Notices by Ben Evans (kittylyst@mastodon.social)

A reminder that #abortion is *not* legal in Great Britain & requires "nod and an wink" consent from 2 doctors - https://observer.co.uk/news/national/article/police-could-search-homes-and-seize-phones-after-sudden-pregnancy-loss - and that the Truss Cabinet had, for the first time since the 1970s, a majority of forced-birth advocates.

#UK folks may wish to write to their MP & suggest that Parliament do something about this state of affairs. I would be rather concerned with what an in-thrall-to-the-US Reform govt might do in 2029. Oh, and #ACAB of course.

Finally some good #AI news

I am very pleased to discover that the Spurious Correlations website has added #AI (i.e. made-up) explanations for the correlations - https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations #programming

@inthehands @rotnroll666 If you aren't already familiar with it, Project Valhalla is an OpenJDK project to take a second bite at some of those fundamental design decisions (e.g. split between primitives and reference types, generics, null-safety) by tackling them as a unified problem space and trying to reimagine them all at once.

Worth a deep dive on, IMO. It's been a long time in the making, but it could be the most profound change in Java's history.

@mattl Can you try again in a new, private window?

This is what I see:

@ntnsndr One pertinent example would be La Sagrada Família in #Barcelona - which has an extremely rich and highly relevant history.

@Hex 1. Get good at SQL 2. Find out how long backups are kept for 3. Decouple the data change from the code change 4. Push the data change first, and have it corrupt the new fields are needed (maybe by setting defaults or polluting other parts of the records). 5. Bundle the code change with unrelated changes, and keep having the other changes fail QA 6. Wait until the uncorrupted backups have been purged 7. Push code change.

Here's a fun thread for a Monday.

Which band were you inexplicably late to the party on? As in, which band within the spectrum of music that you know you like did you somehow overlook for way too long?

@dalias @lulu @eniko Number of active server JVMs in the wild continues to increase, having doubled in ~6 years IIRC.

@lulu @dalias @eniko Java's internal representation for non-ASCII strings is UTF-16 and its not immediately clear how that could be changed. So I think it'll be around for the forseeable future.

@HauntedOwlbear Hosting a PDS (data store & cryptographic signing capability) is basically trivial.

The Relays and the AppViews and the tough & expensive part, and are how Bluesky Inc retains control whilst being able to bullshit about "decentralization" - b/c it's possible to have your own PDS.

https://anderegg.ca/2024/11/15/maybe-bluesky-has-won

@evan There are circumstances where they are absolutely the right tool for the job.

For example, in a database where the transaction log is correctly implemented (e.g. Postgres, DB2) then using sprocs for complex logic preserves the transaction log as an unpolluted source of truth.

This makes replication (including wide-area async) and recovery vastly easier (and even trivial in some cases). If those properties of the system matter to your use case, sprocs are a good candidate technology.

@aral I had to read the damn article 3 times, but sure enough, all the methodology and data is under wraps.

Theranos vibes, much?

@kagan I reject the entire premise of the question. Every serious relationship I've been in has been with ... other bisexuals. (There's one person from my teens that I'm not sure how they would identify now, but apart from that it's all of them). In my circles that is not unusual. Bisexuals date other bisexuals a lot.

If other people want to make assumptions based on the gender presentation of the folk I'm dating, then that is scarcely my problem.

In case you're having a bad day, a reminder that there are people that believe that the X-Men are a metaphor for being persecuted for having conservaitive views. #marvel

@HauntedOwlbear IKR.

@RustyBertrand What the fuck I do?

@RuiSeabra AFAIK the deal hasn't closed yet and I would therefore expect IBM to be prohibited from making any such statements currently.

@GossiTheDog I said net worth, which is not remotely the same as income, and it varies widely depending on where you live.

In the US, for example, you need a household income of over $500k to even make it into the 1%

@GossiTheDog Depends how you define it. There is a point of net worth where you are basically decoupled from what is happening in the economy - you no longer have to work & provided you don't do anything really stupid & have a diversified portfolio you will be absolutely fine for the rest of your life.

The amount varies on what kind of lifestyle you want, and where you want to live - but $10M will do it pretty much anywhere. Those are the actual rich.