- Without self-replicating grey goo, infinite scalability is surely more a property of some kind of networked computer rental business (like AWS) rather than a database.
- What does 'serverless' mean exactly? My understanding is that it denotes a stateless application which is executed to serve a request but doesn't run continually as a daemon. Essentially the aforementioned computer rental business provides the event loop and the program provides the event handler. I fail to see how this is compatible with a database, which is definitionally very stateful. (And that encompasses much, much more than just the data.)
- 'Fundamentally reliable': This idea could reasonably be described as, uh, 'not novel'.
- 'Distributed globally, locally available': As far as I can tell, this collection of words is entirely devoid of any meaning. It sounds like it came out of a random passphrase generator.
- 'Scale should not come at the cost of performance'. While technically semantically meaningful, this is not novel or interesting, and I'm pretty sure this has been a pleasant daydream for database designers since databases were stored in punchcards. As far as I can see, this is comparable to saying 'houses should not come at the cost of money'.
This feels more like a laundry list of daydreams rather than a meaningful narrowing-down of how future databases will be architected. "It should be infinitely scalable, usable by a toaster, and it shouldn't need a computer to live on. It should be serverless and stateless but also self-optimising and with connection pooling. It should be consistent, available, and, uh, partitions, it should be cool with those too. It should be usable by anyone and perfectly tailored to their needs as well as to the opposite needs. Also..."
Personally I prefer ifconfig.me which takes this idea one step further.
Especially: Querying it with curl (or another system requesting plain text) really only returns the IP, not some HTML page. (Opening it in the browser also shows some useful information about the request, but http://ifconfig.me/ip always shows just your IP address)
Lol “ he had just saved the lives of three people” typical crap from the guardian. No doubt almost none of these people would have come to harm from these keyboard warriors. It’s amazing that anyone reads this rag for anything other than a joke
Worth highlighting here: Stripe also publishes a software engineering magazine called Increment [1] that puts out some really high-quality articles -- on a different level than any of your standard "corporate eng blog" kind of stuff (and I love those!).
They focus their issues on different engineering topics: May 2021 was "Containers," August 2020 was "APIs," Feb 2019 was "Internationalization," you get the idea. Can't recommend it enough. Worth scrolling through the topics to one that hits close to your interests.
Nearest to my own heart is the "Frontend" issue [2] -- every article is fucking fascinating, and one of my favorites is a deep dive from Evan You, the author of Vue, about the decision to do a full rewrite for Vue 3.
I am endlessly impressed by the quality of writing that comes out of Stripe.
I bought an Axidraw recently and its been great, its a fairly robust device. Plotting quality has been great, although it takes some learning on how to use it. They also take care to use non-proprietary firmware, and publishes it as open source: https://github.com/evil-mad/axidraw
Hi everyone, I'm one of the maintainers of Porter (https://github.com/porter-dev/porter). We are building a Kubernetes-powered PaaS that runs in your own cloud. We consider Porter to be the next-gen successor to Flynn in the era of k8s.
We had the pleasure of getting on a call with the Flynn founders last week and learned so much from their experience. It was incredible to hear the first-hand account of the past 7 years building Flynn (seriously, what a ride). We took their lessons and advice to heart and hope to fill the void Flynn is leaving behind.
To the founders of Flynn and all contributors, thanks so much for building such an awesome project and paving the way. Porter is still in its early stage, and we're super excited to start sharing our progress with the community. Exciting stuff coming your way soon - stay tuned!
Not too long ago, I went to the Apple store to get my MacBook Pro looked at for a faulty key and degraded trackpad. As I had a Genius diagnose the issue, the screen brightness of my iPhone 7 had dropped nearly completely.
While it was true that the glass of the screen had cracked due to a fall, the phone had operated just fine for many months since. The Genius told me it was likely a display issue while I told him it's much more likely a software issue. The Genius gave me the unfortunate advice of restarting the phone by holding down the power button and the lower volume button. The phone restarted, with the Apple logo in full brightness but would turn black when it came to logging in. Pity, since my password is too long to type it in without visual aide.
The Genius told me that to repair the display was $200+. I scoffed at the price and told him it's not the display, and it was unacceptable as I planned on buying the iPhone 12 next month. The manager came by and made it clear there's no room to budge on the price. I resigned and left the device with them.
When I was called in to pick up my phone, they told me that replacing the display did not work, so now my option was either to upgrade or to buy another iPhone 7 for $400+. I told them that's unacceptable and that it's clear it's not the hardware. I told them I am immersed in their ecosystem and I would easily spent another $2000 this year and to cut me a break. They told me, take it or leave it.
I took the phone back and started making my way home. Descending into the metro, I walked past an ill-lit part of the platform. I looked at my phone again and realized I could faintly make out the log in screen. I typed in my password, logged in, went to control center and raised the brightness back up. Perfect. Now, even if I lower the brightness to its lowest setting, it works as normal.
Not only is Apple's moves to cut out 3rd party repairs egregious, their own solutions and staff are rife with incompetence and their offer to you once you've immersed yourself into their ecosystem is, "Money now or go away".
I am not buying the iPhone 12 and my next machine will run Linux.
I recently purchased a 16” MBP despite significant personal concerns over the future of MacOS, being a strong open source advocate and Linux paying my mortgage.
I did this ultimately for a few reasons. MacOS lets me run Adobe (Photoshop, Lightroom, etc), Fusion360, has a good terminal (iTerm and zsh unix like shell) and Logic.
Mac hardware is still some of the best in the business, no other vendors seem to be able to catch-up. The XPS line is a great example, the battery that Dell chose to put in that laptop can’t run the internals at full power when not connected to AC. There are plenty of other comments about Thinkpads here (I have a T480s through work) and find the overall experience just fine.
The MacBook on the other hand, I use for 8+ hours every day. It’s the machine I reach for first. It sparks joy. It just works when roaming on WiFi, always. It just works with Bluetooth headphones, always. It just works with external displays, first time, every time. To put it simply, the machine gets out of my way and lets me get real work done. I can SSH to wherever I want and get ‘the Linux experience’.
My personal desktop runs Arch and KDE but for a portable, annoyingly, I still think Macs are the only way to go. But damn do I wish they had a SD card slot.
Look, if you trust a Facebook or google owned property to respect your privacy that’s kinda on you. They’ve proven time and again they do not care about your privacy at all.
I'm astonished and pleased to see they walked back the two worst things about the original Touch Bar MBPs - the lack of a physical Escape key, and the full-size left and right arrow keys.
The lack of physical function keys remains regrettable, and the Touch Bar is still no worthy substitute, but perhaps this is a sign that Apple is finally interested in listening to feedback from its long-term customer base, even if that feedback conflicts with the design team's desires.
- Without self-replicating grey goo, infinite scalability is surely more a property of some kind of networked computer rental business (like AWS) rather than a database.
- What does 'serverless' mean exactly? My understanding is that it denotes a stateless application which is executed to serve a request but doesn't run continually as a daemon. Essentially the aforementioned computer rental business provides the event loop and the program provides the event handler. I fail to see how this is compatible with a database, which is definitionally very stateful. (And that encompasses much, much more than just the data.)
- 'Intelligence': Databases already are intelligent and self-optimising, and have been at least since MySQL/Postgres: https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.0/en/cost-model.html#cost...
- 'Fundamentally reliable': This idea could reasonably be described as, uh, 'not novel'.
- 'Distributed globally, locally available': As far as I can tell, this collection of words is entirely devoid of any meaning. It sounds like it came out of a random passphrase generator.
- 'Scale should not come at the cost of performance'. While technically semantically meaningful, this is not novel or interesting, and I'm pretty sure this has been a pleasant daydream for database designers since databases were stored in punchcards. As far as I can see, this is comparable to saying 'houses should not come at the cost of money'.
This feels more like a laundry list of daydreams rather than a meaningful narrowing-down of how future databases will be architected. "It should be infinitely scalable, usable by a toaster, and it shouldn't need a computer to live on. It should be serverless and stateless but also self-optimising and with connection pooling. It should be consistent, available, and, uh, partitions, it should be cool with those too. It should be usable by anyone and perfectly tailored to their needs as well as to the opposite needs. Also..."