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mixedCase

4,419 karma · joined February 6, 2016

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mixedCase··on Google's new pipe syntax in SQL
Re-reading it I can see how it could be perceived by some people as such, thanks for pointing it out. There's probably better phrasing or adding more context could make it more amicable:

The goal was to explicitly tell people not to bother "just reading it" as one (and by one I mean myself and most people I know, surely there are exceptions) is naturally inclined to do unless something is particularly piquing our interest.

Without engaging in active, conscious effort, syntax that is different than what we're used to (specially something as established as SQL) where the changes aren't groundbreaking at first glance can easily make us dismissive without realizing the benefits. And after seeing it too many times with all kinds of technologies that stray away from the familiar, I just want to prepare the reader so that their judgment can be formed with full use of their faculties rather than a reflex response.

mixedCase··on Google's new pipe syntax in SQL
https://prql-lang.org/ has a bunch of good examples on its home page.

If you engage the syntax with your System 2 thinking (prefrontal cortex, slow, the part of thinking we're naturally lazy to engage) rather than System 1 (automated, instinctual, optimized brain path to things we're used to) you'll most likely find that it is simpler, makes more logical sense so that you're filtering down things naturally like a sieve and composes far better than SQL as complexity grows.

After you've internalized that, imagine the kind of developer tooling we can build on top of that logical structure.

mixedCase··on Effect – Build robust apps in TypeScript
This is for all intents and purposes, fp-ts 3. The projects essentially merged, Giulio Canti is working on it and fp-ts 2 is renaming methods to ease the transition to it.
mixedCase··on So good, it works on barbed wire (2001)
In the same vein of interesting experiments on weird cables:

ADSL on wet string: https://www.revk.uk/2017/12/its-official-adsl-works-over-wet...

mixedCase··on Faced with RTO mandates, some top tech talent left instead
https://archive.is/2HWfB
mixedCase··on The Rabbit R1 is probably running Android and is powered by an Android app
So it's not really something intended to be efficient and useful, it's a conversation piece.
mixedCase··on Tvix – A New Implementation of Nix
Does not care about flakes and does not care about adding types, the most important omission in Nix. A minor performance bump seems unlikely to make me want to boil the ocean.
mixedCase··on Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?
Damned. I'd be tempted to write down in my resume "Company would've saved N million dollars and 5 years of their time had they listened to me" were it not such a double edged sword.
mixedCase··on Don't use your ORM entities for everything – embrace the SQL
I guess I failed to set the context correctly given that you presented solutions for Clojure and Python, where it isn't as much of a problem since from the start the language fails to provide compiler guarantees you usually come to expect out of a SQL driver wrapper in typed languages (even though Clojure macros are probably powerful enough to allow this).

As a comparison, DX-wise this is no safer and is indeed very similar to the usual idiom in Go for example, where you just concatenate (pre-interpolated) SQL strings. But when you actually want the compiler to prove the correctness of your queries even in a rudimentary way, these .sql file solutions usually (if not, everytime) fail to provide the necessary external checker that processes templates and uses an accurate model of your database and SQL to verify that all used combinations make sense.

The closest thing to a proper take on this I've seen is https://github.com/andywer/squid with https://github.com/andywer/postguard which, although the SQL is inlined in the code, it uses the right approach for verifying correctness as far as I could tell in the little time I experimented with it.

mixedCase··on Don't use your ORM entities for everything – embrace the SQL
Those tend to be great until two words come into play:

Dynamic SQL.

mixedCase··on Dissent – A GTK4 Discord client written in Go
Because people like to talk to each other sometimes.

And voice channels are a convenient feature people prefer rather than handling yet another tool with its own idiosyncrasies.

And voice is not enough, it also needs video and screen sharing. It all needs to be "free" (AKA someone else pay for it) too, or people will keep using Discord.

People should also be able to create their own servers without worrying about technical details, and again, without directly paying for it.

That's how high the bar is.

mixedCase··on I Improved My Rust Compile Times
Some people need it, some don't. When I upgraded to a 7950X I was unable to find an excuse to buy more than 32GB. "That one time a script compiled clang by default with LTO and OOMed" was not a good enough reason.

If you use a lot of VMs, it comes in handy. If you do a lot of heavyweight compilation in parallel, same thing. But at least on Linux, popping 3 VS Code projects and 4 more browsers doesn't even hit 50% utilization.

mixedCase··on Court docs reveal Epic CEO's anger at Steam's 30% fees
Are they? Or are they just removed from sale?
mixedCase··on Google slips as OpenAI said to be working on search product: report
Does it, though? I do wonder if we just have set up a false expectation of how search ought to work. I want answers to problems I have, 20-30 seconds for a good quality answer will very, very often be vastly preferred over 200ms and results I'll have to frequently delve deeper into myself, and I am not adding any less than 30 seconds in most cases.

I'm happy to use a !bang to indicate what kind of response I want. I'm not the average user but people understand the difference between asking your roommate who's right there and asking a professional about something, so this doesn't seem like much of a stretch.

mixedCase··on Japan Goes All In: Copyright Doesn't Apply to AI Training
It was meant to be rhetorical. The answer is no, you can't. Same with ML. Training on copyrighted material? Just fine. Producing and distributing material that infringes on copyright? Not allowed.

It's no different than a photocopier or a VCR when you're using it for that purpose, it's the end result that matters.

mixedCase··on Japan Goes All In: Copyright Doesn't Apply to AI Training
If you can type a whole book into a word processor, can you now distribute it without breaking copyright?
mixedCase··on SageBrush: AI Painter – the simplest way to create with AI
Looks like something I'd love to have on an Android foldable. Web based stuff never handles the pen well enough.
mixedCase··on I have interviewed 100s of candidates for software engineering positions
That is one interpretation. An interpretation that, once we start thinking beyond the first concept that comes to each particular mind, ends up just as meaningless:

What is a component? A global variable, a pure function, a procedure, an endpoint, a business usecase, a microservice, a microservice fleet?

What is the whole, if not the same list of questions just asked in backwards order?

It gets worse: Once you arbitrarily come up with one definition that you stick with in your project, does the definition you chose leave little to no room for interpretation? Do all kinds of tests that are worth writing fit neatly within those definitions?

Technical terms that are so loosely defined we can do without, for only two things ultimately result from their use: Apathy, or madness.

mixedCase··on I have interviewed 100s of candidates for software engineering positions
"Unit" and "Integration" (and E2E) are the most bullshit "technical" terms we have to deal with on a regular basis as an industry. At best, they can only tell you that integration tests are on average more liberal in their use of system calls than unit tests, that is if the codebase in question even has both.

While this dev you encountered might have had no idea what they were doing, a most charitable explanation is that they may subscribe to the idea that the "unit" is a business usecase within a single service (often a 1:1 correspondence with an endpoint, but sometimes even more than one, e.g. a form upload with a separate signed upload step to a 3rd party service).

FWIW the concept of small/medium/large as presented in the Google testing blog is a much more useful denomination.

mixedCase··on AI may be on a trajectory to surpass human intelligence; we should be prepared
> We can be 74 zelenskys in debt, and no one really cares

Except for basic demand and supply. The more of those "zelenskys" you have around, the less they're worth.

mixedCase··on [dead]
AI doomerism is a politically+class neutral virtue signaling topic that carries the benefit of both being extremely current, and is seen as slightly sophisticated as far as everyday topics of discussion go.

When it comes to these matters, reality is a secondary concern.

It is thus reassuring that given the superficial attractiveness of this trend it is not that popular among the average populace.

mixedCase··on GitHub lacks IPv6 support for Git repositories
IPv4 will continue to dominate until IPv4 experience is very noticeably degraded for users or seriously more expensive for providers to get an address.

It's just reality, it's hard to care about non-problems, specially when fixing them creates real my-problems.

mixedCase··on GTK: Introducing Graphics Offload
Gtk is not going wayland only.
mixedCase··on Research shows why hunting for the cheapest plane ticket is a waste of time
Well, the reason is self-evident: $40 round-trip flight to Vegas.
mixedCase··on Many scientists don’t want to tell the truth about climate change. Here’s why
Right, because the "you'll all be underwater by the 2000s" messages 30-40 years ago sure helped a lot and nobody is claiming climate change is a hoax anymore.
mixedCase··on Don't worry, your Parser is a functor
From where I see it, that belongs in `a`. It's your parsing result.
mixedCase··on Open source AI will win
Because they were giving advice about a legal matter, so by stating what seems obvious to you and me, the GP is covering themselves from "implied" lawyer-client relationships which under some jurisdictions could adjudicate them the responsibilities of a lawyer to a client if a person could prove in court that they reasonably believed they were acting as their lawyer.

I don't know if this is actually been a problem ever brought to a judge to be honest, but that's the reason why that disclaimer is made and of course, I am not your lawyer.

mixedCase··on Unity plan pricing and packaging updates
This feels like a pretty obvious door-in-the-face tactic.
mixedCase··on Why Htmx Does Not Have a Build Step
>Does http2 solve waterfall imports?

It used to, but browsers ruined it because they didn't want to help improve caching support

mixedCase··on HashiCorp switching to BSL shows a need for open charter companies
As stated in the article, that's exactly what is being considered.
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