Realized that the death of the author and « The purpose of a system is what it does » are similar approaches

I'm going to create an SSG that runs just-in-time when a user of your website requests an html file from the web server. And for convenience, instead of mucking about with the filesystem I'm going to store the SSG inputs in an SQL database

I wrote about "Past Tense, parts 1 & 2", aka the Bell Riots episodes, from Star Trek Deep Space 9, and how their version of San Francisco in late August 2024 compares to the one we're living through today: https://cohost.org/vectorpoem/post/7112917-the-bell-riots-happe

On Sep 12 the Applied Social Media Lab (where I work) is hosting “Beyond Discourse Dumpster Fires: Strategies and Tools for Better Online Civil Space" to explore new ideas for healthier and more satisfying online communication.

I'm particularly excited to hear from @zephoria!

RSVP here, online via Zoom or (limited) in-person tickets in Cambridge MA: https://brk.mn/discourse

There will also be a recording available afterwards, so those who do not use Zoom can still watch!

Damn, AnandTech is stopping publication:

“Still, few things last forever, and the market for written tech journalism is not what it once was – nor will it ever be again. So, the time has come for AnandTech to wrap up its work, and let the next generation of tech journalists take their place within the zeitgeist.”

https://www.anandtech.com/show/21542/end-of-the-road-an-anandtech-farewell

Big news: I'm working with @criccomini on a second edition of Designing Data-Intensive Applications! An early release of the first 3 chapters is now available: https://learning.oreilly.com/library/view/designing-data-intensive-applications/9781098119058/ (O'Reilly Learning subscribers only at this point) and we're hoping to finish it next year.

The overall structure and philosophy remains unchanged, but we're bringing it up-to-date with new technical developments, and polishing the presentation with things we've learnt since I wrote the first edition a decade ago.

At the height of One Million Checkboxes's popularity I thought I'd been hacked. A few hours later I was tearing up, extraordinarily proud of some brilliant teens.

Here's my favorite story from running OMCB :)

https://eieio.games/essays/the-secret-in-one-million-checkboxes/

Have surprised a lot of my coworkers with my age this summer by talking about playing in the grandmasters division.

Woah. https://www.reddit.com/r/nextfuckinglevel/comments/1f175f0/zooming_into_iphone_cpu_silicon_die/

@bkim @robdaemon Yeah, it’s somewhat unfortunate that dataclasses is in stdlib now since it makes attrs a harder sell to add as a dependency. As such, I’ve never had the opportunity to actually compare pydantic against cattrs.

@robdaemon @bkim Also pydantic is a common tool used for validating external data into types. People here have started adopting it, thankfully.

@robdaemon Not sure if you’re already aware of these or not, but dmypy (https://mypy.readthedocs.io/en/latest/mypy_daemon.html) and pyright are things that people here use to mitigate mypy’s slowness.

You can’t patch a skills gap with process

And you may ask yourself, who wrote this crap

And after enough time, you realize it was you all along.

RE: https://mastodon.social/@brouhaha/112928310801430771

@baldur "Most of the time, it seems to be a never-ending parade of angry demands with very little reward. "

I used to answer 100% of SQLAlchemy emails / questions. these days I try to answer as few as possible, hoping someone else can pick it up. when your project is new, your users are all enthusiastic, motivated people who picked you. but in 20 years, most of your users are people who were told by their bosses to learn it

Finally hit 1000 miles on the e-bike! Took a while, since the vast majority of my trips are <1 mile.

If there are going to be climate-justified subsidies for owning electric cars, there should be subsidies for not owning cars at all.

Yep.

reading "The slow evaporation of the free/open source surplus" and I mostly agree with it, except for this tiny aside at the top which turns out to be important

Free/open source has been on my mind lately – more than usual. (FOSS or OSS for short, the distinction matters, a lot, but for the purposes of this post the two are similar enough to lump together.)

often it's fine to lump together free software and open source, but this article talks about the intersection of FOSS and industry, which means it's almost all about open source and hardly about free software at all because The Industry is ... almost entirely unconcerned with free software

the only point raised in the article that actually affects FS is how more coders becoming unemployed means less free time to hack; beyond that it seems that FS will roll on mostly unaffected, because FS (programs that put the end user first) has always been at the margins

https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2024/the-slow-evaporation-of-the-foss-surplus/

Because you know one thing that’s stupid simple? Doing concurrency control in code and not in the database.

Which is something that’s not necessarily always the wrong thing to do, even!

And I’ve encountered a fair number of new interns fresh out of boot camp who were unfamiliar with database constraints!

But how about doing the less understandable thing and teaching said engineer about database constraints instead of writing the more “understandable” code.

There are so many times I’ve had to make that tradeoff, and you know, sometimes you’re even net better off keeping the code understandable at the cost of correctness given a team’s context, and I’ve made that choice as well in the past. But it’s also not unreasonable to have code that is hard to understand because of essential complexity and that’s not approachable by the whole team either.