• 6 Posts
  • 359 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • Got hands on experience with this. Wasn’t my design choice but I inherited an app with a database where one of the keys was tied to a completely separate database. I mean at the time it probably made sense but the most unlikely of scenarios actually happened: that other database, the one I had zero control over, was migrated to a new platform. All of those keys were synthetic so of course they were like, “Meh, why we gotta keep the old keys?” So post-migration my app becomes basically useless and I spent 6 hours writing migration code, some of it on off hours, to fix my data.

    So it’s questionable whether a foreign key of a completely different system is a natural key, but at the very least never use a key YOU don’t control.










  • Not sure if you want to label it as a “captcha alternative”. In most cases I’m sure the captcha is used because they want a real person looking at the page (and the ads on the page). In this case it seems more like a way to keep either bots or people from doing nothing but consuming content (or hacking) without giving back something of value. Either way I really like the idea.

    Other ways, in theory, I think you could do this kind of thing are torrent ratios (e.g. hosting one or moreLinux ISOs), general archiving (e.g. you get asked to return a random range of bytes from a file you’re supposed to be backing up), you run a weather station that reports temperature to the National Weather Service. You might think about a more general framework for just verifying if user X has been contributing something of value.


  • I’ve never heard anyone explicitly say this but I’m sure a lot of people (i.e. management) think that AI is a replacement for static code. If you have a component with constantly changing requirements then it can make sense, but don’t ask an llm to perform a process that’s done every single day in the exact same way. Chief among my AI concerns is the amount of energy it uses. It feels like we could mostly wean off of carbon emitting fuels in 50 years but if energy demand skyrockets will be pushing those dates back by decades.