• 3 Posts
  • 138 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 26th, 2023

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  • Cache-like storage, private user-specific data, blobby or otherwise schemaless data. Stuff like that. But IMO it’s a matter of time until you find a need to operate against this data relationally, and then you regret using document storage. I’ve made this mistake twice now and do not intend to make it again. I now consider document storage architecture to be a performance optimization with significant tradeoffs, and not a choice to be made by default for nearly any scenario.



  • I really hate these awful “puzzles”. They only work by the asker intentionally withholding what, if any, constraints exist in the problem space leaving it totally vague, but of course there ARE secret constraints revealed if you violate them with your answer.

    Me: “I do it without flipping any switches. I just ask the lightswitches which one controls the light, and they tell me.”

    Interviewer: “That’s not allowed.”

    Me: “Well what exactly is allowed? Can I pull the cables out of the wall and see which connects to the bulb? Oh, I bet that’s not allowed. How about I open my smart home app and just check which of the smart switches is labeled for it? Oh, I bet it’s not a smart switch so I can’t do that either? Oh, then the bulb has a chime that boops when it comes on, so I just listen for the boop. Oh that’s not allowed either? Wait wait wait, the walls are glass, so I just watch to see when the bulb comes on when I flick the switches.”

    Even the canonical answer makes a dumb assumption. Ordinary LED bulbs don’t get hot.






  • Money is a transferrable form of debt, and debt is emotion. You do something for someone or give someone something. They are then “indebted” to you. Or the reverse - you’ve been issued a fine, meaning some of the “debt” others owed to you for something valuable is now void because you did something interpreted negatively.

    The physical money symbolizes the feeling of indebtedness, and standard currencies allow people to recognize one anothers’ debts as something commonly valuable and transferrable for symbolizing new debts.

    It sounds kind of like karma, but because money is just symbolic for debt and not actually the real manifestation of the emotions associated with the causes of the indebtedness, having a lot of money, or vice-versa, doesn’t translate to a karmic judgment of a person. Someone can trick their way into making others feel indebted to them, at least at the point in time of the emotion to money exchange. Or, they can literally steal the “debt markers” that others accrued. Or, one can decide that one kind of debt is not worth as much as another kind of debt - foreign exchange rates, employment wages, etc mediate this mostly in the sense that human time is not valued identically depending on where a person lives or who they are.

    And you can be “wealthy” without money, as long as enough people feel indebted to you and you can “exchange” that indebtedness for the things you want. The money is just for easy debt accounting and transfer.



  • Not exactly aimed at language keywords (although it is aimed at the language designers who decided abbreviations in keywords are acceptable):

    I hate abbreviations in source code so fucking much. Reading is more of software engineering than writing. If you cannot be bothered to type a whole word because typing is hard for you, find a different job. Do not force others to engage in mental gymnastics to understand what the fuck a variable or function is supposed to mean.