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Oh totally. It started as a Tcl extension, and Tcl is famously loose with it's types...all data types can be treated as strings. I assume that's where that came from.
Hipp based semantics off an early version of Postgres, so there was a deliberate choice to loosen the type guarantees from what Postgres offered.
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That's a nice way of looking at it...but I'd argue that if the intent is to be a "bag of bytes" you don't want to imply it's anything but that. Simultaneously if you want it to be typed, it seems less than ideal to have them front and center and then be wishy-washy with them.
I'm not a polemic, but I believe compromise on things like this corrupts conceptual clarity. Choosing one or the other would help learners quite a bit I'd think. I understand engineering tradeoffs are the enemy of such thoughts though.
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Oh cool! Thanks for digging in. It's always interesting to me how many "accidental features" there are lurking in code where every behavior isn't necessarily defined. In this case though, it was an explicit choice which is awesome.
On a side note, what an interesting formatting style. I don't read a ton of C, but choices on what brackets/parens require spaces and what ones don't seem almost opposite to what I'm used to. Easy enough to read still though.
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This is awesome! The loose type system is my main complaint about sqlite...I know it's a matter of opinion, but it always struck me as a really strange choice. I just like being confronted with errors as fast as humanly possible.
I wish there was some way to check how much code directly interfacing with sqlite before this was effectively asserts on the structure of what's returned.
All that being said, the arguments for the loose type system are linked from that article https://www.sqlite.org/flextypegood.html . They don't particularly move me, and their points seem to be ones that would more effectively be addressed in other ways. But again, I understand it's more of a project choice than something objectively good or bad.
Also, fun quote:
Because of a quirk in the SQL language parser, versions of SQLite prior to 3.37.0 can still read and write STRICT tables if they set "PRAGMA writable_schema=ON" immediately after opening the database file, prior to doing anything else that requires knowing the schema.
Currently working up the motivation to understand that quirk. Just kind of sounds like a fun random happenstance.
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First of all, I agree with Graeber and would love to minimize bullshit jobs.
However. He ignores the major purpose of those bullshit jobs in a large organization: to slow things down. This sounds bad...until you realize that moving at full speed is incredibly risky, especially if you're working on a project with huge scope and very different users/consumers.
Bullshit jobs serve the same function as enzyme inhibitors, or maybe resistors. By forcing people to communicate and write things down, people have to pay attention to what others are doing. So you don't get 20 people who know how to produce their part, and after a frenzy of productivity they realize nothing fits together and even if it did then it doesn't solve the actual problem well. It also means that one part can't race ahead of a dependency because different parts can be produced at different rates. It's primarily risk mitigation.
That's not to excuse bullshit jobs, just to explain that they do have a function. They are a "solution" to what happens when projects get too big, when the stakes get too high, and when someone can't even fit what an organization does in their head. I'd much rather reduce scope to eliminate the problem, not patch over it.
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As one often guilty of this crime, this speaks to me like it does to the other commenters.
That said, a distinction must be drawn on whether the asker is looking for an answer or a collaboration. Sometimes they need help getting to an answer and need expertise to work their way there. But if they just need an answer, I'm not sure arming them with nuance is necessarily bad.
Sometimes an end to a conversation just means the need is satisfied. Not that you can fully assume one way or another.
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Good point on color being inaccessible. My worry about using the word "valued" (I know I mentioned it first) is that it suggests the others are "unvalued", which wouldn't be true.
Maybe just a visible z-score not attached to a signifier would work? Might get confused for raw points though.
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In heavily technical discussion I tend to like the visible upvote count as just a way to see a baseline of how much the post resonated with the community. In that case the difference between 8 and 9 points doesn't matter. But when I post, there is a terrible dopamine searching activity where I just refresh hoping for feedback.
Given all that, may I suggest a compromise? What if there was just a Neutral, Valued, Outlier signal inplace of the score?
The way I'm envisioning would be scoped to a post so you can't interpret value outside of a context. You check the average number of upvotes across all posts and if it's below average then you assign the neutral signal (gray?), if it's above or equal to the average then it's valued (green?), and if it's a crazy outlier (95 percentile or something?) then give it the outlier designation.
This solves a couple problems:
- Refreshing to check your signal on a post is basically pointless
- It allows recognition of fantastic comments that are buried deeply in a nested thread (whereas Hotness only values top level comments to it's fullest extent)
- It feels descriptive and organizing, but not gamified.
- Because crossing "average" (median? mean?) is necessary to exit neutral, it means that neutral posts are not considered bad, whereas 0 upvote posts do feel that way to me sometimes. This gives them more chance imo.
- Because being higher than the 95 percentile is a huge order, outliers would be uncommon.
- This system scales better with more users. sic.pm is growing at an impressive rate for a social media site, even if it feels a bit quiet now due to the raw number of users. If the rate keeps up then we'll suddenly have tons of comments and the system would balance along with them.
- Because the system is scoped to a post, lesser tended to niches don't get punished. If I see a post on the chemical implications of dyes for certain weaving patterns, then it may only be something a few people deeply care about. If it has 3 comments and the top one has 3 upvotes then I might not think the comment is superlative even if it is. But 3 upvotes might be enough to kick it into the top tier signal due to the amount of attention/interaction the post got and it's rightly recognized as a great post.
This is just a casual idea that popped up in response to rhn_mk1. Open to discussion/refinement or it just being dropped. But I like the idea of still incentivizing indepth and insightful posts somehow, which goes away with literally no visible scoring system.
EDIT: for the record, the colors never need to be explained or named. I just needed a way to refer to them in text. If the system is well balanced, people will intuitively build a feel for them without anyone feeling like their post didn't achieve "valued" or whatever.
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Ok, so this is totally satire...but I can actually see where it might be useful. By giving absurd examples of how one might describe a chalkboard (a Calcium Trace Display System, or CTDS for short) the reader is forced to think backward on how they could have come up with that. I bet after reading this book you get really good at understanding other people's BS on the fly.
A domain specific joke pamphlet should be given to everyone who joins any large company with tons of warnings on why it's an example of what not to do.
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"How to Avoid a Climate Disaster" by Bill Gates. I've had strong opinions on climate change for a long time but I never felt like I was educated to the extent I wanted to be. This book has tons of very specific information on timelines, tradeoffs, and the ramifications of possible solutions. It's still an overview, but it assumes no knowledge and really digs in there. I feel like I finally have some rigor in the topic beyond what I've absorbed from random news articles and internet posts over the years.
"Abstract Algebra: Theory and Applications" by Thomas W. Judson. I never went to college and am self taught, but work in fields that often require various types of mathematics. I'd figured out workable amounts of abstract algebra here and there and just wanted to tie everything together. This book is fantastic for that. Like every math book it's dense and requires effort...but it's more approachable than most and it seems to fit right in the niche I needed.
"Altered Carbon" by Richard K. Morgan. Just a fun book. Not too far from the Netflix version, but in text form it gets away with alot more suspension of disbelief.
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That's definitely an interesting thought. To reduce the amount of deliberate crawling of the search space (where a person has to check the surrounding tags of individual tags) what would you think of a Discovery page?
What I'm imagining is that there's a page that you go to and it shows you the normal posts filtered by your subscribed tags. Unlike other pages though, there's a slider that goes from 0 to
n. The slider position represents the number of hops from each tag, and as you ramp it up the specificity of your filters loosens and the results get fuzzier. That way you can find "novel" posts outside your comfort zone, without going all the way to the unfiltered stream.Of course, all these features assume an amount of activity that warrants them. The Discovery page doesn't make much sense if all tags are effectively 1 node away and therefore equivalent to the unfiltered stream, haha.
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^ forgive the weird formatting. Ran into the 500 character limit super fast and had to make it fit.
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I like it. I'm curious how we'd tackle tag discoverability. If tags are suggested to new users, will they still be able to see the unfiltered stream? If not, how do I find new tags?
Some ideas:
- "All" and "Subscribed" views. The "All" view lets users stumble upon tags that might interest them by seeing what's attached to stories
- A master tag list. This would likely require curation/organization
- Tags could be added/edited at any time. Refining tags on known posts could introduce them
Agreed! It's basically why I like the talk...everything has a bunch of historical context and shows how things go from theory to real-world applications and all the messy human-parts that had to go into making it possible.