Having built two production, scaled evented systems over the last decade, I don’t see the need for this. Properly designed events flatten to a table schema in a regular DB quite easily. Tools like Trino/Presto and therefore Athena, let you deep query on a JSON field, as well (e.g. against a Parquet-based event store on block storage), so if you use a standard envelope, the bodies are all still available without having to provide the schema for every event. This works to quite huge amounts of data given that you do rollups and/or snapshots.
Elixir and Phoenix is a better production platform than Django.. I’m not throwing shade on Django, many production systems use it happily. I’m saying that Phoenix/Elixir is better, partly because of the BEAM and OTP and partly because of the language and the framework. Real concurrency. Better performance. Far more robust in production. The language is pre-compiled, and while not statically typed, that alone provides one more safety layer. It’s functional, which avoids a lot of the ugly patterns in both Rails and Django. It has a built-in fast and reliable KV store. It has distribution between the nodes if you want it (e.g. for a distributed cache). It enables you to debug with a remote shell connected live to the running system. There’s a lot more than I can add here.
I am a Go dev, too. I consider Go my main language. The BEAM has a very, very similar architecture to the M:N scheduler in Go. Goroutines are not dissimilar to BEAM processes. You can similarly run thousands of processes on the BEAM. But Go does not have a real Phoenix equivalent and there are reasons to use Elixir and BEAM, especially on the web side, including some of what I already mentioned above.
Equivalent Go code would be very long and very ugly.
Golang has its positives but you also lose a lot. Whole ecosystem is not comparable, like "debug live production cluster" is one-command away for Elixir vs "fuck you" for Golang
Contrast that with my personal experience of items from the UK (specifically the UK, my experience is different elsewhere) where “untested” almost always means “I tested it and I know it’s broken but I want to try to get a better price anyway”. Especially when testing would involve plugging it in with the adapter it comes with and seeing that it doesn’t light up, for example.
I've had good luck from "vibe checking" the seller based on their other listings, it's usually obvious who's trying to make a profit vs who's just trying to clear out their unused personal stuff. The latter is often priced down too, for a quick sale. I'll only buy from a commercial seller if they explicitly describe the fault(s).
A whole lot of these bulk electronic sales seem to be "Here's all the stuff I couldn't fix". Either water damaged or the repair was botched. I can't imagine too many normal situations someone has 15 of the same game console they are selling in a bulk lot.
I found a similar (though much smaller! 1GB) Kingston drive from about 2008 that had been in storage since I moved overseas. 14 years later it still had all the data on it.
It’s not clear to me from this, but I hope that the “removability” component of this means the end of “disposable” vapes with a fixed lithium battery installed. I can’t even count the number of these I’ve seen littering the roadside. Ideally this raises the cost of that business model enough to also eliminate some vendors from that product category (“disposable” vapes), which is primarily aimed at/used by children anyway.
I agree, disposable vapes are an absolute perversion. I never thought we would come to a point where throw-away "technology" (e.g. microsystems, batteries) would be acceptable like a throw-away cigarette. Absolutely wicked, and again many politicians that have been captured by the vape industry to not act against it.
The UK banned disposable vapes, the suppliers now add a charging port and the ability to put in refills. The refills cost as much or more than the vapes so now people throw away the "reusable" vapes as if they were disposable.
Alternatively, it's successful and is expanded to support more artists in the future. Cynicism with governance not unjustified in Ireland, but here we are looking at some actual progress.
While some things are doing great, there's a not insignificant amount of inertia in government for the last decade. This is actively being discussed in the Irish press. And Ireland has a long history of cronyism. I suspected (author clarified below) that is what was leading to the cynicism in the original post.
Artists picked at random will still be subject to existing conditions, those best able to maneuver within the social and political currents will inevitably outperform those who cannot.
Those running the program are ill-equipped to define it’s success, being part of the same regime which routinely delivers bottom-of-the-barrel slop.
These things work well on the extremely limited task impetus that we give them. Even if we sidestep the question of whether or not LLMs are actually on the path to AGI, Imagine instead the amount of computing and electrical power required with current computing methods and hardware in order to respond to and process all the input handled by a person at every moment of the day. Somewhere in between current inputs and handling the full load of inputs the brain handles may lie “AGI” but it’s not clear there is anything like that on the near horizon, if only because of computing power constraints.
Way back, Perl got off the ground really because, in contrast to the C compilers of the era, code written on one Unix ran on the others, usually unmodified. In my first jobs, where we had heterogeneous mixes of commercial Unixes, this was unbeatable. It also wrote like higher level shell, which made it easy to learn for systems people, who really were the only ones that cared about running things on multiple platforms most of the time anyway.
As things became more homogeneous, and furthermore as other languages also could do that “one weird trick” of cross platform support, the shortcomings of both Perl and its community came to the fore.
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