elvinyung

> One of things that tends to boggle programmer brains is while most software dealing with money uses multiple-precision numbers to make sure the pennies are accurate, financial modelling uses floats instead. This is because clients generally do not ring up about pennies.

> But today’s episode kept veering weirdly away from Michele’s frantically complex romantic entanglements, which Bobby had anyway never bothered to keep track of, and jerking itself into detailed socioarchitectural descriptions of Soleri-style mincome arcologies. Some of the detail, even to Bobby, seemed suspect; he doubted, for instance, that there really were entire levels devoted to the sale of ice-blue shaved-velour lounge suites with diamond-buckled knees, or that there were other levels, perpetually dark, inhabited exclusively by starving babies. This last, he seemed to recall, had been an article of faith to Marsha, who regarded the Projects with superstitious horror, as though they were some looming vertical hell to which she might one day be forced to ascend.

> Other segments of the jack-dream reminded him of the Knowledge channel Sense/Net piped in free with every stim subscription; there were elaborate animated diagrams of the Projects’ interior structure, and droning lectures in voice-over on the life-styles of various types of residents. These, when he was able to focus on them, seemed even less convincing than the flashes of ice-blue velour and feral babies creeping silently through the dark. He watched a cheerful young mother slice pizza with a huge industrial waterknife in the kitchen corner of a spotless one-room. An entire wall opened onto a shallow balcony and a rectangle of cartoon-blue sky.

You might say that buying a house on credit isn't frivolous but a pair of shoes on credit is, but where do you draw the line in the middle?

(Disclaimer: I work at Square, but I am otherwise completely uninvolved with this acquisition or product area.)

This is not to say that e.g. Sapporo only has Sapporo-style ramen or Fukuoka only has Hakata-style ramen, but the names describe where the style is perceived to have originated from.

The water is slightly muddied (no pun intended...) by techniques like "double soups", i.e. mixing multiple soups in the same bowl. In some cases a chintan might be mixed with a paitan, etc.

This tidbit is particularly infuriating:

> In California, the problem is, in two words, Tutor-Perini. This contractor underbids and then does shoddy work requiring change orders, litigated to the maximum. Ron Tutor’s dishonesty is well-known and goes back decades: in 1992 Los Angeles’s then-mayor Tom Bradley called him the change order king. And yet, he keeps getting contracts, all of which have large cost overruns, going over the amount the state or city would have paid had it awarded the contract to the second lowest bidder. In San Francisco, cost overrun battles involving Tutor-Perini led to a 40% cost overrun. This process repeated for high-speed rail: Tutor submitted lowest but technically worst bid, got the contract as price was weighted too high, and then demanded expensive changes. It speaks to California’s poor oversight of contractors that Tutor remains a contractor in good standing and has not been prosecuted for fraud.

Edit: oh, wait, just realized this is from the same blog, so the same body of work.

You can be implicitly biased without being aware of it. This is true for both humans and algorithms.

For a fun fact, CockroachDB was actually started by ex-Squares, so we're definitely very familiar with this exact same argument internally, back in the day when neither CockroachDB nor Spanner existed as a viable option :)

>Preventing inconsistencies by enforcing constraints is a key point of an RDBMS. This is literally why people use SQL DBs.

This comment is not specific or related to the work at hand, but note that this is only true for a single-machine database or a sharded setup in which you never have to perform transactions across shards. That is, the ACID guarantees are only enforceable in most RDBMS if all your data is on the same machine.

I'm especially curious about Schemaless, since it seemed like at one point every company tried to build a NoSQL KV store on top of sharded MySQL, realized how janky it is, and are currently decommissioning it.

Meh. The Media Lab is (or was) doing some of the best work in the field in food and flavor science. Arielle Johnson [1] in particular is known for her work and expertise on flavor and fermentation, and she went on to lead R&D at Noma's science bunker [2] and now has her own lab in East Village [3]. She's probably has had an outsized impact on the food world in the last decade or so on stuff like fermentation, which is gradually making its way beyond just fine dining and is something that I'm particularly excited about.

[1] https://www.ariellejohnson.com

[2] https://www.eater.com/2018/3/9/17100494/rip-noma-science-bun...

[3] https://www.ediblemanhattan.com/magazine/summer-2019-issue-n...

For the "valid time" primitive I was thinking of implementing something like a hybrid logical clock that CockroachDB has (but with looser guarantees, mostly just need uniqueness and monotonicity). A sequential ID would provide a slightly nicer interface for pagination but has all the problems that I previously mentioned.

This might not be needed if this is strictly used for FIFO event consumption, but I guess I was thinking of trying to make a system like this support time-sliced queries.

It's amazing how much of the Arthurian mythologies have been derived from varius vague allusions in this book. Probably lots of people know about the theory of Ambrosius Aurelianus as a possible candidate for historical King Arthur because of his role in the battle at Mount Badon, but what's even more interesting is that in the book Gildas refers to a leader only by their sobriquet of "the bear", which was rendered as ursus in Latin, but in Brythonic, it would've been arth.

Also another fun fact, Gildas never refers to Dumnonia by name, instead calls it "Damnonia" presumably to reflect his condemnation.