mjw_byrne

10 ms·

61.
by mjw_byrne 6y ago
Thanks, that makes sense.
62.
by mjw_byrne 6y ago
Right, so the article is talking about data sharing which isn't core to the service, that makes sense.
63.
by mjw_byrne 6y ago
I was a little surprised by this: "The DPA highlighted that users should have a real choice not to consent without any negative consequences." Does this mean that it is unacceptable to run a service which requires consent to share
64.
by mjw_byrne 6y ago
I think the "clean slate" benefit is achievable almost for free in a monolith though - each request is a separate invocation of a handler function which is given the context it needs to run (e.g. an HTTP request, an output stream
65.
by mjw_byrne 6y ago
Yeah, in my case I'm talking about a thing that is largely a web app but also does other things which don't fit well into the one-script-execution-per-request model. That being said, I would still prefer a monolithic application f
66.
by mjw_byrne 6y ago
I think it comes down to how we assess the cost of things. To me, the issues you identified with state (which I agree are real issues) are straightforward to overcome with disciplined design. On the other hand, I find not having applicati
67.
by mjw_byrne 6y ago
I used to use PHP as a web backend and then moved to Go. Forgetting the debate about the actual languages, it makes so much more sense to me for a web app to be a full-fledged, self-contained program which happens to listen on a network in
68.
by mjw_byrne 7y ago
There are in fact alternatives to NULL for outer joins. For example, the SAS data analysis system has an operation akin to a join which gives you an explicit variable saying whether a corresponding row in the joined table was found. In th
69.
by mjw_byrne 8y ago
I think a big problem with "apologies" nowadays is that they are often not apologies at all, but exercises in ritual humiliation. True apologies (e.g. what passes between people who care about each other when one of them transgres
70.
by mjw_byrne 8y ago
In the court of public opinion, yes, this is true - video is no longer proof that something happened. I guess that's a price we pay for technological progress. Presumably at some point it will be possible (and easy and accessible) to
71.
by mjw_byrne 8y ago
US intelligence doesn't enjoy a reputation for trustworthiness, to put it mildly. But if people can just go online, upload a video and get back a "hilarious" deepfake, that's an irrefutable demonstration that video-medd
72.
by mjw_byrne 8y ago
I think the general public is learning how to be sceptical, albeit slowly. It used to be the case that merely being published counted as authority (I remember reading about UFO abductions and thinking "this is a real book! There must
73.
by mjw_byrne 8y ago
I agree, but I think my original point covers this - if video proves to be very easy to fake at scale (e.g. using your example of a turnkey website) then that should result in equally large-scale scepticism about video as evidence. The int
74.
by mjw_byrne 8y ago
Deepfakes are surely no more a "problem" than photoshopped still images? Everyone knows that a still image can be altered to (convincingly) depict something that never happened. So, a still image is not considered good evidence o
75.
by mjw_byrne 10y ago
Trouble with this kind of thing is that if you make it general enough to apply to most situations you can't really say anything (too many exceptions) and if you get opinionated then your guide doesn't apply to a wide class of use
76.
by mjw_byrne 10y ago
This is an interesting discussion about why it isn't possible to define a "good" value for 0^0, i.e. a value which works in all cases, but the original riddle doesn't really work. "Nice" operations like additi
77.
by mjw_byrne 10y ago
Not sure about point 3 ("use UUIDs instead of integer PKs"). Exhausting a 32-bit int takes a lot of usage; exhausting a 64-bit one is completely out of reach for almost everyone. 128-bit UUIDs will take more space to index than
78.
by mjw_byrne 10y ago
I don't single Apple out (although this wasn't clear in my original comment) - there are plenty of other organisations and systems out there which are just as pernicious, and my stance is to simply not use them. Remember Sony and
79.
by mjw_byrne 10y ago
Sarcasm
80.
by mjw_byrne 10y ago
I've been telling people for a long time to avoid Apple because it's an organisation which has demonstrated a pattern of contempt - to its customers, to its competitors, to the developers who use its app store and to the courts.
81.
by mjw_byrne 11y ago
Whoa whoa. This means Sunshine wasn't scientifically accurate?!
82.
by mjw_byrne 11y ago
There's a strong parallel between drug policy and sex education policy. If you acknowledge that sex is a thing people are simply going to do and you give them the information they need to do it safely and throw in a free condom or two
83.
by mjw_byrne 11y ago
I did fudge a little - "tends" and "probably". Of course compilation is not a guarantee of correctness, I just find that it gets me most of the way there. JavaScript, by comparison, feels like it's trying to give y
84.
by mjw_byrne 11y ago
I've done real-life web dev using PHP and using Go, and have dabbled with Node. Thoughts: 1. Go's strict, statically typed, thou-shalt-check-thy-errors approach is a breath of fresh air. The compiler does a whole load of checkin