• 2 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • Got hands on experience with this. Wasn’t my design choice but I inherited an app with a database where one of the keys was tied to a completely separate database. I mean at the time it probably made sense but the most unlikely of scenarios actually happened: that other database, the one I had zero control over, was migrated to a new platform. All of those keys were synthetic so of course they were like, “Meh, why we gotta keep the old keys?” So post-migration my app becomes basically useless and I spent 6 hours writing migration code, some of it on off hours, to fix my data.

    So it’s questionable whether a foreign key of a completely different system is a natural key, but at the very least never use a key YOU don’t control.







  • I’ve never heard anyone explicitly say this but I’m sure a lot of people (i.e. management) think that AI is a replacement for static code. If you have a component with constantly changing requirements then it can make sense, but don’t ask an llm to perform a process that’s done every single day in the exact same way. Chief among my AI concerns is the amount of energy it uses. It feels like we could mostly wean off of carbon emitting fuels in 50 years but if energy demand skyrockets will be pushing those dates back by decades.








  • I think it could be potentially easier to thwart malicious bots than “honest” bots. I figure a bot that doesn’t care about robots.txt and whatnot would try to gobble up as many pages as it could find. You could easily place links into HTML that aren’t visible to regular users and a “greedy” bot would follow it anyway. From there you could probably have a website within a website that’s being generated by AI on the fly. To keep the bots from running up your bills you probably want it to be mostly static.