I haven’t tried it yet, but GrayJay purports to be an aggregator along those lines: https://grayjay.app/
The specific question was “I support equal rights for the LGBTQ community”
Seems early to assume an actual decline. 2023 might have been weird. Election years might be weird. Who knows? But it is worth keeping an eye on.
Side note: If your chart has two years, and an assigned color for each year… Don’t use both colors for both bars.
If not for this specific case being tied to some text about going down from 84 to 80, I would not have been able to understand the rest of the charts.
Not at all the point, but:
Michael Manga
I suddenly realized that for eight years I’d been ignoring this potentially amazing new process, 4,000 metres down on the ocean floor
Makes you wonder what strange things are happening right in front of us, if only we looked with the right tools.
Microsoft sues the Library of Babel
Or maybe an abbreviated hash of the text of their specifications?
Sabine
abe-simpson-turning-around.gif
The venerable master Qc Na was walking with his student, Anton. Hoping to prompt the master into a discussion, Anton said “Master, I have heard that objects are a very good thing - is this true?” Qc Na looked pityingly at his student and replied, “Foolish pupil - objects are merely a poor man’s closures.”
Chastised, Anton took his leave from his master and returned to his cell, intent on studying closures. He carefully read the entire “Lambda: The Ultimate…” series of papers and its cousins, and implemented a small Scheme interpreter with a closure-based object system. He learned much, and looked forward to informing his master of his progress.
On his next walk with Qc Na, Anton attempted to impress his master by saying “Master, I have diligently studied the matter, and now understand that objects are truly a poor man’s closures.” Qc Na responded by hitting Anton with his stick, saying “When will you learn? Closures are a poor man’s object.” At that moment, Anton became enlightened.
I think it’s kind of strange.
Between quantification and consciousness, we tend to dismiss consciousness because it can’t be quantified.
Why don’t we dismiss quantification because it can’t explain consciousness?
“Insufficient detail. Please ask a specific question.”
“Read the wiki”
“Nobody here is interested in holding your hand.”
I’m talking about user interactions, not deployments.
In a monolith with a transactional data store, you can have a nice and clean atomic state transition from one complete, valid state to the next in a single request/response.
With a distributed system, you’ll often have scenarios where the component which receives the initial request can’t guarantee the final state of the system by the time it needs to produce a response.
If it did, it would spend most of its effort orchestrating other components. That would couple them together and be no more useful than a monolith, just with new and exciting failure modes. So really the best it can do is tell the client “Here’s a token you can use to check back on the state of this operation later”.
And because data is often partitioned between different services, you can end up having partially-applied state changes. This leaves the data in an otherwise-invalid state, which must be accounted for – simply because of an implementation detail, not because it’s semantically meaningful to the client.
In operations that have irreversible or non-idempotent external side-effects, this can be especially difficult to manage. You may want to allow the client to resume from immediately before or after the side-effect if there is a failure later on. Or you may want to schedule the side-effect, from the perspective of an earlier component in the chain, so that it happens even if a middle component fails (like the equivalent of a catch or finally block).
If you try to cut corners by representing these things as special cases where the later components send data back to earlier ones, you end up introducing cycles in the data flow of your microservices. And then you’re in for a world of hurt. It’s better if you can represent it as a finite state machine, from the perspective of some coordinator component that’s not part of the data flow itself. But that’s a ton of work.
It complicates every service that deals with it, and it gets really messy to just manage the data stores to track the state. And if you have queues and batching and throttling and everything else, along with granular permissions… Things can break. And they can break in really horrible ways, like infinitely sending the same data to an external service because the components keep tossing an event back to each other.
There are general patterns – like sagas, distributed transactions, and event-sourcing – which can… kind of ease this problem. But they’re fundamentally limited by the CAP Theorem. And there isn’t a universally-accepted clean way to implement them, so you’re pretty much doing it from scratch each time.
Don’t get me wrong. Sometimes “Here’s a token to check back later” and modeling interactions as a finite state machine rather than an all-or-nothing is the right call. Some interactions should work that way. But you should build them that way on purpose, not to work around the downsides of a cool buzzword you decided to play around with.
Microservices can be useful, but yeah working in a codebase where every little function ends up having to make a CAP Theorem trade-off is exhausting, and creates sooo many weird UX situations.
I’m sure tooling will mature over time to ease the pain of representing in-flight, rolling-back, undone, etc. states across an entire system, but right now it feels like doing reactive programming without observables.
And also just… not everything needs to scale like whoa. And they can scale in different ways: queue up-front, data replication afterwards, syncing ledgers of CRDTs… Scaling in-flight operations is often the worst option. But it feels familiar, so it’s often the default choice.
but it comes at the cost of short term agility
Often long-term agility, as well.
Big teams are faster on straightaways. Small teams go through the corners better. Upgrading from a go-kart to a dragster may just send your project 200mph into a wall. Sometimes a go-kart is really what you need.
‘Nobody’s more insulting’ to rural voters than Republicans
…say the people who wrote a book that’s literally called “White Rural Rage: The Threat to Democracy”.
You must be too young to remember when Bill Gates was the one person the entire world could agree was a worthless asshole.
If you need a primer: https://youtube.com/watch?v=lFS9DFXtj1M
And if they settle on they/them pronouns, you could have an inverted non-binary tree.
Hah, yeah a hexagon is a weird case. In my experience, devs talking about “math in a custom view” has always meant simply “I want to render some arbitrary stuff in its own coordinate system.” Sorry my assumption was too far. 😉
She had a brown-sounding name, dual citizenship, and attended a protest. “Unamerican” on three counts.