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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • Couple of reasons of varying importance:

    • Security. Even when you limit operations or table access it’s very easy to mess something up. Some new employee starts storing sensitive data in the wrong place or a db admin accidentally turns off the wrong permissions, etc…
    • It’s secretly more overengineered than a standard api despite looking simpler. If your app needs extremely robust query capabilities then you probably have a use case for an entire analytics stack and could use an open source option. Otherwise your users probably just need basic search, filtering, sorting, etc…
    • Ungodly, Flex Tape tier tight coupling. Part of the purpose of an api is to abstract away implementation details and present a stable contract. Now if you want to migrate/upgrade the database or add a new data source, everyone has to know about it and it’s potentially a major breaking change.
    • Familiarity. If someone else steps in to maintain it it’s much easier to get up to speed with a more standard stack. You don’t need a seven layer salad of enterprise abstraction bullshit, but it’s useful to see a familiar separation of auth, queries, security, etc…
    • Having the option to do business logic outside of the database can save countless headaches. Instead of inventing views or kludging sprocs to do some standard transformation, you can pull in a mature library. Some things, such as scrubbing PII, are probably damn near impossible without a higher tier layer to work in.
    • Client support. Your browser/device probably has a few billion options for consuming a REST/HATEOAS/graphql/whatever api. I doubt there’s many direct sql options with wide support.

    I probably wouldn’t do it outside of a tiny solo project. There are plenty of frameworks which do similar things (such as db driven apis) without compromising on flexibility, security or features.



  • Except these are states that explicitly signed on to this constitution, not some innocent sovereign country. It’s not problematic at all to collectively enforce what they’re constantly trying to weasel out of.

    It hasn’t even been oppression or exploitation, the quality of life for those populations has always objectively improved. You won’t catch me shedding a tear for slave plantation owners getting their property broken up and redistributed. Good riddance to the Jim Crowe business owners. Let’s absolutely have armed poll watchers ensuring the voting rights of minorities.

    Don’t fall for the conservative crocodile tears that pour out when we infringe on their right to keep citizens uneducated, sick and poor.


  • Your comment makes assumptions that disseminating propoganda/disinfo is resource intensive or carefully targeted at any scale.

    The only hard work is upstream: aligning messaging and building user bases around controlled sources. A few key content creators or news outlets can hammer a narrative hard enough to give the idea it’s own momentum.

    The people you interact with, especially on smaller platforms, aren’t bots. Bots and malicious actors exist to amplify messages in the main stream (up votes, shares, reposts, etc…) and they generally don’t have to interact much beyond putting up the facade of a normal user. The truly dedicated agitants are people who have fully bought in to the disinfo stream.

    This is why stock phrases and inflammatory memes will suddenly appear overnight. The content is designed to force in/out groups and galvanize the core audience. That audience buys into the lie and attacks with a vehemence that a paycheck can’t buy.

    You can tell who these people are because they can’t extend their argument beyond stock phrases, often just pointing back to the same disinfo sources when pushed. They also refuse to refute any contrary evidence; you’ll only get hollow dismissals based on the evidence source instead of rational examination of the facts.




  • Out of curiosity, what is your experience/usage like with this? Spotify is very easy to justify if you heavily use some of their features because there’s not a way (that I know of) to replicate them. For example:

    • Shared playlists
    • Universal links directly to songs
    • Playback control from a second device
    • Group listen/jam
    • Zero overhead for search and discovery. From someone mentioning a band you can find, sample, and add to a playlist in 30s or less
    • Public playlist discovery
    • Easy crawling. Eg. browsing from Song -> Featured Artist -> Album -> Record label -> Related Artists etc…

    From my usage, sacrificing a majority of those is a non-starter because my Spotify usage has become more than mp3 hosting and organization.




  • I understand from your comment that you’ve read too many sci-fi books to understand what a massive resource sink that would be with negligible benefit. It’s pretty basic physics.

    We’ve already got cheap transportation, look how that’s turning out for the planet. But I’m sure burning God knows how much energy to launch more junk into space will save the world.

    We’re already approaching a critical mass of private equity space trash in orbit, what’s a few more lowest-bidder megastructures? At least the ultra rich will get their life rafts while we burn.


  • Because the world has actual things in it like people, wildlife, culture and history. Space has none of those things. Unless you’re there working as a scientist to study things that can’t be studied on earth, it’s pointless.

    As of now it’s a glorified roller coaster. At its best private space travel could be Disneyland in space. At worst it’s just rich people paying to be carried up mount everest for clout but with exponentially more resources wasted.






  • As for middle school, exactly what did you learn that you think is so useful for daily life?

    Off the top of my head: basic biology so I’m not dumb enough to be antivax. History subjects that require more than elementary maturity so maybe we can avoid another Holocaust. Enough physics, ecology and chemistry that I can comprehend how climate change is happening. How basic statistics work so I’m not completely lost when someone throws around misleading data.

    None of that is automatic from a 4th grade education and is crucial to be a functioning citizen. Learning to take unquestioned GPT answers is not a substitute for actually learning any of those.

    You either went to a painfully bad pipeline of schools or were too dumb to recognize the important parts.



  • The problem is offloading critical thinking to a blackbox of questionably motivated design. Did you use it to solve problems or did you use it to find a sufficient approximation of a solution? If you can’t deduce why the given solution works then it is literally unknowable if your problem is solved, you’re just putting faith in an algorithm.

    There are also political reasons we’ll never get luxury gay space communism from it. General Ai is the wet dream of every authoritarian: an unverifiable, omnipresent, first line source of truth that will shift the narrative to whatever you need.

    The brain is a muscle and critical thinking is trained through practice; not thinking will never be a shortcut for thinking.