Please read the article before responding.

The paywalled, appeal to authority article?

So, you didn't read it either?

> appeal to authority

Very true, reading the article before commenting is definitely not for "free thinkers".

I suspect it’s because VCs have trouble finding decent places to put all their money.

Another happy couple!

I think “I should be able to fully express my food brand preferences” is not a reasonable standard of livable.

Food choices are highly personal. It’s probably the single most variable expense item here. Who are you to decide for someone else whether their food is reasonable enough or not. And furthermore, in general Americans are among the least picky about their foods; now ask a Frenchman or a Chinese about their food culture.

Well I’m not the one to decide. That’s why we let individuals allocate money for themselves so they can prioritize what they care about from their resource pool.

Because preferences for food, housing, and healthcare are essentially unbounded, I think you will always have unmet preferences.

When the choice is between organic food (expensive) and eating pesticides that are meant to kill and neuter living organisms (somewhat economical) it's a choice we never should have allowed to even exist in the first place.

Sounds like you need to get the government’s definition of appropriate foods changed. And then come back to the question of livability.

It must be more nuanced than you say, as millions of people reach old age without sharing your concern.

The definition of appropriate foods is not binary. It’s alright that the government sets a minimum standard of appropriateness and individuals can opt for higher quality than what the government mandates.

I agree

Organic food still uses pesticides.

“Good portion of the world” is probably a handful of people.

Her full quote btw:

“Once upon a time, I was the centerfold of Playboy,” says the former model in the new documentary Losing Lena. “But I retired from modeling a long time ago. It’s time I retired from tech, too.”

I found a contradicting statement where she said that she doesn't mind her picture being used in tech. Maybe even in the wikipedia article you got this quote from. I don't have the time to find it right now but here for example she says she's proud of the picture: https://archive.is/fIRoG

"Lena doesn’t harbor any resentment toward Sawchuk and his imitators for how they appropriated her image; the only note of regret she expressed was that she wasn’t better compensated. In her view, the photograph is an immense accomplishment that just happened to take on a life of its own. “I’m really proud of that picture,” she said."

I agree. I shared the quote above (cited as evidence on Wikipedia) because it’s not at all clear she said she disapproves. combined with your quote I think we have a classic case of being offended on another’s behalf.

Oh, I grossly misinterpreted what you said then

> I think we have a classic case of being offended on another’s behalf.

Definitely!

Well, for instance, it's the official policy of the IEEE to not allow this image in new publications. And they're far from the only journal (or set of journals) that have this policy.

Of course. Most people don’t care and a few vocal ones do.

As in most organizations that would know about it and come into contact with it.

I think my comment is true of the graphics programming/research community.

Given that it's use is banned in most academic journals dealing with imaging/graphics, you'd be wrong.

And as several journals have brought up in the banning, it's not even good at what it purports to be for these use cases. It's a pretty poor quality image to start off with due to being scanned to a digital file with 1970s technology.

At this point the ones defending its continued use are the vocal minority on some weird anti-woke crusade that doesn't even make sense on technical grounds.

You’re using vocal minority framing right now. When I care about it, I’m a weird crusader for caring and noticing. But then you organize a campaign to change it.

There is a large body of literature using these images so it’s helpful to have a comparison which is persistent through time and familiar.

> Given that it's use is banned in most academic journals dealing with imaging/graphics, you'd be wrong.

Critical thinking caps required for this one.

I was repeating your framing.

> Most people don’t care and a few vocal ones do.

It’s perverted now?

Is a nude picture perverted?

No. That is not the question. The question is "do you hang out with an erotic magazine at work ?" and "Is it normal ?"

No I think the social context is inappropriate. However I do not think possessing or liking such a picture is perverted. I also do not thinking a cropped version of the picture which has no sexual content is inappropriate.

What languages does this author like which has a written spec?

This article isn't about languages. It's about the protocol for two or more languages to talk to each other. There is no specification for this.

The System V ABI is as close as we get to an actual specification but not everyone uses it and in any case it only covers a small part of the protocol.

> He’s trying to materially improve the conditions of using C itself as a programming language.

> I’m trying to materially improve the conditions of using literally any language other than C.

You exceeded the step of maxing out the best server you can buy?

HA is not about exceeding the limits of a server. Its about still serving traffic when that best server I bought goes offline (or has failed memory chip, or a disk or... ).

Replication?

Postgres replication, even in synchronous mode, does not maintain its consistency guarantees during network partitions. It's not a CP system - I don't think it would actually pass a Jepsen test suite in a multi-node setup[1]. No amount of tooling can fix this without a consensus mechanism for transactions.

Same with MySQL and many other "traditional" databases. It tends to work out because these failures are rare and you can get pretty close with external leader election and fencing, but Postgres is NOT easy (likely impossible) to operate as a CP system according to the CAP theorem.

There are various attempts at fixing this (Yugabyte, Neon, Cockroach, TiDB, ...) which all come with various downsides.

[1]: Someone tried it with Patroni and failed miserably, https://www.binwang.me/2024-12-02-PostgreSQL-High-Availabili...

In my experience the functionality of “purpose built systems” is found in Postgres but you have to read the manual.

I personally think reading manuals and tuning is a comparably low risk form of software development.

Materialized views work pretty well in Postgres. But yes at some level of load it’s just helpful to have the traffic shared elsewhere.

But As soon as you go outside Postgres you cannot guarantee consistent reads within a transaction.

That’s usually ok, but it’s a good enough reason to keep it in until you absolutely need to.

Materialised views don't work well in postgres. They don't incrementally update and have to be manually triggered to rebuild from scratch

Sure, I guess it depends on the use case.

All parts seem true to me. Most kids think they were more gifted than they were. Learning to work hard and be persistent was actually more important. A lot of talk about being gifted was an obstacle to that.

We try to praise hard work and downplay the yer so smart talk. I still had get excited when they are lazy smart though.