarmed by the fact that nobody has tried to make an open source clone yet..

OP here :)

True, in that there's no solution out of the box. I kind of want to make a "look at all the things I have to do", and GDPR compliance is one of those things where there are probably many ways to do it wrong with Datomic, and a few ways of doing it right.

One thing you can do, is to have a separate database for each person/user. It is trivial to join across multiple databases in Datomic, and you can even do crazy things like joining between a database and an excel spreadsheet. And deleting an entire database is easy. So there's that.

There's also excision, but that's a super expensive operation that you shouldn't be doing as part of your day to day routines, according to the Datomic team. I'd like to know more here. For example, is it OK to excise data once a week? Maybe it's GDPR compliant if deletion requests are batched like that.

There's also crypto shredding (encrypt values with separate key for each user, throw away the key on deletion request), but I'm not sure how GDPR compliant that is, since it leaves a lot of metadata behind. And you obviously can't encrypt values that you want to query on with the query engine.

Isn't it a bit weird to launch a "never delete anything" store today and not mention anything about European GDPR requirements?

How would you go about deleting a users data upon request?

You raise an interesting point!

Maybe everything should have access to everything, and then you keep your _real_ secrets, like encryption keys, on dedicated hardware that locks away the key to the outside world and only does signing. Like a Trezor bitcoin wallet or secure enclave on iOS.

I've been waiting for the 9370 announcement and today I bought a 9360 :)

The bigger battery is nice, USB-A is nice. The weight is the same. Don't care about placement or camera. And the slower RAM doesn't bother me.

I got the updated version with an 8th gen that has win10 pre-installed, since the 9360 with 8th gen is pnly with win10. That's OK, was planning on setting up dual boot anyway.

I've been on the WSL track for a while. I've found that when I live in a Ruby/Node/JVM/Clojure world, you'll run into all kinds of problems related to shelling out and handling paths that are bugs caused by all the developers and most of the community running on macOS or Linux. And I don't blame them, you can't test on all platforms, and all the languages seems to have APIs that allow these kinds of bugs to happen (representing a file system path using the fabulous data structure "string", for example).

I ended up selling my Surface Pro 4 after a year.

WSL is an amazing piece of tech, but due to the issues with windows compatibility of the software I use and run, I had to run it inside WSL. And since I use IntelliJ, that means the IDE has to run inside WSL, too. This worked fine, by running vcxsrv (an X server) from Windows. But then, after a windows reinstall, it suddenly stopped handling high DPI (retina) properly, and all the xorg apps where tiny. That's when I decided that I'm not gonna embrace a platform where I have to hack and slash to get the basics right.

I hope Microsoft works on bringing an official x server implementation to WSL. It's amazing tech, and I want to use it, but for now, it's too premature.

I should add that I also want to use the most standardized desktop environment I can find. Which these days seems to be Win10, macOS, Ubuntu, and maybe a KDE based one?

My argument is the same as what Linus points out in this rant (5:33): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PmHRSeA2c8&feature=youtu.be...

I want life to be easy for app developers, having to target a gazillion different Linux based platforms kind of sucks.

I switched from Fedora to Ubuntu for this. All I want is a canonical (no pun intended) Linux distro so that app developers doesn't have to target a gazillion variations. So I really want to see Ubuntu succeed.

So far, I've had my laptop freeze completely 3-4 times a week, fans spinning, not responding to any input in any way shape or form. This didn't happen in Fedora. Other than that, it's basically Fedora with different colors.

I wholeheartedly agree. What I really want is a super conservative LTS system that keeps the core - OS, window manager, file manager, network, etc - on super stable and old versions, and my apps - Firefox, Emacs, Spotify, ... - updated to the latest release. I'm tired of "new" desktop environments, and rewrites that means I'll now have to live with years of bug fixing until I get a stable system.

I'm hoping that Ubuntu slowly becomes this, especially with the move to the very stable Gnome 3.

This is a very interesting question. To me, understanding in isolation some random function deep down in the code somewhere is not really something I do. Maybe that's why I prefer dynamic languages. And other people like to be able to do that, and therefore prefers static languages.

Wow, that's super interesting, I've never heard about something like that proposed before. Same protocol, but layered and sharded, basically.

Interesting question! I'm not an expert, but I suppose the answer is convenience of implementation? By using Bitcoin, the system is already in place for miners to verify signatures, tokens (i.e. "civiccoins") to pay for getting stuff verified on the chain by the signers, a well made and proven decentralized protocol, etc.

No Bitcoin-based protocol that handles money, at least.

https://www.civic.com/ is based on the Bitcoin protocol. It's a service for putting signed information about a user in a block chain, so that you don't need to implement your own verification of adresses, phone numbers, e-mails, etc being real, as long as you trust the signer of that information in the Civic block chain. This is a read heavy, not write heavy, block chain - reads of signed information is more common that writes of the signatures.

It's definitely my favorite block chain based technology that isn't a currency.