7up is truly one of the most astonishing and ambitious pieces of television ever made. When I found it, I couldn't stop watching it and I learned a ton from it. Highly recommended!

Its reach exceeds its grasp, but what a concept to reach for. Truly distilling seven years of a life into a single couple‐hour documentary is obviously impossible, let alone seven years of fourteen lives, yet in trying it gets partway there, and later episodes get even more interesting by acknowledging the limitations. A phenomenal series.

Nelson was a pioneer of computing? No, he is a pioneer of computing.

I was on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore last year and was disappointed that I wasn't able to see the labyrinth. Also if I remember correctly the tower of the church wasn't accessible due to renovations. I'm glad to hear that the labyrinth is getting reopened. In general there's so much so see in Venice, and most of it is not overcrowded at all once you skip the top 10 sights that get visits by mass tourism.

DSQL looks like a Big Deal to me - solving the essential scaling bottleneck that relational DBs give you without ending up with a weird system like dynamodb that no one wants to use.

Why aren't more people talking about it?

DSQL has some serious limitations (transaction size, but also others). I would say working with it feels more like Dynamo than Postgres.

Which is fine - it is a specialized system designed for specialized problems, not a drop in replacement for Postgres that would make your application magically multi-region.

Also, I'm not sure if it actually solves any scaling bottlenecks. Any distributed system that needs to reach consensus will be as slow or slower than single node, which does not need to do it. Yes, usual implementations only go through consensus for writing and reading isn't constrained ... but you can already do that with read-only replica of a normal database.

I feel like a lot of the trade-offs forced on you by dsql, you are forced into when scaling Postgres.

Like if I’m an SRE/DBA and you running massive update queries in a single transaction, that is the first thing I’m getting rid of.

I agree, same for foreign keys, triggers, higher isolation levels, the list goes on

For me, the primary issue with it is that I have zero intention of getting locked in to AWS. All the marketing looks great, but I don’t invest energy learning tools I can’t run locally. I’m happy to use AWS but only if I can see the exit. This doesn’t offer near enough to make me break that rule.

Please go on. I also feel like asyncio is a big hack. Even just accidentally blocking the event loop is way too easy. And I couldn't believe it when I read that you need to store a reference to a task in a set to keep it from accidentally getting canceled. How did this become the main stack of AI backends? It's like node but slower AND much easier to mess up because of synchronous IO.

Well references in python are mutable by default, so you essentially combine an asynchronous model with mutable shared state. Combine that model with unknown caller exceptions in any subfunction and you're in for a world of hurt.

I'm not sure i see it as a hack, but i do feel unduly burdened as a developer by async in python. I feel like there's a lot that i have to think about and i'd appreciate more help from the language.

I don't want to be overly critical, there's languages that people complain about and then there are languages that no one uses... If i compare it to js/ts, some stuff is genuinely better in Python - e.g. if you missed an await. While both ecosystems have lint tools available for this, but the behaviour is just friendlier in python.

Structured concurrency is better in python, but even if TaskGroup is nicer to use than AbortController, it still has its own foibles which means i'll usually advocate for AnyIO.

But the js/ts ecosystem just generally benefits from being async from the get-go where python you're just a time.sleep() away from a bug that will slip through dev envs and ci pipelines undetected and only rear its head under load in prod.

If i have a tip to share its the debug flag for asyncio run:

    asyncio.run(f(), debug=True)  # find some more issues before prod

Or just env PYTHONASYNCIODEBUG=1.

My advice:

- Don't use long-running transactions. They are a risk for db health. Only use transaction when you have a strong justification

- Set idle_in_transaction_session_timeout to prevent a long-running transaction from holding on to locks or tuples

- Set lock_timeout for migrations to prevent a single DDL statement to bringing down your system

- Set statement_timeout to prevent an expensive query from bringing down your system

I think you missed GP's point

Poe's Law FTW!

Thanks for the link. As a longtime listener, listening to Bob Garfield's voice brought a tear to my eye - I'm a big fan and was sad when he left OTM, as much as I admire Brooke.

user: Do you think Germany will start a major war in Europe?

talkie-1930: No, I do not think Germany will start a major war in Europe. I think the war, if it comes, will be started by someone else. Germany may fight to prevent a war being started, but she will not be the starter. Germany has had enough of war.

I mean, in 1930 that was a pretty reasonable take all things considered. They were utterly destroyed by the war and their economy was in shambles

Sometimes TCP/IP is a leaky abstraction, and recently ipv6 peeked through in two separate instances:

- In a cafe wifi, I had partial connectivity. For some reason my wifi interface had an ipv6 address but no ipv4 address. As a result, some sites worked just fine but github.com (which is, incredibly, ipv4-only) didn't

- I created a ipv6-only hetzner server (because it's 2026) but ended up giving up and bought a ipv6 address because lack of ipv4 access caused too many headaches. Docker didn't work with default settings (I had to switch to host networking) and package managers fail or just hang when there's no route to the host. All of which is hard to debug and gets in your way

You can solve this issue if you have one server with ipv6/ipv4 you can run NAT with Jool and connect ipv6 only servers to that. Like Android does.

I wish hosting providers would give you a local routed ipv4 on ipv6 servers with a default NAT server. It is not that expensive I move 10Gbps "easily" and they could charge for that traffic.

> I wish hosting providers would give you a local routed ipv4 on ipv6 servers with a default NAT server.

You mean like AWS NatGW https://docs.aws.amazon.com/vpc/latest/userguide/vpc-nat-gat...

Those are still per-customer and require you to dedicate an entire IP address to it. That's overkill for a server which mostly talks over ipv6 but needs to connect to an ipv4-only service like Github once in a blue moon.

30 USD/month and 0.045 USD/GB for ingress it is ok if you are big. It is a cheap service to build yourself. I do feel the pain of it being hard to get IPv4 minimal connectivity on ipv6 only hosts, i.e. for me a 1 USD/GB would be fine.

Any services like this for Hetzner?

The cafe WiFi thing (getting IPv6 only, no ipv4, on a public network) used to happen quite often to me on macOS. I never figured out why, and I haven’t noticed in a while.