whether you agree or not, asking "what's the issue" misses the point very badly, since the article is almost entirely about what the issue is (i.e. that most people will not change defaults and the default is to centralise on the bluesky servers)
The fact that the system is built around this escape hatch makes it miles better than almost all other social networks. An escape hatch doesn't need to be used by most people to be valuable.
I know when I’m using a Nostr app because its logo is an endless spinner.
At the scales these systems run at, you need large indexes. Distributing those indexes across many nodes would require a breakthrough in federated queries, and if you have one of those lying around I’d pay good money for it.
yeah I'm not saying the blog is right or wrong; I'm just saying that describing bsky's features and asking "what's the issue?" means you aren't engaging with what it's actually saying.
I was excited about julia as an application development language when it first came out, but the language and ecosystem seem to be targeting long-running processes. there was just a ton of latency in build time and startup time for things like scripts and applications, so I moved on.
Everything in article is excellent point but other big point is schema changes become extremely difficult because you have unknown applications possibly relying on that schema.
It's also at certain point, the database becomes absolutely massive and you will need teams of DBAs care and feeding it.
I've dealt with postgres DBs larger than that in size though with no stored procedures and have never run into such problems. Except for a single table in a single DB at one stop, and that was a special case of people being extra stupid.
Granted, DB size isn't the best metric to be using here in terms of performance, but it's the one you used.
No organization I have seen prioritizes a DBA's requirements, concerns, or approach. They certainly don't pay them enough to deal with that bullshit, so I was out.
The things that impact the most are locking/blocking, data duplication (ghosting due to race conditions), and poor performance. The best advice is RTFM the documentation for your database; yes, it is a lot to digest that is why DBAs exist. Most of these foot guns are due to poor architecture. You have to imagine multiple users/processes are literally trying to write to the same record at the same time; when you realize this, a single table with simple key-values is completely inadequate.
Pro: every team probably needs user information, so don’t duplicate it in weird ways with uncertain consistency.
Con: it’s sadly likely that no one on your staff knows a damn thing about how an RDBMS works, and is seemingly incapable of reading documentation, so you’re gonna run into footguns faster. To be fair, this will also happen with isolated DBs, and will then be much more effort to rein in.
They are very similar to the pros and cons of having a monorepo. It encourages information sharing and cross-linkage between related teams. This is simultaneously its biggest pro and its biggest con.
one of the very first text adventures I played as a kid [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_Kingdom_Valley] had static illustrations; I've always thought of it as a nice touch to add to a text adventure. they key difference between that and more modern graphic (or hybrid text/graphic) adventures was that the illustrations were not meant to be informative; you couldn't look at them and find objects to interact with, e.g., they were just there to add to the mood.
I remember seeing "Choose Your Own Adventures" early in the 80s and thinking "Hmm.. Zork sure would be cool if it had a few pictures like the CYOA books." And of course, about a month later I saw the first text adventure with illustrations. I don't think I ever played Twin Kingdom Valley, but after reading the wikipedia page, I sort of want to now. Oh... aha!
If we trim markdown to just italic, bold, and underline, is it still a programming language?
What if we trim even further, to just the ASCII control codes? My newline characters make the computer perform a special action to generate formatted output. Is that programming?
I would say that a "language" is a necessary component of a "programming language".
An empty file was an IOCCC winner: https://www.ioccc.org/1994/smr/ but you need to interpret that empty file as C source in order to reasonably claim to have programmed the computer.
My reasoning comes more from the other direction: someone who writes HTML is programming therefore HTML is a programming language.
Honestly, I don't think there's a bright line. What's the difference between "code" and "data"? It's as much about intent as anything. If my focus is on my content then I'm probably not programming. But if my focus is on getting the computer to do something then I probably am, even if the end result is identical.
I've created any number of empty files in my lifetime, and I wouldn't say that more than a couple of them were programming, but I don't think it's controversial to claim that the IOCCC submission I linked up-thread definitely was programming, and (maybe slightly more controversial) that my deliberate replication of the program when I first heard about it $mumble years ago was also programming?
In your specific example, if someone constructed an ASCII file which made use of the control codes to do something interesting (or even something boring!) then wouldn't that be programming? While typing ASCII into this text field isn't programming because the value of the information is in the human interpretation of the content rather than the machine having interpreted the content as code.
> If my focus is on my content then I'm probably not programming. But if my focus is on getting the computer to do something then I probably am, even if the end result is identical.
But the part that "does something" is the display-txt or display-html command that already exists.
I'd say that even something as small as setting up an alias for "display-txt your_file.txt" can be programming. But I don't see the act of writing your_file.txt as programming.
I don't think the exact example of feeding an empty file to a compiler is programming, even if you think it definitely is. It's playing around with commands to see what they do. It's like buying a box of lego, opening the box and seeing if any are connected already, and then walking away; you didn't build any lego today, you were so close but you didn't. Nothing about an empty file makes it "written in C", even if the intent is throwing a C compiler at it, and you need to be writing C in this situation if you want to say you're programming.
> In your specific example, if someone constructed an ASCII file which made use of the control codes to do something interesting (or even something boring!) then wouldn't that be programming? While typing ASCII into this text field isn't programming because the value of the information is in the human interpretation of the content rather than the machine having interpreted the content as code.
I need an example here.
ASCII art isn't programming.
If you tossed in something to reset your cursor position and made animated ASCII art, I still wouldn't call that a program, I would call that a weirdly formatted video file. And that's really cool but it's cool in a different way. And the value is still in the human interpretation.
If you're going to feed it into python.exe then it's probably code, but that's why originally talking about "programming languages" is a lot clearer. Your programming language in that situation is python. You are not using plain text as a programming language.
If you noticed BEL makes a beep and you use that to make noise or somehow music when the file is dumped to console, I'm not going to say you're using a programming language there either.
that is not what makes a julius though. there are lots of good, competent workers who don't really give a damn about the job, and are just in it for the money, but they know their stuff and are genuinely working and delivering value for the money they are given while they are on the clock. what a julius dials up to eleven is the oft-heard dictum "fake it till you make it", only they are so good at faking it that it becomes their entire thing, not just a way to stay under the radar while they learn the job.
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