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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • I found that the most impractical thing with these was that the user interface for selecting songs was typically “you have 200 songs and I’m gonna play them in sequence, if you want a particular song you must skip ahead until you hear it”. It worked for a 12-track audio CD, but felt like an underdeveloped toy feature when used with MP3:s.





  • Not exactly what you’re asking for, but Subnautica slowly builds on a primal fear without resorting to jump scares. It’s increasingly unsettling and you start finding excuses to just stay in your habitat to decorate instead of going outside. Possibly the best horror game I’ve played.

    Life is strange has elements of it (think Butterfly Effect: the game) during parts of the game, although it gets pretty explicit rather than subtle.

    Oxenfree also has elements of it, with people behaving weirdly etc. But it also mostly gets fairly explicit. Still, no jumpscares.






  • Oracle has a product called Oracle Policy Automation (OPA) that it sells as “you can write the rules in plain English in MS Word documents, you don’t need developers”. I worked for an insurance organization where the business side bought OPA without consulting IT, hoping they wouldn’t have to deal with developers. It totally failed because it doesn’t matter that they get to write “plain English” in Word documents. They still lack the structured, formal thinking to deal with anything except the happiest of happy paths.

    The important difference between a developer and a non-developer isn’t the ability to understand the syntax of a programming language. It’s the willingness and ability to formalize and crystallize requirements and think about all the edge cases. As an architect/programmer when I talk to the business side, they get bored and lose interest from all my questions about what they actually want.




  • The catch is that they all need to run in the same transaction to be unaffected by other things going on in the database and to make updates atomic. A single transaction means a single connection, and ODBC/JDBC has no way of multiplexing or pipelining queries over a single connection.

    It’s probably theoretically possible to run some things in different transactions. But with all the different layers and complexity of the code (including third party components and ORMs like Hibernate), understanding all the failure modes and possible concurrency issues becomes intractable.



  • I work for a company that has operated like this for 20 years. The system goes down sometimes, but we can fix it in less than an hour. At worst the users get a longer coffee break.

    A single click in the software can often generate 500 SQL queries, so if you go from 0.05 ms to 1 ms latency you add half a second to clicks in the UI and that would piss our users off.

    Definitely not saying this is the best way to operate at all times. But SQL has a huge problem with false dependencies between queries and API:s that make it very difficult to pipeline queries, so my experience has been that I/O-bound applications easily become extremely sensitive to latency.