Tobacco, wine and fresh bread are usually few of the consumables that in many western countries do not have to disclose their ingredients.
Why do we allow this? Just behave like all others.
Now we want to push for smoke-free societies: but non of ways to achieve this even dares to talk about "just make tobacco giants list all the ingredients/additives".
The rule for fresh bread varies from state to state because it's not considered interstate commerce, so it doesn't have to follow the federal labeling law. (There's a ton of hypocrisy about the use of the interstate commerce clause, but this part isn't completely stupid.)
It goes for all good produced and consumed in the same state, not just bread. Tobacco and alcohol actually are regulated federally even when produced in the same state (that interstate commerce hypocrisy I mentioned). They don't require ingredients lists but they do require licensing.
Where I live (Maryland), cottage industries have to include ingredients lists. Others require just allergens. Some have no regulations one way or the other.
An amusing thought but I mean the potato salad deli stuff. Anything prepared on site (in a store or restaurant) doesn't need to disclose ingredients. There's no special exception for bread.
Personally, I prefer my bread to not have plastic labels on it. Besides on the bread itself, where would you even put such a label? The sleve-bags for bread are used for more than just one specific bread, so can't put them there either...
I don't think anyone is under the delusion that cigarettes are healthy for you. Everyone knows they cause multiple cancers. That's part of the appeal. It shows how 'tough' and 'cool' the user is. No matter what you do, there will always be a reactionary group of people doing the opposite of what they are told.
I find SQL a very thick "wrapper masking low-level logic". Think of the query planning, the index-maintaining, the upholding of guarantees, the writing-to-disk and caching that you are all not doing by using a RDBMS!
I'd say SQL is a very high level language.
"SQL teaches you to reason and approach problems logically" -- I kind of agree here. It teaches relational data mgmt. I think it is better to attack most software design challenges at a higher level, and --once settled at that level-- consider how to "serialize" those solutions to an RDBMS (if that's the tech that you've chosen for persistence; still a very solid choice after 50+ years!).
Yes indeed. When I learned SQL in college, the professor made a HUGE deal about how it was a "4th generation language" so it was so abstract you didn't have to think about how the computer would answer your query.
Even at that time I thought that was massive overstatement of what using SQL was like. It didn't deliver on that promise very well. But it's very funny to see plain SQL now sometimes called "low level"!
And this I think is best not done in SQL/ the relational-data paradigm. It's better to understand the problem in terms that do not tie you in to a specific technology. And once you have a clear picture of what need to be built, then choose persistence tech; if that happens to be SQL, you can then translate your solution to SQL.
In my experience, SQL sorely misses sum-types. So I need to find a way to serialize the sum-types of my domain model to SQL.
They tried teaching us this relational algebra (or whatever you call it) in university but most of it went over my head because it was too abstract. Using weird mathematical symbols. But when we started writing actual SQL, all of that made sense to me.
I think it might be easier to see it in action and then go back and understand the fundamentals of how/why it works.
That's the difference between academia (like to make simple things look complex -- but very correct in wording/modelling/approach) and engineering (like to make complex stuff look easy -- sometimes cutting some corners).
I was reacting to the parent post as well, suggesting that they should have used “fundamental” rather than “low-level”, and that “fundamental” would also match the article picture.
I found PRQL[1] to be good fix for nearly everything I dont like about SQL.
But then it's only a query lang (DDL you still do in SQL then I guess).
Bottom line for me now is that I dont write much of my SQL by hand. AI does a much better job at it. I just read it back and point out mistakes and/or inefficiencies.
In many cases they pay really well I heard, so I'm not too bothered by it. If you are a high paid specialist and you do not like how you are treated, you can go and find another, friendlier, job.
For low paid workers I have more sympathy: if you have no options but to be tracked and pee in bottles and ... whatnot; that's just sad. We need better labour law to protect them.
Also all corporates that did anti-unionizing and never got punished for this are simply criminals operating above the law at this point. We know many FAANG++ did it.
To me "deleting a failing test" is not always bad. I've also deleted many failing tests without sabotaging: the test was no longer needed.
I think the "no longer needed" and when that applies is where I simply differ of opinion with an LLM that removed by test -- it I did not want the test to be removed (you seem to imply that); as in some cases I want it to remove my test!
It should remove the test "for the right reasons"; and who gets to decide what's right?
My CLAUDE file has some instructions put there because it was too focuesed on producing "green tests", where I prefer to have a sound test that fails so I can look into it.
Nice to see Ruby vs Java. Must say that in this context Kotlin deserves a mention: my Kotlin code basically looks+feels like Ruby-with-types. Both Ruby and Kotlin are essentially OO, but with "lots of FP features where it makes sense".
On the side of the jpackage: I'm currently using GraalVM compile to native for a Kotlin CLI tool. I do the build in a build container so I use an older glib to ensure compatibility on a wide variety of Linuxes, AND because this way no-one needs to install all the GraalVM requirements by hand. The result is a 57MB binary, that start in a blink of the eye. The downside is long compile times (2 minutes for a simple CLI tool that uses AWS SDK). I think I prefer this of jpackage; but I'm not building a GUI tool.
> Many of those "lots of FP features where it makes sense". were already present in Smalltalk.
Good point. And both Java and Ruby borrowed from Smalltalk (according to Wikipedia Kotlin does not, but that is: not directly.
Sadly Java did not take Smalltalk's FP inspiration (I guess they were strayed by C++'s lead in that regard), and we needed streams and now Kotlin to fix that :)
Smalltalk's syntax never go really popular though. One could say that was its biggest drawback.
> Smalltalk's syntax never go really popular though. One could say that was its biggest drawback.
A lot of Smalltalk-style syntax was absolutely massive for a decade or so you could argue, at least under the guise of the gazillions of iPhone apps that were written in Objective-C. This random blog post probably does a better job than me:
"Smalltalk's syntax never go really popular though. One could say that was its biggest drawback."
This would be my guess, I always heard nice things about it and liked many concepts, but the syntax was just plain ugly to me, so I never felt the urge to try it out. I imagine others felt similar.
Why do we allow this? Just behave like all others.
Now we want to push for smoke-free societies: but non of ways to achieve this even dares to talk about "just make tobacco giants list all the ingredients/additives".
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