The claim that Apple don’t deserve to be praised for their UX because Apple is a hardware company, so therefore are not constrained by the realities affecting software businesses, and are thus able to pursue an uncompromised user experience… is rather given the lie by the fact that every other hardware vendor is universally and uniformly terrible at UX.
Readit Newsjameshart commented on I don't buy Macs anymore jasonsaidwhat.substack.co... · Posted by u/overbring_labs
jameshart commented on You Should Add Debug Views to Your DB chrispenner.ca/posts/view... · Posted by u/ezekg
jameshart commented on You Should Add Debug Views to Your DB chrispenner.ca/posts/view... · Posted by u/ezekg
https://www.xkcd.com/1737
If you're OBVIOUSLY not the target audience you don't have to dismiss it because it doesn't fit your usecase. There's probably a thousand "apps" where this is just fine for every one "Sry we work with the government or are planet scale apps" you're talking about.
It's exhausting to read dismissive online dick-measuring comments, if you have the issues you're explaining you already know this doesn't apply to you. It's on the same level as "Bro I asked a question to an LLM and it gave an interesting answer and I'm unique because nobody but me can ask questions to LLMs like I can" style posts.
I don’t think I was being dismissive, I was just pointing out the lack of universal applicability of this suggestion.
It is my experience that many people do not realize that it is possible not to have developers just connect to prod databases with admin privs.
Pointing out that there comes a point where this sort of approach isn’t the norm is part of how people who reach that level of scale learn that. https://xkcd.com/1053/
And that level of concern isn’t reserved for planet-scale - once you have a couple of million dollar contracts on your B2B SaaS platform you should be taking production data ops seriously enough that this sort of approach is unlikely to make sense.
And I shouldn’t need to say that user privacy ought to be a concern even for small operations.
jameshart commented on You Should Add Debug Views to Your DB chrispenner.ca/posts/view... · Posted by u/ezekg
Counterpoint: you should not be connecting to your production database, you should not be running non-critical queries on production database servers, and you probably shouldn’t have permission to see all this data about your users.
Obviously your mileage may vary, your scale is your own, your trade offs are your own trade offs.
But be aware that there comes an operational scale where this is not an acceptable way - operationally, legally, privacy-wise - to investigate customer issues, and you’ll need different tricks.
jameshart commented on 95% of Companies See 'Zero Return' on $30B Generative AI Spend thedailyadda.com/95-of-co... · Posted by u/speckx
The biggest mistake people are making is treating AI as a product instead of a feature.
While people are doing their work, they don't think, "Oh man, I am really excited to talk with AI today, and I can't wait to talk with a chatbot."
People want to do their jobs without being too bored and overwhelmed, and that's where AI comes in. But of course, we cannot hype features; we sell products after all, so that's the state we are in.
If you go to Notion, Slack, or Airtable, the headline emphasizes AI first instead of "Text Editor, Corporate Chat etc".
The problem is that AI is not "the thing", it is the "tool that gets you to the thing".
Agreed. We’ve got the potential to build real bicycles for the mind here and marketing departments are jumping right in to trying to sell people spandex cycling shorts.
A BBC micro was my first computer. Americans had Amegas or something, but I had a BBC and a big book with example BASIC programs.
The American equivalent of the BBC Micro was very much the Apple II. Both based on the 6502, both dominated the market of ‘first computers purchased en masse by schools’ in the 1980s in their respective countries.
I always get the impression though that while the UK and European home computer era continued from a diverse eight-bit era of C64s, Spectrums, Amstrads and BBCs to the sixteen-bit era of Amigas and Atari STs, before the PC became dominant, in the US the early eight-bit home machines gave way much earlier to consoles - the NES at first, then the SNES and Megadrive.
Are you sure about this?
Let's say you run a webshop and have two tables, one for orders with 5 fields, one for customers, with 20 fields.
Let's say you have 10k customers, and 1m orders.
A query performing a full join on this and getting all the data would result in 25 million fields transmitted, while 2 separate queries and a client side manual join would be just 5m for orders, and 200k for customers.
If you need all the orders and all the customers sure.
But usually you need some of the orders and you need the customer info associated with them. Often the set of orders you’re interested in might even be filtered by attributes of the customers they belong to.
The decision of whether to normalize our results of a database query into separate sets of orders and customers, or to return a single joined dataset of orders with customer data attached, is completely orthogonal to the decision of whether to join data in the database.
jameshart commented on The future of large files in Git is Git tylercipriani.com/blog/20... · Posted by u/thcipriani
jameshart commented on The future of large files in Git is Git tylercipriani.com/blog/20... · Posted by u/thcipriani
Nit:
> if I git clone a repo with many revisions of a noisome 25 MB PNG file
FYI ‘noisome’ is not a synonym for ‘noisy’ - it’s more of a synonym for ‘noxious’; it means something smells bad.
But there's definitely something fun about running the old hardware with an old spinning hard drive, clacking away while it boots up for 2-3 minutes.
And then launching Microsoft Word 5.1 and wondering if it locked up, while each toolbar loads in one by one!
Honestly though, if you just wanted to do word processing, it's fine for that, and with modern tools like FloppyEmu, BlueSCSI, and some of the networking hacks with modern cheap hardware, you can get one of these things to transfer files to and from a network share very easily.
I'm using a netatalk server on my Raspberry Pi to serve up Samba shares over AppleTalk. Very simple to do nowadays! https://github.com/geerlingguy/apple-pi