There's value in not having to hunt in several places for business logic, having it all in one language, etc. I was ambivalent on the topic until I encountered an 12 page query that contained a naive implementation of the knapsack problem. As with most things dogma comes with a whole host of issues, but in this case I think it's largely benign and likely did more good than harm.
But that is the result of having multiple applications needing to enforce valid states in the database.
"Business logic" is a loose term. The database is the effective store for state so it must enforce states, eg by views, triggers, and procedures.
Other "business logic" can happen outside of the db in different languages. When individual apps need to enforce valid states, then complexity, code, etc grows exponentially.
Other than a few ill-advised attempts to implement microservices infrastructure by well-intentioned co-workers I've not encountered situations where multiple applications needed to access a single data store. While I'm sure there are valid use cases there I suspect they're rare and should be treated like the outliers they are.
It was absolutely under version control and there was a full test suite. The guy that wrote it is easily in the top 3 smartest human beings I've ever met and an incredibly talented developer. Unfortunately a lot of his stuff required being at the same level on the IQ bell curve, which meant it was functionally unmaintainable by anyone else. If you're familiar with the Story of Mel, it was kinda like that.
If it takes a few thousand pages of textbooks or other reference material to gain competence with a given topic how is consuming superficial summaries provided by AI expected to produce comparable results?
> If it takes a few thousand pages of textbooks or other reference material to gain competence
This is a huge assumption and not one I’m sure holds up. In my experience gaining competence is often more a matter of hands on experimentation and experience, and the thousands of pages of reference material are there to get you to the point where you can start getting hands on experience, and debug your experiments when they don’t work. If AI can meaningfully cut back on that by more efficiently getting people to the experimentation stage, it absolutely will be more effective. And so far in my limited experience, it seems extremely promising.
Uh yeah, no. For all of the same reasons that Cliff Notes do not stack up against actually reading the assigned literature. For all of the same reasons that skimming search results to win lazy arguments online doesn't stack up against an actual formal education on whatever the argument is about. For all of the same reasons an hour of Youtube University doesn't produce the same outcomes as a decade of experience working in the trades. See the pattern?
Fries used to be fried in beef tallow oil basically everywhere. Most fast-food chains went to vegetable oils for various reasons (vegan, subsidized, cheaper, supposedly healthier, etc). Many perceive a noticeable taste difference.
This is the legitimate end of the spectrum. The science that drove tallow out of kitchens and homes was incomplete, particularly when it was replaced with trans fats.
Where it goes off the rails is when nutters conclude that because tallow was wronged in one context, it is wronged in all of them, which leads to folks rubbing tallow on their faces [1]. (It's probably harmless. I've used it as a foot cream because I got samples at my farmers' market.)
One of the big benefits for corporations is that rancidity in vegetable oils isn't as noticeable by smell, so they can keep using them after they've gone off. Just to add to how much cheaper they are.
Have there been any blind tastings for that? I mean, if people swear by beef tallow's taste, they should be able to also prove it experimentally.
This would also set a level field between beef tallow and other oils. I would expect that a lot have changed in the fast food industry supply chain since the "good old days". Frying oil is only one of the factors that may have affected the taste of fries. Not to mention that everything tastes better when one is young.
The difference wasn’t subtle, and they cooked differently after the switch, too. Plenty of folks had the experience of noticing that they’d had a run of bad batches of fries before finding out the recipe had change (so now all batches were bad) and effectively did do a blind taste test.
I assure you if you'd been alive and consuming fast food french fries before and after the change you wouldn't think a blind test was required. The difference between whatever the hell McDonalds was using before the switch and after was jarring.
That I did know. I lived through the change and "noticeable taste difference" is a massive understatement. What fresh indignity has been injected into the media cycle that makes this in any way relevant?
"for various reasons" ... not really, the main reason was "supposedly healthier." There was pressure from healthy food advocates, mostly based on pop science claims. In the 1980s the "fat and dietary cholesterol is bad" trend started. That's when restaurants switched away from beef tallow, so they could advertise "fried in vegetable oil" as if that was healthier. They also introduced salads, oat bran muffins, changed from milk to yogurt ice cream, and other things that customers generally didn't want but could be claimed to be "healthy."
The amount of sugar added to prepared food took a big jump around this time, as it replaced fat to make the food taste good. Around this time is when obesity started to become a bigger problem.
Perhaps we shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater here? Cut through the underbrush of technical inaccuracies and you're left with a very simple core premise: our civilization is predicated on continuous growth while having only a finite pool of non-renewable resources to draw upon to achieve it. That this arrangement results in some fairly serious problems isn't really in question, so all we're really arguing about is timelines.
Insanely wealthy when your comparison includes tin pot dictatorships, theocracies, and ex-soviet countries that still haven't gotten their shit together. Weird how that unimaginable wealth doesn't translate into financial security, access to high quality healthcare, or the ability to own a home.
After a particularly shitty day on the helpdesk there was nothing quite like loading up Facing Worlds, jimmying team balancing so it was 8v1 and then holding off the ensuing rush of bots for a half hour with a sniper rifle.
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