Doc Avid Mornington

Not actually a doctor.

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  • 31 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 5th, 2023

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  • If your SQL model has nulls, and you don’t have some clear way to conserve them throughout the data chain, including to the json schema in your API contract, you have a bug. That way to preserve them doesn’t have to be keeping nulls distinct from missing values in the json schema, but it’s certainly the most straightforward way.

    The world has more than three languages, and the way Java and Python do things is not universally correct. I’m not up to date on either of them, but I’m also guessing that they both have multiple libraries for (de) serialization and for API contract validation, so I am not really convinced your claims are universal even within those languages.

    I am not the other person you were talking to, I’ve only made one comment on this, so not really “hellbent”, friend.

    Yes, I am pretty sure I read the comments, although you’re making me wonder if I’m missing one. What specific comment, what “case specified above” are you referring to? As far as I can see, you are the one trying to say that if a distinction between null and a non-existent attribute is not specified, it should universally be assumed to be meaningless and fine to drop null values. I don’t see any context that changes that. If you can point it out, specifically, I’ll be glad to reassess.



  • At the (SQL) database level, if you are using null in any sane way, it means “this value exists but is unknown”. Conflating that with “this value does not exist” is very dangerous. JavaScript, the closest thing there is to a reference implementation for json serialization, drops attributes set to undefined, but preserves null. You seem to be insisting that null only means “explicit omission”, but that isn’t the case. Null means a variety of subtly different things in different contexts. It’s perfectly fine to explicitly define null and missing as equivalent in any given protocol, but assuming it is not.



  • It’s better to have useful comments. Long odds are that somebody who writes comments like this absolutely isn’t writing useful comments as well - in fact, I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen it happen. Comments like this increase cognitive overhead when reading code. Sure, I’d be happy to accept ten BS useless comments in exchange for also getting one good one, but that’s not the tradeoff in reality - it’s always six hundred garbage lines of comment in exchange for nothing at all. This kind of commenting usually isn’t the dev’s fault, though - somebody has told a junior dev that they need to comment thoroughly, without any real guidelines, and they’re just trying not to get fired or whatever.





  • Saying that some projects, at some point in their lifecycle, don’t need certain things, is not saying that those things have no place. Also, if one can’t design a monolith that isn’t bloated and tightly coupled, one definitely has no business designing microservices. Using microservices is neither necessary, nor sufficient to achieve decoupling.

    Monolithic services are the ideal way to begin a project, as using basic good practices, we can build a service that does many things with minimal coordination, and as it grows and requirements change or are discovered, we can easily refactor to keep things simple. As the software matures, we find the natural service boundaries, and find that certain pieces would perform better if they were separated out and could scale independently, or act asynchronously. Since we have followed good practices, this should usually be a simple matter of removing a class or module to a new service, and replacing it with a facade, such that the rest of the monolith doesn’t have to change at all.


  • Have you ever heard how religionists talk about atheists? I respect the right of people to believe whatever they believe, but I don’t have to respect their actual ridiculous beliefs. Bringing up the FSM, which is specifically aimed at dismantling the absurdism of creationism, is pretty funny. Are you a creationist? My dad was a real Christian minister, and while I don’t believe as he did, I would never mock his actual Christian beliefs. But I’ll mock the idiotic beliefs of fake-Christian creationists any time I tell like it.






  • A large part of the intent of the survey seems to be to tease out some understanding of what people actually mean by the term. Polls have limits and can be bad, but I think this one provides some good insight into how to communicate about these issues, and how worried we ought to be, or not be, about public support for Christian nationalism. I think, in part based on this survey data, that a lot of people are likely to support Christian nationalist candidates, despite not being Christian nationalists themselves, only because they hear the same rhetoric that you and I do, and interpret something very different. I think this is a good indicator that reaching out to educate people about what extremist Christians are really saying could go far to prevent a christofascist regime.


  • At the same time capitalism has built almost everything we have.

    Almost everything I can see and touch has been delivered by a for-profit business operating in a capitalist society

    There’s a couple ways to interpret these statements.

    Are you talking about innovation, progress, invention? Realistically, no. Occasionally capitalists put enough resources in the right hands that somebody working under capitalists manages to invent something good, but most real innovation doesn’t happen without government funding. Capitalists are very hesitant to risk their capital on the kind of critical R&D that is necessary to make progress. Even when it happens under capitalism, there’s no reason to think that capitalist control of the market caused it to happen - any system that gives creative people the time and resources to work on things will have as good results, at least, and it’s easy to construct a system that gives that time and resources to more creative people, with fewer bosses interfering and squashing anything that’s not seen as profitable. Capitalism is, though, very good at capturing and controlling innovation, sometimes even just killing existing innovations outright - see “embrace, extend extinguish”.

    Are you talking about manufacture and delivery of final products? Sure, under capitalist systems, of course it’s all done by capitalism, as other options aren’t available, or at least, aren’t given any room. If somebody builds a fence around the lake that everyone fishes in, and takes over the fish and sells them to people who used to catch their own, do you praise that person for providing fish? Do you think landlords are providing housing?

    Capitalism isn’t just commerce. Capitalism is an antidemocratic economic trait, where the production and distribution of goods, services, and information is controlled by unelected, private owners of capital. Does it “destroy everything we build” as the person you were replying to said? No, not everything, but it does destroy a lot, and control and pervert most of what’s left.