HN user
The author is mixing two discussions: soul/body dualism and qualia (hard problem).
It could be true that there's only physical body, but still have the qualia explanatory gap.
Parquet file format writes its metadata including length info after all data, at the footer. It was counterintuitive when I first look at it, but smart thinking about it now. I haven't had to trade off for memory constraints, but being able to stream output is definitely easier!
Interesting point about the difference in escape characters, I stored length and the decoded value so it's ready for string view. But when I need them back as JSON string, I need to encode them again :)