Being healthy, good social connections, meaningful activities, exercise, family you can depend on, etc. I wonder if the optimism is just a confounding factor, or rather just the middle man we can measure. Seems like having a good life would make one more optimistic about their prospects.
You're right! AI makes us ask really important questions about our own intelligence. I think it will lead to greater recognition that we are first and foremost animals: creatures of intention and action. I think we've put way too much emphasis on our intellectual dimension in the last few hundred years. To the point that some people started to believe that was what we are.
Perhaps we're confusing intelligence with awareness.
What LLMs seem to emulate surprisingly well is something like a person's internal monologue, which is part of but not the whole of our mind.
It's as if it has the ability to talk to itself extremely quickly and while plugged directly into ~all of the written information humanity has ever produced, and what we see is the output of that hidden, verbally-reasoned conversation.
Something like that could be called intelligent, in terms of its ability to manipulate symbols and rearrange information, without having even a flicker of awareness, and entirely lacking the ability to synthesise new knowledge based on an intuitive or systemic understanding of a domain, as opposed to a complete verbal description of said domain.
Or to put it another way - it can be intelligent in terms of its utility, without possessing even an ounce of conscious awareness or understanding.
Unfortunately true. Then when it all goes south, they are like "oh well, we tried". People really don't understand how hard it is to do something right, you know, the kind of things customers love and will stay in line to buy it. And when an engineer (an actual one) points out some flaw they immediately call him a jerk.
I never understood what people mean by "a jerk/asshole": sometimes they mean an actual jerk but a lot of times it seems to mean "people that don't agree with me".
I worked with many people I disagreed with. We would debate endlessly over how to solve an issue. I've worked with a few people who were assholes. They would lose their cool if anyone disagreed with them, and start threatening, calling names, etc...
I've been in a couple situations in my career where physical altercations even occurred.
Haha...let me just say that small companies fighting to stay afloat cause an enormous amount of stress. Every decision is scrutinized and debated. Egos flare and you end up with physical altercations.
Probably the most serious altercation is from the late 90s...the co-owner walked into a meeting, after yelling at the other co-owner for awhile, people stood up and the one co-owner knocked out the other. The one who threw the punch left and we never saw again.
Being smart is not the end of the game, software is created by teams. You could ask them to make reverse code review so that they can enjoy each others smarteness.
Hard disagree with this attitude but I see it all the time.
Stored procedures are much faster than writing logic in some remote server (just by virtue of getting rid of all the round trips), require far less code (no DAOs, entities and all that crap which simply serves to duplicate existing definitions), and have built-in strong consistency checking primitives - which can even be safely delayed until the end of the transaction.
And what people do is, they throw all these advantages away because they can’t be bothered working out how to integrate the stored procedure code ergonomically into their workflow.
I mean - I even use an IDE (JetBrains) to write pl/pgsql. It’s just another file in my repo. Get to this point and stored procedures are a game changer.
I second that. SPs/funcs have this weird tendency to always stay hidden in the fringes and out of sight, easily forgotten when adding new functionality, easily overlooked when making changes elsewhere.
> If you don't have the discipline to do these things then they are likely best avoided.
I'd go further and say you should avoid databases and maybe even persistence entirely if you don't have the discipline to do the above. Sprocs will be the least of your problems otherwise.
Before the development of decent migration systems it was incredibly common for database structure - including stored procedures - to be treated independently of source code in a repository.
True, of course. There were also undoubtedly a lot of production systems that didn’t even use version control for non-database code. Industry practices certainly evolve over time. But it’s difficult to imagine a scenario where a team is aware of version control, uses it for the things they realize are code, but somehow doesn’t realize that stored procedures are code.
These sorts of places also tend to have database admins in one team and programmers in another team. All database changes go through the database team with tickets or whatever. It's a huge pain in the ass to navigate and enable quick changes.
It's a common thing to miss. There's a reason SQL injections are (unless things have changed recently) among the most prevalent classes of web exploits.
Yeah, I think so. But my hunch is that the majority of people who tell you never to use stored procedures have been burned by these techniques not being used for them.
From my experience only if there are dedicated DBAs and you have too many systems running - then you forget one. If you only have server code and the stored procedures in the same repository, with migrations, this problem goes away.
> SPs/funcs have this weird tendency to always stay hidden in the fringes and out of sight, easily forgotten when adding new functionality, easily overlooked when making changes elsewhere.
This is the classic "carpenter blames his tools for crappy results" argument. Implementation isn't easy.
If the developer doesn't know / doesn't document the project has code embedded in the database, that's on the developer, not the tools. Because the use of any developer tools requires a certain level of competence in order to use them successfully.
I thought so for 30 years but changed my opinion recently. I even argued with the author of Redis for some time to add some functionality so we didn't have to write Lua and have another deployment target.
Now I do think there is a benefit in stored procedures and triggers (E.g. for audits) if they don't contain too much logic or complexity.
> if they don't contain too much logic or complexity.
I think this is the catch. Most folks who are arguing against SP have been burned by huge complex stored procedures with nested dependencies with deeply intertwined business logic and rules. I completely agree that you shouldn't use a SP in that way. But to help perform maintenance, or to audit, or perform data correction all make sense when kept small and simple.
I've only given up trying to understand a system once. It was when I was handed over an application that used stored procedures for everything. Including recursive stored procedures... The rest could be figured out, but they were just too much.
I feel this. Once had something locking up a production SQL Server instance, and it turned out to be a dreadful partially-recursive web of sprocs, views, and TVFs that worked fine until apparently one day the query optimiser decided otherwise. Spent hours tracing what the heck was going on.
Why? What is your specific reasoning? Using EXPLAIN and SP's to help fix cache misses, slow queries, poor index performance, etc. is generally considered a good thing.
As a side note, I did not realize $diety was concerned about DDL/DML, so thanks for pointing it out. I never really thought about it.
Stored procedures has some advantages (fast to debug/try out a query from your service without copy+paste all the time, etc), but also disadvantages (unreadable git diffs, big bang rollouts on changes)
Strangely, it resonates to me in the context of finding "The Best Note Taking App" buzz. Whoa, X has backlinks! Yay, but Y is open source!
At the end of the day we all open the default system notepad.
I'd also recommend that folks reading this remember not to put too much pressure on women when trying this out. They are already approached a lot and often will feel the need not to communicate their discomfort having had saying No go badly many times in the past.
Just remember that when you approach someone they might be uncomfortable even if they don't say that. Keep the pressure on yourself to end things, don't put it on the stranger you've chosen
Why? There is a natural power imbalance between men and women. If you find it tiresome then you're getting a sense of how tiring it can be to be a woman in public.
None of the men I know carry mace, walk with their keys in their fists like brass knuckles, or have stories about being harassed in public. Most of the women I know have all three of these things in common.
When I was in my early 20s I regularly tried to hit on/chat with strange women in random public settings (sitting at a park bench, buying groceries, etc). It made them visibly uncomfortable. But I felt like I was entitled to keep doing it anyway, and my male friends felt the same way. It wasn't until reading "me, too" stories that I realized I shouldn't regularly make people uncomfortable, and not to excuse my carelessness (women had certainly tried to communicate this and I had failed to listen), but part of the reason was that I had been given the impression that that was simply how a man behaved, and I didn't really know men who disagreed with that perspective. I also didn't understand why I was making them uncomfortable and just how common harassment was, and how in their mind there was a totally reasonable concern that I might be dangerous or creepy (and indeed, the way I was acting was a bit creepy, so how can I blame them). I think I mostly saw it through the lens of whether or not my advances were rejected and how I felt about that, and to the extent I considered whether they were welcome, it was to minimize rejections rather than to understand the experience of a fellow human.
Not everything is gendered, but the experience of talking to strangers unfortunately is. I'd like for it not to be, as well, but without recognizing truth there is no reconciliation.
Have you considered that it might just be you live in a dangerous place? None of the women I know carry around those things and never have. If they have stories of being harassed in public places, it never came up in conversation either. But I live in a place that's quite well policed and safe. In a more dangerous city, out on the street if there's nobody around, yes you're going to be safer if you're a ripped 6'3 man than a small lady. No doubt about it. But again, to stress this, it's the other way around if you're at a managed venue of some sort like an office, a conference, etc. There it's actually the men who have to fear the women and not the other way around, although fortunately as bad incidents are very rare in both directions, we can all mostly live without fear.
With respect to hitting on women - again, please don't be tricked by others into thinking these are universal global truths. I successfully flirted with and got dates with female strangers quite a few times in the past, in all sorts of places (before I met my wife). In fact I even got picked up by a stranger myself once! So it's not only men that hit on strangers. Of course it's heavily dependent on how you do it - I definitely found it much harder to do that when I was in my early 20s. As with all men, you're just a lot more awkward and less able to read the signs at that age, as well as less successful, so much more likely to come across as undesirable ('creepy'). That's true of both genders. But it didn't stay that way.
A lot of women had big problems with #metoo and the general culture it was trying to create. My experience has been that for every woman who loudly proclaims their hatred of creepy men there are multiple others who quietly wish that a nice man would strike up a conversation and chat them up, and are sad that men have now been trained not to do it. #Metoo and the feminism that surrounds it is intensely ideological, so people who disagree often are afraid of speaking up because they know they'll be viciously attacked by the left, even if they are themselves female. If you live in a very lefty place like San Francisco, especially one with a gender imbalance (so attractive women get hit on a lot and badly), you're probably going to draw conclusions like the above. If you live somewhere a bit more normal you'll see both sides of this and realize the balance of power has been tipped so far in the direction of women now that it makes quite a lot of them unhappy. They are now expected to take risks and do the work that traditionally men would do, because the men are afraid to do so.
Can't wait for a research which reveals the X.