wvenable

13 ms·

181.
by wvenable 7mo ago
I wonder how one proves that the software is machine created.
182.
by wvenable 7mo ago
What does it mean to look the same? Just look at modern automobiles: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ENE01g6X0AA7w5r?format=jpg Are they copies? Can all these car companies sue each other?
183.
by wvenable 7mo ago
There's a couple of different issues here that all get mangled together. If you're producing effectively the same expression that's infringement. You draw Captain America from memory, it's still Captain America, and th
184.
by wvenable 7mo ago
> If good code was enough on its own we would read the source instead of documentation. That's 100% how I work -- reading the source. If the code is confusing, the code needs to be fixed.
185.
by wvenable 7mo ago
> Come on its literally... You're the one saying a 2 character string is somehow a space savings. If we're going to split hairs that finely then you have to know that any row with a variable length string makes the entire row&
186.
by wvenable 7mo ago
> They do not complicate storage access in any meaningful way. Sure they do, because now your row / index is variable length rather than fixed length. Way more complicated. Even 3 bytes is way more complicated to deal with than 4
187.
by wvenable 7mo ago
Enums are for non user-configurable values. For configurable values, obviously you use a table. But those should have an auto-integer primary key and if you need the description, join for it. Ints are by far more the efficient way to store
188.
by wvenable 7mo ago
I'm not sure it makes sense to add more checks and another operation to every single query just for the case where the user explicitly mislabels the types. You're going to slow down everything everywhere (slightly) for a pretty o
189.
by wvenable 7mo ago
Microsoft did the hard work of supporting Unicode when UTF-8 didn't exist (and mostly when UTF-16 didn't exist). Any system that continued with only ASCII well into the 2000s could mostly just jump into UTF-8 without issue. Doing
190.
by wvenable 7mo ago
Database systems are inherently conservative -- once you add something you have to support it forever. Microsoft went hog wild on XML in the database and I haven't seen it used in over a decade now.
191.
by wvenable 7mo ago
Running the optimizer for every execution of the same query is... not very optimal.
192.
by wvenable 7mo ago
> It was so unfulfilling. I'm going to say something people hate... you're probably holding it wrong. Why do I say that? Because I absolutely felt exactly the way you are feeling. In fact, it can be worse than unfulfilling,
193.
by wvenable 7mo ago
I get it. Knowing good code and how to correctly build software that people actually want is experience that is consistently hampered by constantly having to learn yet another tech stack. Using an LLM lets you quickly learn (or quickly avo
194.
by wvenable 7mo ago
I don't think it was clear at the time that UTF-8 would take off. UCS-2 and then UTF-16 was well established by 2000 in both Microsoft technologies and elsewhere (like Java). Linux, despite the existence of UTF-8, would still take
195.
by wvenable 7mo ago
For a literal/parameter that happens to be ASCII, a person might know it would fit in varchar, but the optimizer has to choose a plan that stays correct in the general case, not just for that one runtime value. By telling SQL server t
196.
by wvenable 7mo ago
It's way better to just use a DBMS that supports enums. I know SQL server isn't one of those but I still don't store my coded values as strings.
197.
by wvenable 7mo ago
Blame the Unicode consortium for not coming up UTF-8 first (or, really, at all). And for assuming that 65526 code points would be enough for everyone. So many problems could be solved with a time machine.
198.
by wvenable 7mo ago
I wouldn't consider it a defect in the optimizer; it's doing exactly what it's told to do. It cannot convert an nvarchar to varchar -- that's a narrowing conversion. All it can do is convert the other way and lose the
199.
by wvenable 7mo ago
It's the optimizer caching the query plan as a parameterized query. It's not re-planning the index lookup on every execution.
200.
by wvenable 7mo ago
> The vast majority of character fields in databases I've worked with do not need to store unicode values. This has not been my experience at all. Exactly the opposite, in fact. ASCII is dead.
201.
by wvenable 7mo ago
This really doesn't have anything to do with C#. This is your classic nvarchar vs varchar issue (or unicode vs ASCII). The same thing happens if you mix collations. I'm not sure why anyone would choose varchar for a column in 20
202.
by wvenable 7mo ago
I'm staring at a few apps on Windows right now and none of them even have menu bars (Firefox, Outlook, Spotify, Notepad, etc).
203.
by wvenable 7mo ago
> Why do all of the above have ...? No clue. The "..." convention is used when menu options open a dialog box rather than just immediately doing the action.
204.
by wvenable 7mo ago
I have no idea why anyone ever thought that Apple only made premium devices for a premium market. Apple has always been (or wanted to be) a mass market computer and device company and I have an iPod Shuffle to prove it.
205.
by wvenable 7mo ago
My last experience with a support chatbot was actually pretty decent. It collected all the information, asked followup details, and then fired that whole thing off to a human to deal with. It was perfectly fine.
206.
by wvenable 7mo ago
<<Looks around>>> You call this normal?!?
207.
by wvenable 7mo ago
I had a 286 with 1MB of RAM. It had a chips and technologies chipset that used that RAM to shadow the ROM BIOS but you could also have it put memory anywhere in the upper memory area that was free. So I too religiously optimized conventio
208.
by wvenable 7mo ago
The DST extension was included in Section 110 of the 2005 Energy Policy Act, debated as part of the bill, and justified on energy-savings grounds. Congress even required the Department of Energy to study its impact afterwards!
209.
by wvenable 7mo ago
But the reasoning for that was a preference for DST. Obviously all this is arbitrary including standard time.
210.
by wvenable 7mo ago
> Humanity settled on these numbers long ago because they work best. Absolutely not. It was a compromise tempered by practical and political considerations.

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