Wonderfully under-rated. Robust as anything and SO FAST. It was my sole desktop OS for years, and while I’m dabbling with Debian right now, I miss Void the most. So lean and snappy.
Coming from OpenBSD and FreeBSD, Void Linux feels almost the same. Same rc init scripts and such.
What made you leave Void? I tried Debian, but I just couldn't do it; too dated and too many workarounds for the dated bugs. I tried Testing and Sid as well, but the only taste that I was left with was that these, somewhat obviously, are not meant to be production distributions and, while they get newer stuff, they're simply too buggy for daily use.
In case you were not aware, there is a large overlap between people who work/worked on NetBSD and OpenBSD that also work on Void Linux, which is why Void feels like that. Juan Pardines being an example of one individual.
Thanks! And yeah the other inspiration is that in the last 27 years of making web apps, I've gone from PHP to Ruby to JavaScript back to Ruby, considered switching to Go or Elixir, but my PostgreSQL database was at the center of it all, throughout.
So it makes sense to notice what's constant, what's ever-changing, and organize accordingly.
OOC how did you land on PostgreSQL 27 years ago? That’s before I was doing this sort of thing but 7 years later MySQL definitely seemed like the “no one got fired for choosing..” option.
PS been a big fan of your writing over the years and it’s a little intimidating to just respond to one of your posts asking a silly question haha
As someone that was kicking around back then, PostgreSQL was seen as more of a proper database, but MySQL was both faster and came with batteries included replication. Those really motivated its mass adoption with LAMP style stacks vs PostgreSQL.
Some years down the road however this was changing. PostgreSQL began to catch up in terms of simple performance, but also MySQL stumbled on transitioning into a multicore world, while PostgreSQL scaled better due to some of the hard work already being done in the architecture. Additionally we got an included replication option, as well as all the main PaaS vendors providing automation around it. So MySQL's previous advantages became less compelling.
And today, hardware is so incredibly capable that just scaling vertically on a single server is totally viable for a ton of apps. For this swath of the market, just running PostgreSQL has become a bit of a no brainer in the way that MySQL was during the peak of LAMP.
my vague memories of ~2000 were that postgres was acknowledged as the way to go if you wanted to do it right, but mysql would let you get set up quickly and easily so you could get on with your actual application, and postgres had the reputation of being harder to set up and administer
Same memories here. In the late 90s I chose MySQL over Postgres, at the time for its speed and replication. And at least partly because I got to talk with Monty Widenius at an Open Source Conference (or perhaps even a Perl Conference) in the late 90s about replication, and asked how hard it'd be to make replication use SSL - and he sent me a beta MySQL version with that implemented a few days later. So I had a quite serious "feel good" reason for using MySQL. In the subsequent 5-10 years or so I regretted not choosing Postgres instead over it's stored procedure handling, but we had way to much deeply embedded MySQL tech and skill by then which made switching always end up on the too hard list.
I've been making PostgreSQL-centered web apps for 9 years that way, by having PostgreSQL just return JSON. Then the "controller" (Ruby or whatever) parses the Mustache or ERB template with the JSON and returns HTML to the browser.
What I'm doing differently now is having PostgreSQL parse Mustache templates directly!
So now the controller just has to pass in the HTTP params, give it to the PostgreSQL function, and it returns HTML ready to return in the HTTP response.
It's not new, my first job circa 2007 was working on a Delphi 7 desktop application and all the "business logic" was stored procedures in an Oracle db. It was early in my career but I believe this was fairly popular in the early 00s. I was too young to have an opinion but for sure others will remember and be able to add more colour to it.
I haven't had the "pleasure" to work with stored procedures,etc but from conversations the main takeaways seems to be:
1: cooperation, nowadays database instances are cheaper and with Docker we can spin them up but having them shared doesn't feel like a fun thing when developing (triggers more than stored procedures here)
2: version control, kinda ties to the above but being able to keep track of changes (and related then to code being out of sync even if that would matter less in a application-less world)
3: debugging in general ?
4: debuging "spooky effects at a distance" when triggers,etc run.
> 2: version control, kinda ties to the above but being able to keep track of changes.
We dont use stored procedures at work, but all other database changes like tables, triggers etc. are committed to git and deployed using github actions. There's no need to run the sql manually
Oracle has a nice way to bundle stores procedures in packages, which makes large amounts of stored procedures manageable. So still ahead of Postgres, but Postgres is definitely good enough.
Asking from ignorance - are schemas not enough to replicate this most of the way? What are the extra nice to haves that would bring PG on par with Oracle here?
In my first proper job, I worked with an accounting system in 2014/2015 that was a .NET GUI client that directly called SQL Server stored procedures. There was a bundled WMS that did the same thing. IIRC the requests were sent directly to the database and were authenticated with the client user's details.
I was a data analyst and had full access to the database for reporting and data import/export purposes. I had a lot of fun browsing through the stored procedures, which were not locked down or encrypted in any way, and figuring out how it all worked.
I even fixed a bug with a custom module that was causing huge stock valuation errors (I can't believe I even did this now) and also created my own automated order import procedure by monitoring the procedures used by the client's order import screen. Possibly invalidating warranties and support contracts etc. but no problems came of it. They even tried to rehire me a few years later.
There's nothing wrong with it. Stored procedures, Java, Delphi, Ruby, Python, or whatever can be considered as a business logic layer separated from the data storage. Similarly, you consider your Python controller business layer separate from the web UI frontend.
And if you complain that stored procedure language is not so versatile for the business logic, remember that people have been using far worse languages for that, like COBOL, MUMPS, ColdFusion, ...
Despite reading the README and the article I am still unclear about how these templated values are populated. So presumably we store our HTML on the sql server along with some templating syntax then how do we plug that value so to speak?
Secondly, what do we do about things like HTML fragments à la HTMX / Datastar hypermedia approach? Do we just hit the DB for 10 lines of HTML to populate the next card in a multi step form?
Thanks for your response. I didn’t explain myself properly.
Suppose I have a html template that contains the dynamic value {{ foo }}, that template is on my SQLDB, how do I populate {{ foo }} whilst querying the template table?
For someone who wants to tread this path, using postgreSQL stored procedures in a team settings, what would be a good dev workflow in a team. Update them in git and use a CI to update the DB etc? Is there some tips that you can share on that?
Les was known for that. I heard a story of him doing a signing and these two guys came and one had a Gibson Les Paul for him to sign. He turns to the other guy there and he said he didn't have a Les Paul, but he had a Strat. Les signed that too and told him "there, now you have a Les Paul".
Also in the address department: Europe numbers houses roughly sequentially along the whole street, while the Americas (generally) assign house numbers based on the distance to the beginning of the block.
And BTW, in the old towns of Sweden and Finland blocks do have names!
I haven't seen the increase by five, but by twos when the odds/evens are separated across the street from each other. 101's next door neighbor is 103 while 102 is across the street next door to 104.
Most streets in the US are the same - there is an odd and even side of the road. Most are as said elsewhere also your house number is distance from the corner (most often in units of 100 feet) - I've seen half numbers before when houses when doors are close together, but normally they round.
However every development is different. The rules might be set by the city, but they change often enough that we can call this per development, others is really is the developer decides. Even where the city sets the rules, a "small fee" lets you choose your street name and address - which is why for most large companies their headquarters is "1 [company name] drive". Still the observation that in the US address are distance to corner with and even and odd size applies to the vast majority.
I love Sinatra, but wanted to see if simple Scheme compiled to C could do the same thing in an equally eloquent way. I thought the answer was no, but this Schematra looks great, so maybe.
That's the magic of money. Download your favorite artist's discography for personal use? If the MPAA had its way (and it occasionally has), torrenting that could bankrupt you.
The AI industry - soaking up every bit of media available online for commercial purposes, often reproducing it nearly identically - has enough money and capital to influence things its way. And only its way, in case anyone was hoping this might change anything at all for the little guy.
> Download your favorite artist's discography for personal use? If the MPAA had its way (and it occasionally has), torrenting that could bankrupt you.
I don't think that there are any clear examples of cases where ONLY downloading has resulted in huge fines. All the big bankrupting level fines have been for both downloading and sharing.
You mention that 'torrenting' could bankrupt you, and that is true, but the main reason for the huge fines are that you are taking part in distribution rather than just 'downloading for personal use'.
> I don't think that there are any clear examples of cases where ONLY downloading has resulted in huge fines.
They [1, and others] been hunting and fining downloaders for over a decade now, with the only "evidence" being IP addresses connected with the torrent [2].
>with the only "evidence" being IP addresses connected with the torrent [2].
Is that an unreasonable assumption? As much as people like to come up with excuses like "I had open wifi!" or "I was running a TOR node", judges don't seem inclined to believe them, probably for the same reason they don't seem inclined to believe excuses like "somebody took my car on a joyride and then returned it!" for parking tickets. Remember, both non-commercial copyright infringement lawsuits and parking tickets are tried in civil court, which means the standard is "preponderance of evidence", not "beyond reasonable doubt".
You are missing the point I was replying to, specifically that parent suggested people were only hunted for creating/uploading pirated content, not merely participating in the torrent.
That’s a really interesting distinction. Clearly there’s an “original crime”, the first person to rip the CD and put it online (or whatever kids do to pirate music nowadays).
But then if I download a file, create a copy, and share it with you, have I done anything wrong?
To all intents and purposes, seeding is an act of reproduction. You, while keeping your copy, create copies of (parts) of the file and share it to someone else to allow them to assemble a new, second copy.
Whether this is, or should be, a crime is a different question altogether. The main point I was making is that it’s the copying/sharing to other people which seems to be a crucial element in these prosecutions.
That’s likely intentional: the last thing the *AA folks want is a decision that creating a copy of a copyrighted work for your own personal use is not a crime. But it does seem the courts have decided: making a copy for someone else is indeed illegal.
But both are illegal? I suspect if it came out that some torrent seeder was actually part of some sort of piracy ring responsible for ripping the movies, they'd get far stiffer penalties than the few thousand $ fine that typical torrenters get. Moreover isn't AI companies also "keeping content available"?
The whole point of the thread is that AI companies are getting away with piracy but individuals aren't. But the reality is that AI companies aren't getting away with it (a judge ruled that Anthropic must face trial over their use of pirated books).
More specific to this thread is that claim that "ONLY downloading" hasn't resulted in fines for anyone. So far as I can tell, this is true. People are just quibbling over how someone who's torrenting somehow counts as "only downloading", even though their client is uploading.
Yes, but torrenting is not ONLY downloading, it's both. The articles you link are very clearly talking about 'Sharing' (from link 2: "File sharing consists of both download and upload of a file.").
Given the lack of sense in treating each peer as a lost sale for damages, I think we can safely say they're only interested in making examples out of people and would absolutely go after people for only downloading if the law permitted. Thankfully it's not, but maybe they lobby to make changes in that direction to try and curb future AI industry shenanigans.
You contradict yourself. There were numerous public cases where they chased people downloading few mp3s just for themselves, and made into example case with massive fines.
If you don't understand how torrents work on technical level I suggest at least some shallow reading. Property rights holders don't care about details, as long as you tick the box of sending a single packet to somebody, off to court with ya.
> There were numerous public cases where they chased people downloading few mp3s just for themselves
If this is true, I have been unable to find any. Can you please share? In all of the cases I was able to find, the huge fines were based on also uploading.
> If you don't understand how torrents work on technical level I suggest at least some shallow reading
This is a bit patronising, and I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. My point is that the only prosecutions I've been able to find are where they were able to prove uploading as well as downloading (and yes, the fact that someone used BitTorrent makes it a slam-dunk, because the protocol makes it impossible to download without also uploading). Are you trying to argue that someone who torrents a copyrighted work doesn't also share it?
The fight about digitized media for personal (entertainment / informational) use were the early aughts. The precedents crafted then don't immediately translate to these cases (novel transformative work from protected materials), and the new precedents have to account for the fact that universities have been training via "piracy" for ages.
(The magic of money factors in to the extent that they can afford the lawyers to remind the court that this isn't settled law yet).
The fact that this is propping up the entire AI industry adds additional weight. When legislating or deciding court cases, some won't be willing to pop the cash cow, some will be worried about falling behind countries that don't enforce copyright evenly. IP owners are trying to go after the AI industry, with only mixed to poor success.
Hard to justify that they can't afford to pay when they have multi-billion dollar valuations and are apparently paying hundreds of millions to get a single engineer.
Anthropic is going to trial over pirating books for training. The judge was pretty clear that even if training is fair use, the training material must be obtained legally.
These regurgitations combined with proof that a model is familiar with a work could be sufficient evidence to force discovery to determine if the work was pirated.
What's insane is copyright. How come you can own intellectual property but not pay a property tax? The ecosystem would be much healthier if to get copyright protections you should declare value of your IP (that you are obligated to sell for if the buyer pops up) and pay tax on this for every year you hold the IP.
> if to get copyright protections you should declare value of your IP (that you are obligated to sell for if the buyer pops up) and pay tax on this for every year you hold the IP
I think this would have some unpalatable consequences. Let's say an author is writing a modestly successful book series: it's not going to make them rich, but it's commercially viable and they care a lot about it for its own sake. Under this system, if the author declares a value commensurate with the (quite small) pure economic value of the IP, they have to live in fear of their right to continue working on their creation being abruptly taken away from them at any point. If they instead declare a value commensurate with the economic value + the extra value that it has to them personally, the resulting tax liability could easily tip the balance and destroy their ability to pursue their writing as a career.
You are always free to update the value before paying tax. If somebody is willing to pay more than it's worth to you they probably have an idea how to turn it into more economic value for the society. So the society should allow them to do that. For a price, of the tax. What I'm proposing is about the financial rights. Individual right, like the right to call yourself author of any given creation should be inalienable.
There are always some cases on the edge. The question is if saving them is worth the cost of the major players running rampant.
>What's insane is copyright. How come you can own intellectual property but not pay a property tax? The
Most jurisdictions that have "property tax" only apply it on certain types of property, most commonly real estate. So it's not that weird that IP isn't taxed.
Can you imagine if we evaluated property taxes this way? Yeah, nice single family home, better hope nobody offers you the same amount you paid for it or it's back to apartment living for you and your kids.
And it seems to be because the training data is largely unofficial subtitles from movies. Which often have a string like "Translated by X" at the end of the movie which is often silent while credits roll.
Looks like they used more official sources for German - there, silence is apparently hallucinated as "Untertitelung des ZDF für funk, 2017" according to one of the comments on the issue. Which makes sense, as the public broadcasters' "Mediathek" is probably the largest freely available resource of subtitled videos in Germany. I wonder if the ZDF gave its approval for it being used for LLM training though?
I'm being made to pay for Autobahnen I barely use, finance kindergartens despite not having a child, and made to pay into public pensions with little hope of getting close to the same value out. All under threat of imprisonment, many without a way to even refuse (not that I'd want to) The only thing that sets the pubic broadcasting fee apart is that it's collected separately from taxes in an attempt to reduce the influence politicians have on broadcasters
This person refers to the German television and radio fee (Rundfunkgebühren).[1] It is a state-mandated system that ensures free (as in free speech) and (relatively) neutral public broadcasting institutions. There is a constant and engaged discussion, because every household in Germany has to pay this fee. Exceptions are made only for low-income households.
A constant discussion, lately fueled by extremist parties (AfD) who feel treated unfairly by (amongst others) the public broadcasters (which has parallels to Trump's recent campaign against public broadcasters in the US).
Can't argue them - Tageschau always has been trashtalking people with the wrong opinion.
Back in 2011, Tageeschau openly rallied against Muslims and wanting public broadcasting gone was a leftist position. The whole thing is completely asinine to anyone who remembers.
Ah, ok, thanks for the info, TIL! "We are funk – the first public service content network that started on October 1, 2016. We create online-only content on social networks and third-party platforms, including YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, Spotify, Apple Music or Twitch for 14-29 year-olds." (https://presse.funk.net/das-ist-funk/, scroll down for the English version). I live in Germany, and I even watch public broadcasters regularly, but this is the first time I have heard about funk (I even initially thought it was misspelled, usually it's written with a capital F). But I'm not part of the targeted audience (not now, nor even back in 2016 when it was launched), so all good...
> We have a public service mandate, which means that we have very clear responsibilities according to the state media treaty. For us, this means that our top priority is actually reaching our target audience, namely approximately 15 million people living in Germany between the age of 14 and 29 who have internet access
It's not a binding contract for sure but I don't think that OpenAI or other AI scraper is their target.
Just in case people consider this seriously, I just want to add my two cents: Ulysses although is prose, it's so much more of a poetry than prose compared many other novels. I personally don't think listening to someone's reading of Ulysses will be remotely similar to reading it on page. Some of the chapters are really almost entirely about discovering how to read this chapter. I don't necessarily think it's bad, just the same way you can listen to poetry by going to a poetry reading session, you can listen to Ulysses. Just note that it's going to be an entirely different experience than reading it, and it will likely forever bias your interpretation of the book. Just my humble two cents, I don't claim to know anything.
That's certainly your take on poetry, but not mine. It also may not be everyone's. I think everyone has a unique reading of each poetry, and thus reading and listening are different. There is nothing wrong with listening to poetry, it's just that I prefer to read first (find my own reading) then listen to others. I personally don't think I would have wanted to listen to Ulysses before reading it. Again, you may find it bizarre and that's fine.
Etymologically the word "poetry" comes from the Greek verb for "make," which has no connection to speech or sound. Historically, in many places and at many times, poetry has not fit into narrow straitjacket you're putting it in.
Poetry in some languages and traditions is at least as visual as it is oral/verbal. Calligraphy is tightly bound to some poetic traditions. In others, the form of a poem is chiefly or entirely calligraphic, not oral, acoustic, or rhythmic.
Even if we restrict ourselves to Western Anglophone poetry of the past 100 years, you'll find that the sound of poetry itself has changed drastically. Find a recording of someone reading an English-language poem in the early 20th century. You'll likely find its sound quite alien, not just because of the antiquated pronunciation but because there's a strong element of something like chant -- and delivery is far more affected than it would be today. I'm not so sure the sound of poetry for you would sound at all like poetry to, I don't know, Yeats or Kipling.
In turn, poetry in Greece and Rome was so tightly coupled to music that it would be more correct to say that poetry in these civilizations was defined by its characteristics when sung, not spoken. Hence in Homer and Classical Greek the word "aoidos," singer, is frequently used of poets.
> Poetry is literally defined by its characteristics when spoken. That's what "poetry" means.
Wiktionary (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/poetry) tells me that its etymology is through "poet," which in turn means "author" or "maker," and that its meaning is "Literature composed in verse or language exhibiting conscious attention to patterns and rhythm." Neither of those things uniquely privileges its spoken experience. But it doesn't really matter what the etymology or meaning of the word is when discussing the best way to enjoy it, and it's at best useless to try to tell someone else that they're enjoying it wrong.
> and that its meaning is "Literature composed in verse or language exhibiting conscious attention to patterns and rhythm." Neither of those things uniquely privileges its spoken experience.
Pattern can definitely exist in writing without being spoken. (Sometimes only in writing, and not when spoken; see, for example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concrete_poetry.) I would argue that rhythm can as well, though that's less of a slam dunk.
Have you done that successfully for any book? I've never tried, but it seems likely to me to be very difficult, unless you happen to read at exactly the narrator's pace.
Most audio players these days have an option to listen to the media at higher speeds. Through some FFT magic, I think, the tone doesn't go up either; it's just faster. I watch most of my YT vids at ~2x now and most podcasts are at ~1.8x. It can be a bit jarring at first, but you get used to it really fast.
> Most audio players these days have an option to listen to the media at higher speeds. Through some FFT magic, I think, the tone doesn't go up either; it's just faster. I watch most of my YT vids at ~2x now and most podcasts are at ~1.8x. It can be a bit jarring at first, but you get used to it really fast.
I may be protesting too much, since, as I say, I've never tried it. But this seems like a solution to the problem where the narrator's reading speed is a fixed percentage of your reading speed, whereas I have in mind the way that I read, which is that I might go very quickly through some sections that don't need or to which I don't want to pay detailed attention, and then slow way down in the more difficult sections. I think it is fairly rare for audiobook narrators to approach the book this way (but maybe they do it so seamlessly I don't notice?).
I'm not sure about YT, but my podcast app allows for me to map the left earbud's +/- buttons for volume and the right earbud's for playback speed. I can go slower or faster depending on how much I want to listen to a section. What I can't do is map a rewind button, which can be tough if I fast forward through something and miss and want to go back.
The best reading I've found is from Raidió Teilifís Éireann (RTÉ), Ireland’s national public-service broadcaster. [1] It's treated more as a play, one part per actor. It's special - my closest other experience is watching Shakespeare.
https://linusakesson.net/qweremin/
Brilliant.