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mzi commented on Avoid UUID Version 4 Primary Keys in Postgres   andyatkinson.com/avoid-uu... · Posted by u/pil0u
vintermann · 3 days ago
A prime example of premature optimization.

Permanent identifiers should not carry data. This is like the cardinal sin of data management. You always run into situations where the thing you thought, "surely this never changes, so it's safe to squeeze into the ID to save a lookup". Then people suddenly find out they have a new gender identity, and they need a last final digit in their ID numbers too.

Even if nothing changes, you can run into trouble. Norwegian PNs have your birth date (in DDMMYY format) as the first six digits. Surely that doesn't change, right? Well, wrong, since although the date doesn't change, your knowledge of it might. Immigrants who didn't know their exact date of birth got assigned 1. Jan by default... And then people with actual birthdays on 1 Jan got told, "sorry, you can't have that as birth date, we've run out of numbers in that series!"

Librarians in the analog age can be forgiven for cramming data into their identifiers, to save a lookup. When the lookup is in a physical card catalog, that's somewhat understandable (although you bet they could run into trouble over it too). But when you have a powerful database at your fingertips, use it! Don't make decisions you will regret just to shave off a couple of milliseconds!

mzi · 3 days ago
> Even if nothing changes, you can run into trouble. Norwegian PNs have your birth date (in DDMMYY format) as the first six digits. Surely that doesn't change, right?

I guess that Norway has solved it in the same or similar way as Sweden? So a person is identified by the PNR and for those systems that need to track a person over several PNR (government agencies) use PRI. And a PRI is just the first PNR assigned to a person with a 1 inserted in the middle. If that PRI is occupied, use a 2,and so on.

PRI could of course have been a UUID instead.

mzi commented on Migrating the main Zig repository from GitHub to Codeberg   ziglang.org/news/migratin... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti
woodruffw · 22 days ago
I don’t have strong opinions about Zig or Codeberg, but I find the self-described status of the latter’s infrastructure concerning[1]: they’re seemingly running faulty hardware in production with limited redundancy, and are actively soliciting more hardware of unknown quality/reliability/provenance from their community. This is cool for a hobbyist project, but it doesn’t scream “stable platform for a post-GitHub world,” which is how I’ve seen Codeberg (aspirationally) described.

[1]: https://blog.codeberg.org/letter-from-codeberg-onwards-and-u...

mzi · 22 days ago
It seems like they have reliability issues; if I read their status page correctly, they have incidents every few minutes. Or how should one read their all green page?
mzi commented on The last European train that travels by sea   bbc.com/travel/article/20... · Posted by u/1659447091
normie3000 · 2 months ago
Which part of the Baltic takes 18 hours to cross?

Anyway it wouldn't be too surprising it's less rough than the North Atlantic given the Baltic is closely wrapped in land.

mzi · 2 months ago
Stockholm - Helsinki, for example.
mzi commented on The last European train that travels by sea   bbc.com/travel/article/20... · Posted by u/1659447091
codyb · 2 months ago
Took a train from NYC to Chicago and it was so nice. Similar amount of time, about two days I think all in all. And just rolling on the plains, got myself a bunk, was more expensive than the plane ride home but 25 times more enjoyable and fulfilling.

Ditching my phone as much as possible has been the best decision I've ever made. Life always feels a little slower when you're not constantly inundated with outside noise.

I still pay attention, but instead of constantly paying attention and doing nothing, I pay attention a good amount, and do things instead.

mzi · 2 months ago
I was a little taken by the state of American trains if this was true. Two days would mean at least 36h for me and that in turn would mean that the trains would have an average speed of 20mph.

But it turns out that it takes 20h, so twice that speed. Still not fast but better. With that duration it also seems unlikely that the speed is kept artificially low to allow some sleep on the train, as is very common in Europe.

mzi commented on Tcl-Lang Showcase   wiki.tcl-lang.org/page/Sh... · Posted by u/luismedel
doublerabbit · 2 months ago
I'm currently working on a PXE provisioning system with Tcl. This crafts a KickStart configuration hosted on a virtual URL.

LUks is a requirement and requires a random password on each workstation. Password generation with handmade web gui stored natively in sqlite all under 200 LoC so far.

Tcl gets flak, but it's battle tested. Still under active development and has a cool GUI, Tk, I love it as a language. In terms of simplicity it just works out of the box, execution in a single file, in a sanely manner.

Wrap a variable in brackets {} and you've secured yourself from injections or run the procedure in a lightening safe interpreter if your paranoid.

Threading is a breeze. It does make you think in a different methodology which folk may rebuttal, but once you get it, it's great.

NaviServer too, AOLs original webserver is awesome.

https://wiki.tcl-lang.org/page/NaviServer

https://github.com/naviserver-project/naviserver

mzi · 2 months ago
Nitpick: it's flak, not flack. It's a german abbreviation of Flugzeugabwehrkanone or anti-aircraft gun
mzi commented on Being blocked from contributing to lodash   c.ruatta.com/on-being-blo... · Posted by u/crtns
noodletheworld · 2 months ago
If someone opens a PR to one of my repos with no context, I ban them.

There’s too much AI spam out there right now.

Publishing ‘@provenance-labs/lodash’ as a test, I suppose. Ok. Leaving it up? Looks like spam.

Badgering the author an a private email? Mmm. Definitely not.

This isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. There’s a contributing guide which clearly says; unless a feature gets community interest, it’s not happening. If you want a feature, talk about it rouse community interest.

Overall: maybe this wasn’t the right way to engage.

Sometimes you just have to walk away from these situations, because the harder you chase, the more it looks like you’re in the wrong.

…it certainly looks, right now, like the lodash author wasn’t out of line with this, to me.

mzi · 2 months ago
> Overall: maybe this wasn’t the right way to engage

Lex Livingroom. If you are among friends you can surly criticize a sweater, but if you come barging in uninvited and criticize the same sweater, you're in for a bad time.

mzi commented on My Mac contacted 63 different Apple owned domains in an hour, while not is use   appaddict.app/post/my-mac... · Posted by u/rpgbr
SimianSci · 6 months ago
Polling domains when attached to the network like this doesnt suprise me in the least. Apple's ecosystem has often been praised for its tight integration, and this consistent network connectivity is the result. Anybody who has worked with large scale services that rely on messaging services to ensure people get timely notifications and data, knows that you need services which are continuously polling endpoints to check and see if they have new information.

Organizations like Apple who service billions of devices cannot rely on a "push data to system only when something has updated" type of system, as such a system doesnt operate at their scale. They have to operate a system where individual clients are assumed to have an unreliable connection to the service, and where the client does the legwork of checking for new data stored in a centralized system.

This is what you are seeing in the article. Domains like [gdmf.apple.com] which govern device management, are where the declarative device management system is checking Apple's various databases to see if they need to update their configuration.

mzi · 6 months ago
> Polling domains when attached to the network Apple devices do communicate over BT even when you explicitly turn it off and put your device in flight mode.
mzi commented on Mozilla Firefox – Official GitHub repo   github.com/mozilla-firefo... · Posted by u/thefilmore
reddalo · 7 months ago
Why GitHub? If they truly cared about open-source they would've chosen something else, such as a self-hosted Forgejo [1], or its most common public instance Codeberg [2].

[1] https://forgejo.org/ [2] https://codeberg.org/

mzi · 7 months ago
Codeberg unfortunately have an abysmal uptime track record.
mzi commented on Gorgeous-GRUB: collection of decent community-made GRUB themes   github.com/Jacksaur/Gorge... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti
Fnoord · 7 months ago
macOS has both these features, sort of.

Startup chime in SGI machines depended on model. So an Indy had a different one than an Onyx. My first PC (80286) also had iconic sounds when it started up. Never forget.

Micro distro, is recovery OS. All three major desktop OSes have such, or a key combination to activate such. Android has two recovery partitions I believe, redundancy is key.

If you like the power of snapshots, yep filesystems with CoW like ZFS can show a list during boot. An OS like NixOS wouldn't even need such. Works perfectly fine with Ext4FS, including boot menu with snapshots, rollback feature, etc.

mzi · 7 months ago
> My first PC (80286) also had iconic sounds when it started up.

    BEEP BOP. bidiedi-bop. bip.

mzi commented on Redis is open source again   antirez.com/news/151... · Posted by u/antirez
fastball · 8 months ago
Isn't it though? They weren't contributing before and they weren't paying Redis corp before, now they are at least contributing to a fork (and still not paying Redis corp).

Presumably some of the things being worked on in Valkey, etc can be upstreamed back to Redis in some form (not entirely straightforward since it is a hard fork with a diff license, but concepts can be borrowed back too).

e.g. apparently Valkey has introduced some performance improvements. Redis can implement similar if it seems worthwhile. Without the fork those performance ideas might have never surfaced.

mzi · 8 months ago
They were contributing a lot. So Redis-the-company lost a lot of engineering expertise when they all left for valkey.

u/mzi

KarmaCake day397January 17, 2019View Original