simula67

RFC 4180 [1] Section 2.6 says:

"Fields containing line breaks (CRLF), double quotes, and commas should be enclosed in double-quotes."

If the DMS output isn’t quoting fields that contain commas, that’s technically invalid CSV.

A small normalization step before COPY (or ensuring the writer emits RFC-compliant CSV in the first place) would make the pipeline robust without renaming countries or changing delimiters.

That way, if/when the DMS output is fixed upstream, nothing downstream needs to change.

[1] https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc4180.html

I am glad to hear that there was someone who argued for the right course of action in the Amazon Prime organization. I don't know why this is not being fought by other regulators. I also paid for Amazon Prime, expecting to get ad-free content, and then they started to add advertisements. This may not be fraud, but it is definitely lowering my opinion of Amazon.

The bank is not printing money new money, no matter how many times this idea gets repeated by people who are, ironically, pumping crypto coins that were printed out of thin air.

It is now widely accepted that bank lending produces new money[1][2]

[1] https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/quarterly-...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3lP3BhvnSo

I hope they at least split Office and Windows into seperate companies. Hopefully, then we may get Microsoft Office on Linux.

The worst part of it is that the "true Internet" is probably still out there, but we can't find it anymore. The search engines have gotten way worse over the years and we no longer have good enough filters to ignore all the nonsense.

Even today, Perl is the only scripting language with more than 200K modules and no Global Interpreter Lock.

While you may be able to create amazing experiences in JavaScript, JavaScript still has multiple problems:

1. It is inconsistent [1]

2. It does not have many features that programmers love and other languages have.

3. It has a community that holds different values from what other programmers value themselves.

If people want to continue development in JavaScript, they can. But since JavaScript has a monopoly on the (fairly large) 'frontend development for the web' market, there will always be attempts to find an alternative.

[1] https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat

Is there a Mac app to copy Windows' windowing behavior?

I want different virtual desktops to behave like they are different computers with a shared clipboard, i.e., I don't want to see apps from other virtual desktops showing up on 'Alt-Tab', dock bar to show all open apps, etc.

It is unfortunate that the company that became incredibly successful, at least partly, because of the hackability of Linux and open source software is now actively working to suppress hackability.

I recently had to unroot my phone since it was too much pain. Almost all apps were constantly fighting to not be allowed to run. After a while, I had a variety of root-hiding modules installed on Magisk, and every time I downloaded and installed a new app, the dread was there that it would not work because of root.

War on General Computing[1] is here. For some reason, most people do not seem to care that they do not have full control of the devices that they bought with their own hard-earned money.

It is one of those rare cases where 'your choices affect my choices' and therefore not meshing with the idea that maximum individual freedom is always a good thing. Therefore, I don't think this can be solved by market forces- we may need some regulation. I think it would be fair to ask the companies to allow the apps to run on a rooted device so long as the user takes responsibility for any resulting losses. Any service provider should still be responsible for securing their own systems though.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUEvRyemKSg

Berkshire Hathway is also a conglomerate, but it does perform fairly well.

Another option is duff: https://github.com/elmindreda/duff

Recommend Kings and Generals series on Mongols: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzatw32j-i4

It is also possible to do most of that with Python in Pycharm (except maybe jump behind?).

This is why going from Python to Go can feel like going backward. IMO, even compiled languages should have an "interpreted mode" for development. Once the development is complete, the code can still be compiled to get the benefits of runtime performance.

I thought this was well known in the Anglosphere.

Anyway, I have heard that this is why the words for cooked version of the meat and the name of the animal is different in English.

For example, cow meat when cooked becomes beef. Sheep meat when cooked becomes mutton.

The Norman French elites referred to the cooked version by its French names but the English servants who dealt with the animals used the English words.

While manual backup and restore tests were run once a month to ensure our backups were functioning, they were run manually. After digging into why our restores were not coming up with data, I found that our recurring backups were missing the flag to run volume backups with Restic which snapshots PVC block volume data.

Can someone explain this? How did they test restores, if the actual restore failed to come up with data?

Businesses gave mixed results on remote work productivity, with 30% saying it boosted output, and 40% saying it reduced it.

I think this is a continuation of the theme of technology making time-space co-ordination more independent.

Recorded music/videos made it possible for artists to record their content and for consumers to enjoy it across space and time.

E-commerce companies such as Amazon, Ebay, Craigslist made it possible for people to not require to be physically present at the same location at the same time to exchange goods and services.

Zoom, Slack, Confluence, GitHub etc. did make it possible for people to build great products and services by collaborating across space and time for a long time, it just validated during COVID.

The thing is remote work is what enables western companies to hire high quality labour from Asia, Eastern Europe etc to push out great innovations. If it works for that, why can it not work for employees across the length and breadth of the organisation?

I remember when I used to work at a company where I had to do some testing on physical servers in a datacenter. When I had to install new operating systems, I had to physically walk into the data center and stand in the hot/cold isles, pop in my USB drive and (re)install the Operating Systems I needed.

The day I discovered IPMI, I stopped going in. The IPMI implementation was not that good, but it was still better than going in physically to the data center. It cemented by view that, if something can be done remotely, it should be done remotely, even if the remote solution is not perfect.

PyAutoGui is very good. I have been using it for a long time and rewrote some simple ahk automations with it recently. It's strictly not a one-to-one replacement (so I still use autohotkey) but the UI automation features are well-done.

Meanwhile for the newer and more demanding JetStream 2.0 benchmark, Google Chrome continues to win easily over Firefox

It is a good outcome that we have for the web: good standards and a reference implementation in the form of WebKit/Blink.

This is a boon for web developers: follow the standards, but if there are gaps in the standard, check the behavior on Chrome. If there were multiple mainstream browser implementations with split market share; it would be painful for web developers. Large amounts of time and energy would be wasted on testing the web apps on every possible browser implementation. This is probably why platform technologies such as Operating Systems, browsers, etc. trend towards monopolies or duopolies. A highly fragmented market is not in users, developers, or even platform developers' best interests.

Chrome also has well-resourced competition in the form of Apple and Microsoft. As Chrome adds more user-hostile changes, users will switch away to friendlier browsers, such as Brave, Edge, Safari, etc.

I have been using it with Oracle SQLPlus to regain some sanity. I wish Oracle would develop a good CLI and make it available by default. For bonus points, release it to be relocatable and backward compatible with older versions.

to explain why they should stop using #Chromium / #GoogleChrome and use #Firefox or #Epiphany as their main #web #browser

Or use Brave.

The difference between Firefox and IE was orders of magnitude larger than the difference between Chrome and Firefox

I don't think so. When Chrome came out it was much better than competition too[1]. I don't know if Firefox was that much better than Internet Explorer.

It is also possible that Chrome rode the wave of Firefox i.e, Firefox got people thinking about improved browsing experience by switching from Internet Explorer. Then Chrome came along and picked up many new users who may have otherwise gotten picked up by Firefox.

[1] https://youtu.be/LRmrMiOWdfc

Pretty soon, the French visiting Tokyo will report Tokyo Syndrome: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_syndrome

The fact that these mandates are required is a piece of evidence that points to the idea that WFH is popular. If WFH was not popular, we would see workers showing up to offices on their own, since offices are open and have been open for a while. I did not deny that their maybe genuine value in in-person setups, I just said it should outweigh the benefits of remote work, some of which I listed. Regarding intelligence of CEOs, even smart people can occasionally make strange decisions, there are many examples throughout history.

I am really surprised at how the remote work situation is evolving.

Despite not mandating in-person work for most of last 3 years, tech and non-tech companies have shipped great products, delivered many high quality projects; on time and within budget, thereby proving that mandatory in-person work is not necessary to make a healthy profit. Given that WFH has other benefits for both employers (lower office costs, access to a larger pool of talent etc.) and employees (reduced commute times, more flexibility of work etc.) so the return to office should be because the benefits of in-person work are above and beyond these advantages. Has this been proven? Can we see the studies? Mark Zuckerberg said that newer employees under-perform because of lack of in-person interaction. Fine, but are there any groups that outperform? What about introverts? Single mothers? Differently abled people?

I would have thought that this was an opportune moment for some of the top companies to poach some top talent. I would have thought that at least one FAANG company would permanently remove the mandate for remote work causing people who wanted the flexibility to start to apply. This would trigger a 'wfh-benefit-war' among the big companies and the smaller companies would follow. However, all the FAANG companies have announced in perfect unison that workers would be mandated to come back to office.

My strongest suspicion is that there is some sort of market failure in the employment market.

I think it is probably because of the UNIX philosophy of the virtue of silence: 'The program should say nothing if it has nothing interesting to say'.

It is an open question whether progress is 'interesting' or not. My own opinion is that it is not interesting if the operation is nearly instantaneous. If any operation can take more than 5 seconds, it should have a progress bar and an estimated time of completion.

Earlier versions of Windows did this very well. Often these progress bars were a joke, but sometimes they were useful. It gave us valuable input on whether there is enough time to go get a cup of coffee, which as we all know, is the most important question for us all.

How unfortunate that Sqlite Virtual Machine has opcodes to directly manipulate B-Trees. The opcode documentation[1] is even written in terms of B-Trees. This means that it would be too complicated to replace the storage engine with something else, necessitating the need for seperate products such as duckdb.

[1] https://www.sqlite.org/opcode.html

Can anyone with good robotics experience explain why these types of robots are not in wider commercial use?

We have seen interesting robots like this one, from Boston Dynamics and others but they still seem to be far from displacing humans in the workforce. It seems that these robots have similar fine motor skills to humans, enough to displace humans in more economic activities.

If visual detection and response is the problem, teleoperation is always an option: hire people from low-labor cost countries to operate them remotely.

So I am assuming that some kind of manufacturing costs are the reason that these robots are not taking over more human labor in advanced economies. Is that correct?

It’s the best GUI automation tool out there.

I think PyAutoGui is pretty good.

Google should be forced to open the system settings panel that allows users to change the default browser, not do it for them.

Why is it not enough that the user clicked on the button to change the default browser?

If this window unfairly favours one browser over another, I'd say that would be anti-competitive, but requiring to go through said window is not

Making it harder for users to switch from the default browser to another browser unfairly favours the default browser over non-default browsers.

I think we are now conditioned to think that higher numbers are 'better' or 'continuations' of lower numbers. For example, "Back to the Future: 3" movie is a continuation of the story of the movie "Back to the Future: 2". Similarly, Windows version 3 is the new and improved version of Windows Version 2.

It seems that marketing executives have forgotten that part of their jobs is to ensure that they communicate product qualities accurately to consumers.

Google is one of the worst offenders in this, with their madness over naming. Is Nexus 5X an earlier version of Nexus 6? No? It denotes the size of the screen? What exactly is a Pixel? Phone? Tablet? Notebook? What does Chromecast have to do with Chrome?

I always though Intel is a close second. There can be better names for Intel processor lines:

i3: Mobile

i5: Balanced

i7: Professional

i9: Creative/Graphics

There may be better approximations of course. But ideally if a product is targetted at a segment, it should be made clear in the brand name. Generations can be mentioned as suffix: p13 would be 13th generation of Professional, m5 would be 5th generation of mobile.

Apple does a good job of this with their Mac lines:

Air: Ultraportable

Pro: Creatives/Professional users

M1, M2 etc: higher is always better.

People don't want to feel ripped off, so I am sure that the clear communication from the Apple marketing team provides a significant tailwind to their sales team.