JsonDemWitOster

I thought you were making a reference to Six Sigma and their distinguished Black Belts. Like, who knows what they call themselves today?

My apologies to the beautiful people of Recyclon for the unflattering comparison.

The name isn't really that much of a problem.

I know you are explaining in earnest but the way you ended and formatted it is sooo (un?)intentionally funny. Like, of all the stunts Binface is pulling, the name is the least legitimate of concerns.

Kinda like what they say about the poor people of Clacton having to choose between a joke trash candidate and Count Binface.

What's this type of makes-you-do-double-take, got-me-in-the-first-half-ngl humor called other than just British?

There is no opposition in this round because it is a total farce initiated by Farage. It takes two to tango and no one else (other than Count Binface) is dancing Farage's Doofus Dance.

If Farage wins, he will face the inquiry he is attempting to escape by pulling this stunt (in a summer where the WC is happening, Farage managed to score the biggest and most protracted own-goal in the history of own-goals). An effect of the inquiry is that it will trigger _another_ election in which the other parties are expected to field a candidate.

I'm not from the UK so I don't know the proper terms/political procedure but if you read up on the whole situation beyond the jokes, what I said above is a good rough outline. This is hardly the death of opposition to populists.

Lol. Four-ish years ago I stopped cheaping out on house-brand pasta and bought Barilla. It was immediately a very obvious step-up in quality I can no longer keep cheaping out on.

Then they made some very slopjob AI ads. Superick but I keep buying them. :|

Non, du verstehst es falsch, mon amigo. According to EU standards (of which the Brits are no longer a part of) sugar bags (empty) should weigh exactly a pound each to withstand all and any shipping conditions.

That depends. Is the spaghetti made of pure Italian semolina or some bastardized all-purpose flour-based dough? Also, the cut thickness matters as well as how much you salted the water to boil it AND for how long you boiled it. How far is it in the raw-al dente scale?

It's totally plausible to me that this kind of nudge will save a lot of lives.

Probable especially if it gets drunk drivers off the road but I, for one, would be deeply uncomfortable driving knowing my every twitch is recorded and _more importantly_ open to misinterpretation in case of a claim. I could easily believe otherwise averagely fine drivers being negatively affected by this if the surveillance takes up headspace.

Observation affects systems but not always for the better.

I also wonder how well this fares under night driving conditions where the inside of the car has poor exposure.

Related: https://petapixel.com/2025/07/11/dutch-woman-fined-500-after...

I have but only to cache data used by cron/bg jobs. We still had Redis for an actual platform system cache. The thing is that Redis cache was created and managed by some framework middleware so it did not seem right to invoke it in code/scripts that bypassed that middleware.

It was ok. Never really failed and didn't affect the user-initiated CRUD ops though ofc the bg jobs ran when the users slept. Still wouldn't bet my life on it.

As I don't want to repeat myself, with emphasis added:

No Silver Bullet, No Free Lunch, and all that. If your problem domain really warrants something outside of relational storage, you're gonna pay that complexity cost one way or another. You can't escape it by shoehorning everything in Postgres, fantastic as a DB as it is.

So as not to bloat the system, you will end up bloating your Postgres installation instead.

Also, Unix principle/KISS: do one thing and only one thing well. Of course this comes back down to your definition of "one thing". "_Any_ Data Storage" seems to be your one thing but not for me. "Relational Data Storage" is a well-scoped one thing for me.

I'm not saying don't take advantage of the plugin system. But we must exercise good sense so as not to abuse it when we avail of its advantages. TFA's suggestion of "only after pushing Postgres to its limits, documenting why it was insufficient, and accepting the operational cost of the alternative" does not sound like good sense. It sounds like a personal and an organizational burnout waiting to happen. Wait until PG is at its limit does not sound like technical debt to you?

If Postgres can truly handle all of these situations, then mastery of that one tool should be focused on.

Thus you have conceived the conundrum of The Database of Theseus: after how many plugins is your Postgres cluster no longer a mere Postgres cluster to the point where it is unreasonable for a seasoned/certified Postgres DBA to have a good grasp of the system in a reasonable time span?

This is almost textbook https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inner-platform_effect in that this is the second paragraph of the "Examples" section. I acknowledge that Postgres' plugin system mitigates this somewhat but I just can't be convinced that all those plugins will play well with each other for all eternity and especially under stress (unless you make a PG instance for each sub-system, in which case, refer to my original comment).

For the record

- I've used PG for caching with UNLOGGED. Still had Redis for a message queue and other caching. - I've used PostGIS because it made sense to be able to make geo query when latlon is already a (small) part of your schema. - I've used JSONB but only because the alternative is Mongo. I still had an Elasticsearch cluster indexing all that data for search.

I can no longer edit my comment above so I'm just leaving this here, picking you arbitrarily out of the handful that addressed my filesystem suggestion:

I am being sarcastic to show what a ridiculous idea it is to shoehorn everything into Postgres. If you find eschewing a relational DB for the filesystem incredulous, you should maybe reconsider if eschewing specialized software in favor of Postgres is advisable.

I'll do you one better: do you really need Postgres and all these extensions when you already have a filesystem?

only after pushing Postgres to its limits, documenting why it was insufficient, and accepting the operational cost of the alternative

I love Postgres as a DB but, really, this is ridiculous. No doubt these extensions can do the job well-enough but you might as well invest in learning the right tool for the problem from the start, when the stakes are still pretty low. Why wait until, ahem, Postgres is pushed to the limit before you spin up a Redis cluster?

You don't get free opcost by using Postgres for everything. Arguably if you end up with a monolith of a database, you are paying a higher opcost (imagine if too much caching can affect all CRUD ops in your platform). Or you can manage a cluster of PG instances but that's no less complex---each plugin still comes with its own opcost!

No Silver Bullet, No Free Lunch, and all that. If your problem domain really warrants something outside of relational storage, you're gonna pay that complexity cost one way or another. You can't escape it by shoehorning everything in Postgres, fantastic as a DB as it is.

This analogy is disingenuous because by comparing the human brain to the machine, it ignores _scale_. Scale is absolutely important in copyright law. As a matter of fact, copyright law is among the various profound impacts of the---wait for it---printing press, a _machine_ for the mass production of books.

IANAL (plus a whole suite of other caveats) but torrent-baiting works in Germany along these lines.

ISPs and trigger-happy law firms don't send you a C&D for downloading a torrent, they do so for seeding a torrent. It's just that practically nobody "just seeds" a torrent so people colloquially claim they got busted for downloading a torrent.

In theory this means if you torrent as a 100% leecher and turn off seeding from the get-go, you should be in the clear. But nobody sensible would dare test the extent of German Legal Spite, much less do so repeatedly to science the shit out of it.

If you can download through another protocol, say HTTP, however---<Sendung unterbrochen!>

What's next is more AI spam-slop. I already noticed this on youtube.

I hope not but your observation on YouTube is spot-on. It's really frustrating. I've managed to keep good hygiene for my shorts feed. I practice zero-tolerance for braindead content; one strike is all it takes for the "never recommend" button.

But with the World Cup, the situation is just pandemonium. Football has always been breeding ground for low-effort content on the platform: unofficial highlights, cropped to death to avoid copyright, and always, for some reason, with a blaring background music. But now it's reached peak slop chaos: AI voiceovers, dubious anecdotes ("...and that kid, was Ronaldo"), and STILL the horribly blaring background music. The algorithm makes no distinction between quality and slop content of a topic. It's all just about the topic. So all it takes is for me to view a short related to football (even one of thoughtful commentary) for the slop to come in hordes.

At least I can now share in this forum's disdain for shorts. Kill that shit with fire man.

My problem with AI is the sheer variance of its stupid-smart spectrum. While it's true that human intelligence is not deterministic or predictable, the inconsistency exists in a much narrower band of variance which makes failure modes foreseeable. Thus I would much prefer a system with humans in the loop with processes in place for idiot-proofing.

This is true for "lateral" (I lack a better term) fields of intelligence as well. You don't ask a philosophy professor advice for the rashes on your skin; you see a doctor for that. And yet both the professor and the doctor could be expected to accurately identify from a picture that you do have rashes on your skin. An AI (and I mean in the general sense, not only transformer LLMs) could give you a pretty accurate rundown of Plato and still think the same picture is a beautiful sunrise.

(I don't even kid. Just this morning, an AI labeled a GIF from _Friends_ as a 1950s magazine ad for white bread. Just what in the failure mode is that?)

You can't idiot-proof AI without knowing what's in the training data set and even then you run into question of scale.

Out of curiosity which markets exactly do you see with a positive AI outlook?

Also, I think you are downplaying the "anglophone" social media backlash too much for a couple reasons. _Anglophone_ social media is huge, even global. Everyone participates in anglophone social media even non-English speakers (who post in broken English, or comment in their native language in English-language content). So there is anglophone social media in all markets; it's not difficult to be aware of and espouse American public sentiment.

Even if you narrowly define anglophone socmed to correspond to the geo-cultural anglosphere, I think it's not surprising at all that the bulk of backlash is focused there because the leading AI companies are based there as well.

Yeah I think if we are looking at it through that lens, the problem is in the term _intelligence_ in itself. Psychology and biology could not even pinpoint what exactly makes for _intelligence_. There isn't really a precise definition yet so it's just natural that definitions tend to shift.

I don't think we even need to go into tech and AI for an example. The intelligence or lack thereof of pets surprise us. Sometimes a cat is surprisingly smart when it is able to open a door to get food it wasn't supposed to. But then same cat gets bamboozled by walls and simple optical illusions. We generally expect that if something/a human is smart enough to do the former, then it shouldn't be dumb enough to fall for the latter.

Coming back to AI, this dissonance is how AI-generated images are detected for example. If a human can render something so well, you wouldn't expect them to make small but nonetheless elementary line art mistakes.

Fair enough. Mobile and social became ubiquitous and are now table stakes. But my problem with VR and blockchain---even allowing for the fact/assumption that they are still relevant---is that they never lived up to their hype. They never became ubiquitous as mobile and social. They don't inspire investor confidence like they did in the past, if at all. AI, if it survives the public and regulatory backlash, could be headed to the same understudy role.

I'm using "AI" broadly here even if the current investor darling is just LLMs because, well, the term AI has been front and center of all promotions and investors and the general consumer public isn't really a discerning bunch. So I stand by my prediction that a "soft taboo" is likely where investors and consumers shy away from anything even remotely AI. The consumer backlash has arguably already started.

I guess it is a sign we are re-evaluating what makes humans special.

Always has been: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect

Tangentially: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox

But _AI today_ is heavily subsidized by investor capital in the same way investors subsidized social/mobile/big data/VR/blockchain in the past. It's not unlikely "AI" would get a soft taboo in the same way as if you just presented a mobile-first, big-data driven, VR social media app today.

Which, judging by the terrible PR optics AI has nowadays, could unfortunately seep into academia too. Fund grants wouldn't want their names associated with anything with "AI" in its name even if it's a return to expert systems.

Who clicked on this thread looking for career advice??? This discussion is not what I was expecting when I clicked on this thread. What's with the sudden obsession about the field having to be lucrative first? Where's the "hacker spirit" of just wanting to know how stuff works?

Academia was never a lucrative field. For the sacrifices it requires, it will never be financially viable for me to work there. Am I wasting my time going through the Feynman Lectures nonetheless? Keeping my calculus decent? I clicked on this for the same reasons; not looking for career/financial advice, I just have a morbid curiosity about how the sausage is made.

Not to mention, of course, that skills are transferable. Philosophy students don't study Plato because his ideas are relevant to everyday life. His way of thinking/reasoning about problems given his limited means is a timeless skill. I will probably never have to use any direct fact in the Feynman Lectures in my dayjob but learning to think like Feynman is useful when reasoning about large obscure systems which I do encounter daily. FL is not so much an exercise in physics but in the application of the scientific method in general. For software engineering, it nicely compliments Skiena's "The Algorithm Design Manual" IMO.

What I expect to learn from graphics programming:

- it's a good practice for applied maths/vectors/linalg - it's a good practice to learn lowlevel APIs/programming tricks - maybe I'll make a cool game

All of which can also find application elsewhere in computing.

And if yomomma had balls, she'd be yopoppa.

Puh-lease. Unity's "hara-kiri" was in 2023 by which time Godot was NINE years old. Hara-kiri or no hara-kiri Godot has shown longevity and relevance. Anything gained from Unity's own-goals is just cherry on top.

All fair points. I did not consider inventory tracking but yeah it's not likely to be the killer feature that would tide restaurant owners for one form factor or the other.

That said, I have a _feeling_ (I cannot emphasize this enough) that some restaurants might actually relish telling some of their patrons that the _special_ item is no longer available. Makes it seem even more exclusive when there's more demand than supply. I'm not talking about Mc Donald's sundae ice cream but rather Sea Urchin Ceviche from Dorsia's. It's only ever happened to me once, so anecdotal.

It's cringey because it's thoughtless contrarian points. Like, really, how do digital menus provide more details? The lack of detail is not a problem of analog vs digital but from whoever decided on what goes in the menu in the first place.

QR codes work across a conference room (personal experience) how old is your phone, exactly?

See, here we go. Of course a conference room with good (if not necessarily aesthetic) lighting is conducive to scanning QR codes. I bet said QR code was also printed large or even projected. A _restaurant_ on the other hand, more often than not has (a) small QR code print-outs---remember these are put on a table!---and (b) often has mood diffuse lighting which makes getting a good exposure on an already small print-out more complicated. If someone had the genius idea to print it out on reflective glossy paper that complicates things. However, if someone lacked the foresight and printed it on normal matte paper, you might find it stained with three-week old sauce.

(EDIT: For the record, other than the aforementioned Pixels, my current phone is a Sony XPeria 1 V1, but IDK I can't even handle JSON files, maybe I'm also holding my phone doofusly.)

QR codes have gotten easier to use over the past ten-ish years, I've seen it.

I'm not disputing this and yet they are still at a point where it's a PITA. They've plateaued. Soooo...Tesla FSD before or after it's a PITA no more?

My point isn't that you haven't scanned QR codes before; it's that it seems you haven't scanned QR codes to get a restaurant menu while eating out with a large group ever. Hence, (⸝⸝⸝>﹏<⸝⸝⸝) .

But if $DAYJOB actually keeps you from your dying kid's bedside, is it still there to "sustain" it? Or is it just leeching into your life?

Once people get used to QR code menus we will see its benefits over traditional menus.

Au contraire, mon ami. Once people see the benefits of anything they will keep using it and naturally get used to it. Not the other way around.

Really enough HN now. Goodness, the discussion here is ridiculous.

You make some good points but some are, excuse me, cringey-wrong.

physical menus are hard to update

How often does a restaurant update a menu? Those that need to update frequently already solved that by having a chalk board.

physical menus are often too simple, requiring asking the server questions they've answered a dozen times before already, hurting their efficiency...

How does a digital menu solve this? All online menus I've used have basically the same amount of information as a printed menu, with some being marginally better. The marginally better ones are the online menus for food delivery because they have a bit more flavor text, pun intended. This is however offset by restaurant-owners' tendency to put unrepresentative stock photo to go with the item and they just put a disclaimer about the photos somewhere.

physical menus aren't cleaned between uses, so you're touching everything the server touched, and the three people before you.

Ok but please wash your hands after you order at the earliest and before you touch your food at the latest.

physical menus aren't searchable.

Fair but only thanks to `Ctrl + F`, the best menu search interface by a mile.

Difficulty scanning the QR code will get better over time, obviously.

I'm starting a prediction market if this will happen before or after Tesla FSD.

it ignores how QR codes work (you don't have to be that close)

Uhhh...what? The farthest I could scan a QR code is about two handspans away. This was from the original Google Pixel! It was remarkably good at catching QR codes, I have no idea why. I thought it was the moment scanning a QR code has finally gotten better(!) so imagine my disappointment when my subsequent phones (even one Google Pixel 3a) couldn't live up to it. The 3a was still better than others. Even with flagship models, you gotta be pretty close to scan QRs not to mention wait for the exposure and focus to adjust.

(Whoever tells me "cameras can zoom now dummy" has never actually scanned a QR code from afar with the camera zoom lens. When you zoom, the exposure changes AND it becomes _super_ motion sensitive which is, obviously, not great for scanning things.)

Does the author really think getting the server to split the bill is easier?

I am not the author but yes I do think so. Server has the table's bill in front of him and a calculator, each tells him what they had and pay in turn. Et voila.

Splitting the bill inconveniences comes down to a couple of factors IME:

1. the customers know what they had but don't know the price so they have to leaf through the menu again to calculate.

2. the table is provided with only one copy of the bill so the group has to scramble over one measly piece of paper, talking over each other, to compute their share.

Both can be solved by centralizing all that complexity on the waiter.

To be fair, I think the author's bad experience was due to wanting to keep the apple crumble gesture a secret. That is such a bizarre complaint, bro. It doesn't make sense to me either! You're all in a restaurant, everyone knows all the food will be paid for by someone! Why keep it a secret that you paid for the apple crumble?

That's enough HN for the rest of the week.

Wasnt it pretty well documented Romero was fired from ID for playing Doom

Afaik Carmack's forcing everyone into single room was a direct result of frustration over people playing multiplayer Doom instead of working on the next game.

It's been ages since I read "Masters of Doom" but the impression I got from its coverage of this era was that the rest of the team was "blocked" by Carmack's exacting vision that every release should feature an advancement in technology.

I mean, I don't intend to make excuses for one John or the other. There was definitely some hubris involved on both sides and, had I been in Romero's shoes, the decent thing to do would be to help out Carmack or de-scope Quake, scale back ambitions. I.e., that project needed better adult supervision. I just think that their organizational dynamics (considering their partnership's history) made Carmack the de-facto "engine developer" and Romero the de-facto "game designer/developer". When the going got tough, Carmack felt (rightly) slighted by the loose role definitions but Romero was too busy having fun.

Again, more maturity would've helped, either from a neutral third party or if they talked it out openly amongst themselves.

Also, FWIW, Romero is still credited as a programmer in Quake. So at least it's not like he left/was fired without putting anything of credit into Quake.

Daikatana failed to make us Romero's bitches

Fair. And I'm still waiting for the big thing from Romero's Irish studio. That said, Romero has had an undeniably prolific career in games. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Romero#Games . This guy just loves making games.

This gonna blow your mind: https://aesthetics.fandom.com/wiki/Skeuomorphism

Cliché cynic's comment: the end users they are concerned about are the companies they sell ads to. If you're not that, tough luck.