deborah @ gnomicutterance @awful.systems

You’re thinking of my brother, Zathras.

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1 yr. ago

when you do not yet have (1) customers, (B) unit tests, (ג) developers who can write their own code, or (IV) exception handling, the term-of-art that comes to mind for doing anything besides auto-incrementing primary keys is YAGNI. (Especially because nobody who is making thoughtful, careful database tuning decisions is using chat-gippity to convert their models. And more to the point, they aren't using SQLAlchemy of all things to make large, distributed applications that need UUID primary keys.)

clip

okay, for some reason, I feel the need to help.

The given link defines the function that creates a UUID:

uuid.uuid4(): Generate a random UUID.

In mathematics, can you generate a monotonic function by generating random numbers?

There are countless issues here. They didn't do exception handling, they used a string to store their UUIDs (even if this was a DB constraint, you use sqlalchemy.Uuid and let the ORM and DB handle the translation), and as the person you're replying to stressed, they're using non-monotonic UUIDs. Also if you have a unique user_id and you're never exposing your primary keys, you don't need to get fancy, just let the ORM handle it with auto-incrementing, for most use cases. And so many other tragic things about this one tiny blog post.

tl;dr if you're going to copy code you don't understand, copy it from the docs, not from everything in the kitchen thrown into a blender.

If you’re using a new-to-you ORM, and you don’t ever check the docs to see the basic primary key syntax… it’s SQLAchemy, it’s well documented and there’s tons of prior art.

Also I don’t understand their business case but if a user has a primary key, a unique user ID, and a unique customer ID, then all three of those uniquely identify the customer. (Weird, but there are some plausible explanations.) But then why would you need both the user ID and the customer ID in the subscription table is this some stripe thing I don’t understand or are they just bad at this?

It’s okay to copy/paste your basic model structure for SQLAlchemy classes, but copy and paste from the SQLAlchemy docs. Sweet suffering stack overflow, did nobody even look at the docs ever, or did they only trust ChatGPT? SQLAlchemy‘s simple for basic use cases.

Also here is such a nutshell of everything wrong with YC: jackhole prompt fondlers with no tests, no paying customers, who turn on the most important new feature in prod at the end of the day (jesus wept), and yet with all that clown show,

We had eight ECS tasks on AWS, all running five instances of our backend (overkill, yes we know, but to be fair we had AWS credits).

What the actual fuck.

I mean ...

No, I don't know that atheists should be regarded as citizens, nor should they be regarded as patriotic. This is one nation under God.

-- allegedly, President George H. W. Bush (though he denied he said it)

tbf most of your problem is hanging around here.

Tired: bragging about how you always knew the true face of evil because you’re just more tuned in than other folks.

Wired: Sharing valuable, documented, normie news stories about how crypto is tied into crime and grossness at every level.

Inspired: Mocking an extreme-fasting, psychedelic-chugging weirdo for giving millions to a fascist fan of a dead guy who believed there’s aborted fetal material in pepsi and who was an AIDS and Covid denier who died of, shock, Covid.

The deeply amusing thing about oglaf is how often it isn’t porn or even NSFW.

Aw, I worked with David, not that many years after RFC 1149, and he was a nice guy. It makes me so happy it's still a thing.

I wonder if we can start requiring history of science, philosophy, and literary & artistic theory classes in secondary school (or at least before giving out doctorates), just to limit incredibly annoying adults who think they're geniuses. I also thought I invented brain-in-a-vat thought experiments when I was ten, but I don't opine on them reinvented from first principles.

the banhammer is strong in our admins.

(for mastodon users who don't get the image: it's Andrew Lawrence's "you know the ones" tweet)

I suspect Elon's pretty comfortable with his political ideology and ego, tbh. But I agree with the second part.

They want to ban kosher food and circumcision, but love the Israeli government and the war on Gaza, which says... so many things, about so many people.

you're not wrong.

but can you observe their chromosones?

I expect SneerClub to provide my alibis when reading one of these finally makes me snap.

to be fair, a lot of the early Internet, including the early research Internet, was driven by libertarian tendencies (which always ignored the dilemma in combining libertarian tendencies with the fact that the entire early Internet was enabled by massive government funding). John Perry Barlow, the EFF, etc. It’s just that a lot of those people were libertarian utopians – and I will fully admit that in my youth it seemed very convincing. It felt like there were no space for bad actors because when the Internet was smaller, it was less obvious to idealists and the naïve that a larger internet would be incredibly useful for bad actors.

As recently as gamergate the EFF was loudly insisting that all moderation by private companies was wrong, and in the intervening few years they have only grudgingly and rarely admitted that overly libertarian moderation policies can suppress speech massively. And yet I fully believe all the EFF people mean well.