> In my view nonnegative real numbers have good physical representations: amount, size, distance, position
I'm not a physicist, but do we actually know if distance and time can vary continuously or is there a smallest unit of distance or time? A physics equation might tell you a particle moves Pi meters in sqrt(2) seconds but are those even possible physical quantities? I'm not sure if we even know for sure whether the universe's size is infinite or finite?
Sounds like you’re talking about the presumed free speech rights of corporations, which is part of this debate. I think corporations should have much more limited speech than an actual person and the concept of corporate personhood in general needs to be walked back significantly.
Yes it’s important for news organization and such to have unrestricted speech, but that seems solvable by keeping them in a separate category and excluding corps that engage in other lines of business. I don’t want say Google to be have full censorship and editorial privileges just because one of their many products surfaces news.
I can spam or send misinformation here just fine without being a corporation. And it's legal speech. Should platforms not be able to moderate this?
> news organization and such to have unrestricted speech [...] by keeping them in a separate category and excluding corps
This is an misunderstanding of "freedom of the press". The "press" is a reference to the printing press as a device itself. News organizations (which are usually for profit) have the exact same rights to free speech as anyone else. The natural analogy is printers and the right to publish information online.
Ofc I wouldn't us it for extremely high scale event processing, but it's great default for a message/task queue for 90% of business apps. If you're processing under a few 100m events/tasks per day with less than ~10k concurrent processes dequeuing from it it's what I'd default to.
I work on apps that use such a PG based queue system and it provides indispensable features for us we couldn't achieve easily/cleanly with a normal queue system such as being able to dynamically adjust the priority/order of tasks being processed and easily query/report on the content of the queue. We have many other interesting features built into it that are more specific to our needs as well that I'm more hesitant to describe in detail here.
So perhaps don’t use kafka at all? E.g. Adyen used postgresql [1] as a queue until the outgrew.
In this case it seems there are a lot of things that can go south in case of major issue on the event pipeline. Unless the throughput is low.. but then why kafka?
RDBMS are pretty well understood and very flexible, more still with the likes of JSONB where parts of your schema can be (de)normalized for convenience and reducing joins in practice. Modern hardware is MUCH more powerful today than even a decade and a half ago. You can scale vertically a LOT with an RDBMS like PostgreSQL, so it's a good fit for more use cases as a result.
Personally, at this point, I'm more inclined to reach for a few tools than to try to increase certain types of complexity. That said, I'm probably more inclined to introduce valkey/redis earlier on for some things, which I think may be better suited to MQ type duties without an actual MQ or more complex service bus over PG... but PG works.
Especially for systems that you aren't breaking up queues because of the number of jubs, so much as the benefits of a logical separation of the work from the requestor. Email (for most apps), report generation, etc... all types of work that an RDBMS is more than suitable for.
I became fascinated by Lean last week while watching Terrence Tao stream his proof work on Youtube. At least on the surface his thought process and workflow looked very similar to what I do in my IDE when programming, especially when coding in a very strongly typed language like Scala with FP style.
If I can work through math proofs in an IDE with Lean helping check my work I might finally get around to diving into the higher level math I’ve always wanted to. Could open some doors to us working folks that don’t have an instructor to review our proof attempts.
Even worse for me, some of my coworkers were doing that _before_ coding LLMs were a thing. Now LLMs are allowing them to create MRs with untested nonsense even faster which feels like a DDOS attack on my productivity.
Companies should have more limited speech than individuals. Nerfing the concept of “corporate personhood” will be a key part of fixing our problems IMHO.
Only if they’re wealthy or get extremely lucky and live near a randomly good school. By many metrics I was the smartest in my class, but my family had little money and lived in a rural area with a single underfunded school. I spent my days in class with kids that were still struggling to sound out “cat” in third grade. A few times a week I got to spend an hour in “gifted” class but that was mostly art projects, nothing that would help make up for the rest of the day being wasted.
I think of ADHD and autism as brothers, or at least cousins. Lots of overlap, but not quite the same.
With the older concept and diagnosic criteria for autism there was less overlap. ADHD and autism used to be considered mutually exclusive diagnoses. Autism used to imply delays in speech and most people diagnosed also had significant intellectual disability. Autism is now a dramatically larger umbrella than it used to be with the last couple of DSM editions merging Aspergers and other conditions with it and making it not be mutually exclusive with ADHD. The shift in definitions makes autism extremely difficult to discuss in public because people have wildly different concepts of it depending on when they learned.
Side comment, merging Asperger's into autism was motivated in part by awareness of Hans Asperger's evil deeds and not wanting that association. It was also championed based on enabling help/protections given to autistics to folks with Aspergers as well, and maybe because being part of a larger and harder to ignore pool would help autistics with intellectual disabilities get more attention as well. So far I haven't seen a clear explanation of why it made sense in terms of better understanding the condition/difference, everyone that discusses it focuses on perceived potential social good.
A big factor was the defining feature of Asperger's being a lack of language delay, which turned out to be poorly correlated with life outcomes. The categories were also used very inconsistently - a lot of people, and some clinics, thought the Asperger's distinction implied far more than it did on paper, but not everyone went along with that.
> the idea that, "Every should must come reinforced by a want."
I haven't heard that before...I need time to ponder and process that, but on the surface it sounds like gold!
The parents and town I grew up with were extremely religious and authoritarian. I grew up hearing how our personal desires should be ignored and suppressed, and only the will of God and authority figures matters. I think neurotypical people may be more able to function with such a mindset, but it's a losing battle for ADHD brains to try to force themselves too far from their natural wants/interests. Especially since lack of emotional regulation is a significant(but less discussed) difference for ADHD, focusing first on emotions and reorienting wants before focusing on getting the task at hand done might make a lot of sense for us.
I'm not a physicist, but do we actually know if distance and time can vary continuously or is there a smallest unit of distance or time? A physics equation might tell you a particle moves Pi meters in sqrt(2) seconds but are those even possible physical quantities? I'm not sure if we even know for sure whether the universe's size is infinite or finite?
reply