dsimms

I had totally forgotten about the rain generator item in that edition of What If! I think because it includes this gem:

Q. What if you strapped C4 to a boomerang? Could this be an effective weapon, or would it be as stupid as it sounds?

A. it's the second one. Aerodynamics aside, I’m curious what tactical advantage you’re expecting to gain by having the high explosive fly back at you if it misses the target.

In a day dream, it'd charge the batteries!

or at sea! Nuclear mines, torpedos, etc. A lot easier to take out that SSBN or carrier I guess.

Are you thinking of Dave in 2001?

"Open the pod by doors, Hal." "I'm sorry, Dave, I can't do that."

there are so many intersecting problems here, that I feel like we argue about different ones at the same time.

Are you a human and want to query a database? SQL is probably it. (a SQL of some sort, but a pretty good shared understanding) Even if it's not relational exactly, it probably comes with some project with things like records/rows and columns/fields.

Do you have some kind of relational model that needs accessing? SQL sounds pretty good, and you know it from writing queries as a human...

But should you construct queries with string concatenation? No! Absolutely not.

Do you have to write the queries yourself? Like what if you want to stick an object in a database? Can't it write the query for you? It's appealing, but leads to sadness and anger at some point. (Joins? Conditions of more than 2 degrees? lots of dark corners very close by)

AND whatever model objects are used become a defacto database schema, so you can't really refactor them in the same way you would other models. So you better not expose them past whatever datastore touching interface you have. So why not just define them in SQL DDL in the first place?

What if you want to write the query (or need to to be sure you're getting exactly what you expect) but type-safely? LINQ? Absolutely! jOOQ? Sounds good! Arel? Sure! And maybe you get some amount of programmatic composability as well with any of these. Thankfully they're not really ORMs or extremely thin ones at that.

ok, ok, the headline here is more descriptive but the one actually in the article is a good one: The Hole Truth

There's a scene in Kim Stanley Robinson's 2312 that I think about often:

Habits begin to form at the very first repetition. After that there is a tropism toward repetition, for the patterns involved are defenses, bulwarks against time and despair.

He [Wahram] was very aware of this, having lived the process many times; so he paid attention to what he did when he traveled, on the lookout for those first repetitions that would create the pattern of that particular moment in his life. So often the first time one did things they were contingent, accidental, and not necessarily good things on which to base a set of habits. There was some searching to be done, in other words, some testing of different possibilities. that was the interregnum, in fact, the naked moment before the next exfoliation of habits, the time when on wandered doing things randomly. The time without skin, the raw data, the being-in-the-world.

Elon Musk, to customer: I'm sorry for your experience

also Elon Musk, to product management: why don't we have a targa option? that looks amazing

The struggle between semantic and page description is old. In some early arguments HTML "what's this markup thing, why not postscript with hyperlinks?" the most succinct counter argument was "yes, but what does it _mean_". But that was minority for sure.

Someone called this "the revenge of NeWS" (the Sony system) but I can't find a reference for that.

also: earlier recent discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24358850

the world should be append only!

and they surely weren't the first to do that either, I assume now.

This gets reinvented as a system matures, I think.

IBM mainframes had TCP offload in the early 90's at least. (The NIC in that case was a PC running PS/2 plus some routing software. Worked great.)

I agree: it catches entry errors, which is really handy in a system where you're hand-writing them twice.

But if you're writing a computer system that's simply duplicating one entry from a human in two places in data store, is that "double entry"? is it useful?

But the idea that you would want to reconcile one view with another independently reported one is super useful. (Almost every financial-oriented company builds a system like that, I would bet.)

or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdgzsF_O7oI&t=47 ?

I feel like https://aphyr.com/tags/jepsen really drives this home.

One day a chicken will finally win, which will be a pullet surprise...

But seriously, congratulations to the winners!

or honeypot rooms with super secret sounding military talk

or honeypot rooms with soft porn

I have to agree that Zoom just doesn't seem to care very much about privacy or security. Once? Sure, maybe an honest mistake. But, come on.

Also, I have been enjoying this: https://github.com/arkadiyt/zoom-redirector which highlights how optional the use of the native client is.

great article! It's not mentioned there, but I think the "conventional phone lines" meant fax, which was a pretty common gateway from the internet at the time. One of the McCools (can't remember if it was Rob or Mike) had a new-fangled CGI script that enabled a HTML form to order Jimmy Johns sandwich and it used UIUCs email-to-fax gateway to fax the local shop. Good times.

I should re-read Snowcrash. Was one of those texts the namshub of Enki by any chance?

Tangent, sure, why not COBOL? COBOL in the cloud for example with Elastic Cobol:

https://www.heirloomcomputing.com/elasticcobol/

? I mostly just love the name.

I was even going to say it was a missed opportunity for gittyup but maybe giddyup is better for TM avoidance!

We're sorry, but this URL is not supported by Outline

I also have an Arabic book (which was super fun to read on plane post 9/11, oops), that likens it to Scottish's glottal stop, which seems right on in retrospect:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_4MJUi03GHM

https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2010/feb/07/learn-arabic-... says:

: We have a muscle in our throat which is never used except in vomiting. Think about that and pretend you are about to be sick. You will find that what is normally called in English gagging is actually a restriction in the deep part of the throat. If you begin to gag, and then release the airstream from the lungs, you will have produced a perfect : (called :ain in Arabic).

I wondered if they were consciously avoiding "journey"!

Why Knot? https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00IF3UOQ4/