nehalem

Thank you for your thoughtful reply. The extension system makes great sense.

But it's also stuff like `"SELECT * FROM my_df"` – It's super cool but why is my database connecting to an in-memory pandas data frame? On the other hand, DuckDB can connect to remote Parquet files and interact with them without (explicitly) importing them.

In these examples, DuckDB feels more like an ephemeral SQL-esque Pandas/Polars alternative rather than a database.

Probably it's just me losing track of what a database is and we've evolved from "a monolithic and permanent thing that you store data on and read data from via queries".

I have a deep appreciation for DuckDB, but I am afraid the confluence of brilliant ideas makes it ever more complicated to adopt —- and DuckLake is another example for this trend.

When I look at SQLite I see a clear message: a database in a file. I think DuckDb is that, too. But it’s also an analytics engine like Polars, works with other DB engines, supports Parquet, comes with a UI, has two separate warehouse ideas which both deviate from DuckDB‘s core ideas.

Yes, DuckLake and Motherduck are separate entities, but they are still part of the ecosystem.

To be honest, I don’t know. I just enjoy the simplicity of devenv. It’s the right amount of user friendly.

Although I’ve never committed to using nix system-wide, I do enjoy nix-based using https://devenv.sh/ for the very reasons described in the article. It’s much easier than local containers for development.

Sure and that’s nice going forward. Yet unlike with Chrome, older devices won’t be updated making this a nice add-on at best.

And yet another modernisation of the web platform sabotaged by Apple and their misguided (malicious?) refusal to update their devices continually.

https://caniuse.com/temporal

It will take years until this can be widely used as intended.

I like this a lot. What I would love to see is a panel to run management commands and see their output. Would be great in services like Google Cloud Run where you cannot access a shell anymore like you could on Heroku.

This is a straw-man argument. A public service that can answer whether a one-time key provided by the user to the service fulfills a certain requirement would suffice.

No doubt, maybe should I have emphasised the "general" part of "general purpose" more. Not a hardware person myself, I wonder whether there would be purpose-built hardware that could do the same more cheaply – think F(P)GA.

Whenever I see another supposedly menial device including enough general purpose hardware to run Doom, I wonder whether I should think of that as a triumph of software over hardware or an economic failure to build cheaper purpose-built hardware for things like sending audio over a radio.

Answering the question how to sell more tokens per customer while maintaining ~~mediocre~~ breakthrough results.

Seeing news like this, I wonder whether there is a market for an OSS Android and/or Linux distribution that provides the management comfort of Chromebooks without being tied to Google, Apple or Microsoft. A little like Keycloak but one layer higher.

The actual disturbing thing is that given Next‘s track record of questionable security architecture, the author felt compelled to make the joke explicit.

There is an element of tragic comedy to those announcement. While remarkable on their own, everybody knows that one cannot use any new browser feature reliably any time soon due to Apple not shipping continuous updates to the browsers they force upon their users.

To me personally, it feels like Windows 2000 was the last and maybe only consistent UI onto which all later versions bolted what they considered improvements without ever overhauling the UI in full.

I am glad Vercel works on agents now. After all, Next is absolutely perfect and recommends them for greater challenges. /s

Thank you. I was rather thinking of magazine like layouts with columns of text and headers and footers on every page holding article title and page number.

How does it do with multi-column text and headers and footers?

I wonder what happened to Siri. Not a single mention anywhere?

I wonder how this relates to Mother Duck (https://motherduck.com/)? They do „DuckDB-powered data warehousing“ but predate this substantially.

Not knowing much about special-purpose chips, I would like to understand whether chips like this would give Google a significant cost advantage over the likes of Anthropic or OpenAI when offering LLM services. Is similar technology available to Google's competitors?

This looks great!

Is anyone familiar with something similar for Python in general and Django in particular?

I wonder whether the search algorithm would need (and can?) to be adjusted to respond to the increased probability of playing numbers that are hard to find with standard binary search.

Big fan of Tailscale, yet I wonder whether it wouldn’t be better to make internal services securely available over the internet (zero trust rather than castle-and-moat). On the other hand, the former might be just to expensive for smaller organisations.

Could somebody that knows both explain how Simutrans compares to (Open) Transport Tycoon Deluxe?

You are correct that the provisions of EU law can be construed as punitive damages. That’s why I emphasised the German legal tradition. Also, those damages do not apply in all possible situations of cancelled flights and they do not punish withholding refunds for no reason. If the airline cancels three weeks prior and then refuses to pay, the EU law does not apply and the behaviour we would like to disincentivise is not to honour the refund claims rather than the cancellation.

Those are passenger rights, a set of rules different from German laws of contract. Also, for cancellations there is no compensation if the flight was cancelled early enough or if the airline can prove exceptional circumstances.

Allowing punitive damages would be a major change to the foundations of German civil law. German law (mostly and traditionally) thinks of damages as a means to make the other party whole rather than to incentivise a certain behaviour of the injurer. Hence German law is utmost reluctant to give anyone more than they suffered in losses.

Adding some obscure consumer protection rule is a much less controversial change to the law.

The traditional German legal doctrine sees the enforcement of fair business practices rather in the hands of the authorities than in those of consumers. Of course, there is little evidence of this to work in this or similar contexts.

I don’t think that this regulation would make any ticket cancelable. For one, the booking would still be an enforceable contract. But the airline would have to enforce it now. But a more likely scenario would be to hold the payment in escrow, release it on check in and refund it on cancellation. A bit like Paypal‘s buyer protection.

In this context and under German law, a reservation would be an enforceable contract between passenger and airline. If a passenger does not show up, the airline can sue for payment. Hence the proposal mostly shifts the burden of litigation to the airline.

In Germany, airlines have a strong incentive to refuse any refund. Courts are very slow to render decisions and the worst that can happen is being ordered to refund the original amount. Behaviour-correcting damages do not exist under German law. In combination this deters some passengers from pursuing their claim.

Edit: Airlines would also be ordered to pay court and lawyer fees which could be construed incentivising. Yet both fees are statutory capped and quite low for the average ticket price.