9dev

It’s really not that hard, especially with an AI agent to help you. Running a Postgres server and a read replica in Hetzner with pgBackRest backing up to their S3 buckets and a cloud volume can be had for under 50€, has HA, PITR, 3-2-1 backups, and will carry you through your series A comfortably, with GDPR compliance built-in.

What does the equivalent RDS setup cost you?

That is one clever metaphor. Thank you, I might steal it.

I find it fairly easy to distinguish between US model labs and North Korea.

Do you now? Remember the girls school bombing in Iran, of which we still don't know if an AI agent was involved in the target planning?

I do unterstand why a (assuming here) US citizen might sleep all sound and comfy, but to the rest of the world the distinction is neither as clear nor as comforting.

As a European, all I know is that we cannot trust the USA anymore, and being so utterly dependent on them to not fuck up the most important technological revolution in our history so far over greed, cronyism, incompetence... it is terrifying.

It's such a freak incident of history that right at this critical time the dumbest, most incompetent leadership is at the helm in the US...

They sure don't. I still find the hypocrisy appalling.

I never really understood these complaints about the standard library, that's not what makes a language really. Yes, it's ugly, yes, it carries 30 years of baggage, but it's PHP the language that allows you to interact with a much more convenient abstraction layer provided by Laravel.

PHP can run the same code fully dynamically typed or with very strict type annotations, depending on your requirements. It has runtime reflection APIs that are so cheap that you don't really have to think about using them. You can do OOP or FP with PHP, or even procedural HTML-interleaved-with-PHP if that's your thing. It has late static binding, so you can defer to child classes from their parent class. There are generators and fibres as first-class language constructs now. Property hooks are an extremely clear pattern, way better than in many other languages.

Generally, there have been tons of new syntax extensions over the years, and they all slot in gracefully. With PHP 8.6, we're going to get partial application for functions, which will make PHP 8.5's match expressions one of the most ergonomic implementations I have seen yet!

These "very new things" have, in part, been available for more than 6 years now. Not to speak of all the other PHP features WordPress chose to forgo, like PDO with prepared statements (which completely eliminates SQL injections), which came out 21 freakin' years ago.

There are many very successful and professional PHP projects with millions of users that seem to be able to migrate to newer PHP versions just fine.

Whatever the WordPress developers are claiming are the reasons for their irresponsible codebase and their inability to improve it is nobody's fault but their own.

The, uh, WordPress Foundation[0]?

[0] https://wordpressfoundation.org

That might even be a beneficial move, creating (well, actual, not artificial) scarcity works well to draw interest usually. Curious how this one plays out.

...and then the American companies cried Foul! Unfair play! You've got this wrong, see, it was us who were supposed to profit off of the public, not the other way around!

You’re right, of course. Still I think the point stands that PHP has very powerful runtime metaprogramming features that you can build amazing abstractions on top of.

Shame I forgot to add named arguments above, eliminating this problem too:

  array_map(callback: fn($i) => $i * 2, array: [10])

So, you move into a new flat. In the living room, there's five sockets on the west side, but only one on the east side, and that's planned for a lamp already.

Does it make more sense to

  a) put up your TV and gaming console on the east side, and have an electrician run another power line across the room (they can install five plugs there too so you can keep the lamp and even charge your phone, which is nice), or
  b) simply put up your TV and console on the west side?

What they do is put lipstick on a pig! There is no need to "reduce" the risk of SQL injections when you can use a safe API that eliminates the entire error class. This is a solved problem for the rest of the world!

Video streaming or game streaming both depend on close proximity to the end user

That's a straw man for this discussion. Yes, there will be a need to place some DCs close to users, but most of them could be located closer to energy production, attached to a backbone network, and the vast majority of customers would not suffer any degradation of service from it.

Even just introducing emulation layers for the old parts and making the new parts opt-in would be better than just giving up and keep on going. Plugin authors can choose the new subsystem as they publish updates or new plugins and themes, and in return they get speed and security guarantees.

And since the WordPress foundation controls the extension marketplace, they can reliably determine which parts of the API surface are in use, or even invest a chunk of money every month to send AI-written patches to plugin maintainers to ease the transition.

There would be so many ways to improve the situation (to the benefit of WordPress maintainers, customers, and ecosystem vendors alike, mind you!), but alas, they are stuck to their ways and will not.

Yeah; the common idea of dignity and self-respect is to replace the duct tape with proper engineering once you're successful though, instead of just taping ever more of it on top and pretending SQL injections aren't really a problem.

Let me convince you! :-)

There are match expressions and arrow functions:

  $slug = $title
      |> trim(...)
      |> (fn($str) => str_replace(' ', '-', $str))
      |> (fn($str) => str_replace('.', '', $str))
      |> strtolower(...);

  final class PostsController
  {
      #[AccessControl(fn(Request $request, Post $post)
          => $request->user === $post->getAuthor()
      )]
      public function update(Request $request, Post $post): Response {
          // ...
      }
  }

  enum Status
  {
      case Draft;
      case Published;
      case Archived;
  }

  class Data
  {
      public string $fullName {
          get => "{$this->firstName} {$this->lastName}";
          set(string $value) {
              [$first, $last] = explode(' ', $value);
              $this->firstName = $first;
              $this->lastName = $last;
          }
      }
  }

The WordPress codebase is a disgrace. PHP is a beautiful language by now, but they absolutely butcher it and refuse to do anything about that.

Well, in Germany at least - if the living space differs drastically, that is at least 10%, you can lower the rent accordingly and make a demand for a refund of the entire rent you overpaid since you moved in - and you probably should also make a second case for damages due to purposeful deception.

A consumer doesn't buy anything from a business "as seen", that is not a thing over here. There are binding rules to protect consumers from malevolent sellers or landlords, and legal obligations you can't subvert by tricking customers into purchasing something different from what was advertised.

And why not build data centers where the energy is?

Try watching a bit less Fox News and talk to real people sometimes. It helps.

…and define rules for the measurement taken, like no stairs, count areas below roof sloping or outside on balconies etc. with a lower factor, exclude shared areas and cellars/attics, and so on.

Not measuring correctly, not publishing the measurements, or publishing incorrect measurements outside an error margin gets counted as deception. Offer a simple reporting contact point to citizens to report landlords or offers that violate this regulation without a lawsuit.

Right? Germany too. I wouldn’t even have thought this could be a problem…

That kind of emphasises the problem I was referring to; if I pick 200ms, will it stop before doing a proper optimisation because that would make it faster than that? Will it do something stupid to justify pushing from 195ms to >=200ms?

I'm way too afraid of a "paperclip problem"-style target overfitting to use it really; how could I even describe a goal so well it doesn't sacrifice other things that are important to me? Like, if my goal is to make an endpoint faster, will it create an over-engineered mess out of the clearly readable code I have to reach that goal?

Eh… If I can bring prod down simply by sending CSV with a comma in a field to a prod endpoint, whoever has come up with the most naive CSV parser possible running in prod is responsible for the outage.

…and it's also entirely in character of you representing Microsoft to not reply to my comment :-)

The regulations and requirements are much stricter in Europe, especially around warranty, repairs, and support. There's no wiggling out of that if you sell devices around here.

I take that comic a bit personal, to be honest - I just returned from a two-month odyssey to find a way of offering our customers a simple way of connecting our MCP Server to their Copilot Chat. Digging through a mindboggling number of documentation that was often outdated, sometimes contradictory, but always written both verbose and yet very light on information was part of that; talking to broken AI chatbots and clueless support staff was, just as trying out four (four!) different ways to create an Agent wrapper - only to discover that multi-tenancy is not supported for any of these, and two of the three SDKs are outdated but still referenced in docs everywhere.

What's more, people seemed to be actively confused by the use case ("Why would your customers even want to use an external tool that isn't part of their Microsoft environment?").

I finally found out about "declarative agents", which seem to be able to do what I need. And if I don't trash my computer against the wall out of pure rage over page changes in partner center taking 15 seconds or longer, I might just be able to complete the 40-step form required for the marketplace listing. Progress!