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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.



  • 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.




  • I think it could be potentially easier to thwart malicious bots than “honest” bots. I figure a bot that doesn’t care about robots.txt and whatnot would try to gobble up as many pages as it could find. You could easily place links into HTML that aren’t visible to regular users and a “greedy” bot would follow it anyway. From there you could probably have a website within a website that’s being generated by AI on the fly. To keep the bots from running up your bills you probably want it to be mostly static.


  • One of the reasons I think JS gets a lot of hate is the tooling is a bit of a mess. If you go that route I encourage you to generate or find a barebones project to start from. Getting that very first “Hello World” app to run can be a massive pain in the ass.

    I also don’t think the requirement to a desktop app and website in the same language is being fair. It’s definitely possible but different languages have different strengths. It shouldn’t make your brain explode to deal with more than one language and I think you could benefit from a shift in mindset. When I’m in JS world I know l I’ve gotta let go of performance and security desires (i.e. JS in the browser is a “clear box” and users can fully control it). When I’m in Java I know those things are highly important but also to not stress about “presentation”.









  • I’m not planning to alter the system daily so, admittedly, this is a bespoke, non-trivial process to handle an uncommon use case. In general I haven’t run into the kind of issues that immutable distros proport to fix. I would say this is moreso an OCD friendly approach to OS management. I’m also hoping this setup will basically force me into using Ansible more and manual tweaks less.

    I feel Guix and NixOS are a bit more in a league of their own due to their declarative nature. I’m on the fence if I want to go that far. Again, I’ll admit my knowledge of these systems is based on docs and I’ll probably have much different thoughts getting hands on.

    And my goal is to rely on Flatpak and containers but if that was the answer then all the immutable distros out there are about as overbaked as my idea.