I'm actually impressed by the amount of abuse our Oracle instances are able take from our developers.
Massive amounts of parallel single reads and writes with millisecond responses mixed with mega-joins of incorrectly indexed tables that works flawlessly "on their machine" that limp on well enough to sneak past performance testing with just the planner silently writhing in agony.
The original question does discount the capability of Oracle's database too much, as only something "golf executives" buy. When you have a large problem that is best solved with a relational model, Oracle delivers and can indeed be worth all the money and license hell involved.
The etymology is interesting - Pebble Voting was used in the early democracies in Greece from 500 BC. Black pebbles meant 'no' and white meant 'yes'. The tradition evolved to the black and white marbles used in the Roman senate centuries later, i.e. two millennia ago. The practice has since continued – it was used in the early American republic in the 18th century, and the word 'ballot' used today for voting means just that - a 'little ball'.
The word 'blacklist' probably originated from this meaning. It was in use in England since before, but it was probably the "Black List of Regicides” that popularised the term. It was a list compiled by the administration of King Charles II England of those to be punished for the beheading of his father King Charles I in 1649, following the restoration of the monarchy of England in 1660. As this list was rather long, it was a probably a bit of a traumatic event for the gentry in London and it’s not hard to imagine that the memory of the dreaded "blacklist" stuck. A century later the word was in general use for a list of enemies, detractors, and unwanted people.
Conversely, "in the black" is the notion of having no debts or a positive cash flow. This obviously comes from the centuries old principle of using black for credit, and red ink for debit and negative balances in the double-entry accounting system codified in the 15th century.
A tangential but equally fascinating concept is the practice of forbidding - or blacklisting - words in totalitarian regimes like Maoist China. Controlling language was a key strategy to influence thought, define in-groups, and ostracize out-groups. It's a hallmark of a totalitarian systems aiming to shape thought through language. Very much not at all in line with the principles of ballot voting in a democratic system one should think.
(The last argument can be used with any word. I could find your Gallicism offensive and demand that all words with a French etymology should be removed from English to restore it to it's Old-English form before the oppressive Normand rule, since after all, the old words would just make more sense to those who are old enough to be used to it, and my feelings are important.)
Thank you for sharing the etymology! It's quite interesting, I agree!
I may have been a bit too pithy/I sufficiently clear with that last statement I made.
I meant it in the sense that understanding the word relies on a lot of contextual/colloquial/cultural understanding that's typically gained via time and exposure. At least, more of it than allow/deny requires.
Imagine an alien culture encountering blacklist vs Denylist. The latter requires a lot less context to translate, because Deny is used a lot more consistently.
My argument is mainly one about _clarity_, not hurt feelings.
It's an apocalyptical mind-bug. All times have an eschatology - ours seems to be climate collapse. It used to be nuclear war.
The media is selling a story. In reality everything is still getting better. People are healthier, richer, and better off in almost every measurable way, all over the world, including Africa and Asia.
Yes, there are some dark clouds. A long list. But the problems - even a long war in the middle east, are bumps in the road, not a cliff. If the clouds turns out to be a really bad storm, people will buckle down and sort it.
Go watch a big chimney stack being demolished. It hangs around in the air for a long time, before it is suddenly gone. But it’s definitely collapsing the whole time.
> If the clouds turns out to be a really bad storm, people will buckle down and sort it.
That'd be cool if it were true, but it isn't. The people with the economic and political power to do anything about it are massively profiting off the storm and care more about that than the damage the storm will do.
Why do you think they are all literally building end-times style bunkers these days?
Is global economic collapse not an eschatological scenario?
When you say "everything is still getting better", what do you mean? Because the price of fuel and food, isn't getting better. It seems to be getting worse. Your version of "reality" doesn't seem to reflect the experience of a lot of people.
> people will buckle down and sort it.
It's an interesting series of words that don't say a lot. There is much to wonder about.
> Is global economic collapse not an eschatological scenario?
Not really, no. In this case 20-25% of the world's oil disappearing doesn't sound like it should be an 'everything collapses' scenario, we still have >75% of the oil around and oil isn't the only energy source. Everyone has always seen a "worst economic collapse of my lifetime" and although this one looks like it is going to be unusually horrific it isn't going to cause the end of anything structural unless there are other causes already in place. For example in theory this might be the end of the US military's ability to maintain global order in the same way as the Suiz Crisis humiliated the British empire - it'd be a recognition of realities on the ground rather than the current crisis changing anything.
You're missing that the impact is not evenly distributed. It doesn't mean everyone gets 25% less petrol, tighten the belt a little bit, take one fewer trip to starbucks, and all is well.
It means rich countries get the 75% while the poor countries get nothing and starve. What happens when a nuclear power like India starts to lack food?
> What happens when a nuclear power like India starts to lack food?
Personally I think that actually seems a bit unlikely. Most of India's energy doesn't come from oil and doesn't go to agriculture. It seems plausible that the global economy will be able to overcome the food and fertiliser issues even in the short term, there is a lot of food out there.
I'm expecting the threat to be more complex economic goods like construction, manufactured goods, leisure and general logistics. I don't want to downplay the risk, famine in India is a scary thought, but I don't really see how we'd get there from closing the Strait of Hormuz without a lot of bad luck. The problem is it is going to materially impoverish a number of people and collapse complex supply chains rather than make it hard to get food to them.
Food quantity has never been the issue. The logistics are. Food is the most direct issue, but "just" the economic turmoil alone is reason enough to worry. No one was starving in the Weimar republic, yet ...
The logistics of food don't seem to be under any particular threat. The petrol required to get someone survival calories is not so much and the vast majority of traffic on the road is not about getting basic calories to people. I don't think any of the world's nuclear states would struggle to overcome that problem right now.
> You’re getting worked up over nothing. Everything is going to be fine. So just relax, okay? You’re really overreacting.
> Trust me, it’s all going to work out perfect. Nothing bad is going to happen. It’s all under control.
> Why do you keep saying these things? I can tell when there’s trouble looming, and I really don’t sense that right now. We’re in control of this situation, and we know what we’re doing. So stop being so pessimistic.
> Look, you’ve been proven wrong, so stop talking. You’ve had your say already. Be quiet, okay? Everything’s fine.
The other thing is that it is WAY too easy to distract yourself from your solvable problems by focusing on the big ones - you have to fight that with ferocity.
Why get out of debt? The country is a brazillian trillion in debt we’re doomed.
Why invest for retirement or save? The market is fraud anyway.
Why exercise and lose weight? The planet is doomed anyway.
The 150€ is a reservation on your debit card before filling up, since the banks or the station doesn't want the credit risk. It's released when the actual sum is booked.
I think it's just what a reasonable "full tank" was a while back.
My internet provider didn't even maintain the ip-address. They have a pool of egress routes and seems to route round-robin. Basically every new connection can be from any address in the pool.
I had to call them to make it stop since it tripped the VPN solution at work, that interpreted it as a MIM attack. They disabled it no questions asked as soon as I called, so I guess it mostly works for most people, but not all.
But on that note, isn't it basically time now for IPv6 so we can stop shit like this and go to directly addressable devices like everyone did in the early 90s.
What's fast on Z platforms is typically IO rather than raw CPU - the platform can push a lot of parallell data. This is typically the bottleneck when compiling.
The cores are in my experience moderately fast at most. Note that there are a lot of licencing options and I think some are speed-capped - but I don't think that applies to IFL - a standard CPU licence-restricted to only run linux.
In Sweden and I think Europe, there seems to be quite much product development in apples. I think one of the reasons is that storage seems to have been more or less perfected so that the produce can be sold over almost a whole year.
Using only traditional methods there are several "new" Swedish varieties, Aroma, Frida and Saga that are very nice - and especially Saga is absolutely fantastic - On par or better that international varieties Jazz, Pink Lady and Honeycrisp.
Some of the more traditional varieties are also sold more and for a longer period because of the improved storage, even though that I think they have a shorter storage window.
Another reason I think is that not all of these varieties thrive as small trees, and most factory farmed trees are kept small because it makes picking them easier.
I don't think it's a best example. MMAcevedo is about running a real human mind on a different substrate (for science, for labor, or to torture it for fun a million times, I guess, by a bored teenager who got the image from torrents).
Scaling up these neuron cultures is rather something like "head cheese" from Greg Egan's "Rifters" novels (artificial "brains" trained to do network filtering, anti-malware combat etc.).
I think that is Hofstadter grieving his wife, and reflecting on how we embed models or predictions of others in our own neural networks, more than anything else.
We build models of the world in order to predict it.
But I guess you could say other people are objectively shaping the neurons in our brains. But so is that fiddly printer tray or whatever, to a small extent.
Hey that printer tray is a bit of someone's soul too. Many people's work and decisions, even a bit of the nature of our whole society is recorded in those flimsy things. It may or may not be comforting that most of what we contribute to the world will ultimately be considered mundane, even and perhaps especially if it's successful.
You need to be reasonably experienced and guide it.
First, you need to know that Claude will create nonsensical code. On a macro level it's not exactly smart it just has a lot of contextual static knowledge.
Debugging is not it's strongest skill. Most models don't do good at all. Opus is able to one-shot "troubleshooting" prompts occasionally, but it's a high probability that it veer of on a tangent if you just tell it to "fix things" based on errors or descriptions. You need to have an idea what you want fixed.
Another problem is that it can create very convincing looking - but stupid - code. If you can't guide it, that's almost guaranteed. It can create code that's totally backwards and overly complicated.
If it IS going on a wrong tangent, it's often hopeless to get it back on track. The conversation and context might be polluted. Restart and reframe the prompt and the problems at hand and try again.
I'm not totally sure about the language you are using, but syntax errors typically happens if it "forgets" to update some of the code, and very seldom just in a single file or edit.
I like to create a design.md and think a bit on my own, or maybe prompt to create it with a high level problem to get going, and make sure it's in the context (and mentioned in the prompts)
Sometimes people forget that you don't have to use AI to actually write the code. You can stick to "Ask" mode and it will give you useful suggestions and generate code but won't actually modify your files.
This has been my experience as well. I get drained at the end, and I spent most of my energy and thinking capacity dealing with the LLM instead of the problem space.
I use AI-Lint to enforce basic code hygeine and design taste across languages, and force it to develop test iterations it can run on its own and tell it to iterate until the tests go green.
Massive amounts of parallel single reads and writes with millisecond responses mixed with mega-joins of incorrectly indexed tables that works flawlessly "on their machine" that limp on well enough to sneak past performance testing with just the planner silently writhing in agony.
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