If you follow through on there being no goal, there is no working or not-working state, in which case it bears no relevancy on the question of whether "Working" is not the natural state in a complex world!
Or rather, you could say TFA is made more correct, by virtue of “working” not being a natural state in the first place.
But if we allow room to anthropomorphize, we can basically state that the natural goal of a natural system is to keep doing what it do, at least in regards to the larger outcomes. And for some strange reason, these systems are shockingly difficult to influence at meaningful scale in ways that are rarely true for the systems we design. In one sense, they continue to operate despite continuous minor and possibly major (but not catastrophically so, by definition) perturbations to their state
You need to burn ridiculous quantities of dino juice to influence the weather system. You need to look at windows a little funny to bring it to a complete halt. You need to bully only few substations to bring down the electrical grid.
For me, it's not until that file is retrieved for local use where I have to deal with this. If it was born remotely and only used remotely with the same settings, I never notice it. But yeah, I hate it with the passion that raises my temp to that of a thousand suns.
Oh neat; I’ve been calling it the “economy of the poor” since I can’t find any proper conversation on it. This is the first time I’ve seen someone bring it up
But I think the notable aspect is not that they have recourse, it’s that the economics properly scales down. Can’t afford 20 cigarettes? An Indian shop will sell you 10. Can’t afford 10? They’ll sell you 1. Can’t afford 1? They’ll sell you half a cigarette.
Can’t afford clean water? They’ll sell you mildly dirty water. Can’t afford mildly dirty water? They’ll sell you dirty water.
Can’t afford a modern, well built, safe car? How about one with 3 wheels? No doors? No AC? 10 MPG? The crumpling structure of a tin can? An engine with less HP than a lawnmower?
In the US, there’s an arbitrary cutoff where you simply aren't allowed to be sold goods and services by anyone in normal society. It’s not about giving recourse; it’s about not actively trying to ostracize them as a separate class of humanity.
You have to actively work to stop “functional poverty” from existing. In any normal setup, it’s just more of the same economy as otherwise.
I’ll read that article later, but that doesn’t sound right — there can’t be so many multi-millionaires that them getting free money is stressing out the system.
Quick random googling, I’m seeing the number 3.2% of retirees have more than $1m
I’m fairly positive the Greek alphabet mixed in Latin would measure quite poorly for legibility, if anyone did that study. Long before it’s an issue of pretentiousness
> The contract goes something like this: the caller is a human-authored application, running deterministic code, issuing predictable queries, reviewed by a developer before deployment. Writes are intentional. Connections are brief. When something goes wrong, a human notices. The database can be dumb and fast because the application layer is smart and careful.
This assumption is that of a non-DBA who happened to get a hold of a database.
When you have sufficient users, your expected set of queries is a complete shit show. Some will be efficient, many will be poorly tested and psychotic, and indistinguishable from a non-deterministic LLM.
Also who said humans can’t query the database directly in prod? If not direct sql access, business users have the next best thing with custom reports and such. And they will very much ask for ridiculous amounts of computation to answer trivial questions.
It was a foundational assumption of SQL that business users would directly access the database and write their own queries.
It’s why row level access and permissions exist. Use them
Or rather, you could say TFA is made more correct, by virtue of “working” not being a natural state in the first place.
But if we allow room to anthropomorphize, we can basically state that the natural goal of a natural system is to keep doing what it do, at least in regards to the larger outcomes. And for some strange reason, these systems are shockingly difficult to influence at meaningful scale in ways that are rarely true for the systems we design. In one sense, they continue to operate despite continuous minor and possibly major (but not catastrophically so, by definition) perturbations to their state
You need to burn ridiculous quantities of dino juice to influence the weather system. You need to look at windows a little funny to bring it to a complete halt. You need to bully only few substations to bring down the electrical grid.
reply