In a business application, the database is just about the most important and valuable component.
It’s where your customers’ data is kept, and your customers’ data is your biggest asset and liability.
In a typical tiered architecture, the database sits at the bottom of everything.
It is on the critical path of almost any interaction a user has with the system.
Making it fast makes the system fast.
Making it reliable makes the system reliable.
Conversely, when there’s a problem with your app, the database is probably in the middle of it.
Doing anything of value requires wrangling these highly complex servers, usually via SQL.
Of course databases would be a target for developers to try to improve things, as they are a huge part of our daily work.
It feels like there’s a lot going on right now in the database/data storage world.
For a long time I’ve been unhappy that SQL is the default interface to the database we use at work (MySQL).
It’s a language designed for humans to write, not for machine-to-machine communication.
I recently learned about SQLite’s virtual machine: basically, a SQL query is “compiled” into a program in a bytecode language which includes both low-level primitives like loading and storing to registers, as well as high-level operations like creating a btree.
This made me wonder if SQL could be replaced by a bytecode interface for database clients.
Developers wouldn’t want to write bytecode directly, but if we’re already using ORMs to construct SQL expressions, which get parsed by the database back into bytecode anyway, why not skip out the middle-man and have the ORM product bytecode?
Why bother?
I dunno, it just feels better than treating a business analytics language from the 70s as a compilation target.
It’d be nice if I could bulk insert 1000 rows without having to prepare a statement containing 1000*num_columns placeholder question marks first.
For the forseeable future, we’re sticking with SQL.
But I can dream.
Ursula Franklin said “peace is not the absence of war, but the absence of fear”.
The context, from an interview about the use of force in the pursuit of peace, is:
Peace, for me, is a consequence of justice.
For that reason, peace is defined, not as the absence of war, but as the absence of fear.
And for that reason I am convinced that means that are unjust or violent cannot, even for the best of reasons, provide peace.
This is a high bar.
No enforced ceasefire, no polite society with deadly force in its grin, no economic end of history where war is merely too expensive to capital.
Instead, justice is present, fear is absent, war naturally evaporated.
Identifying fear with the cause of conflict reframes war as an emotional response - not as a reasonable, rational, regrettable but sadly inevitable way humans tend to behave.
The Religious Society of Friends has since its founding been known for its peace testimony.
It sits alongside several other denominations and movements known as “peace churches” which place particular emphasis on nonviolence and pacifism.
These churches generally concur that violence on behalf of nations and their governments is contrary to Christian morality, but agree that the teachings of Jesus were to explain the principles of the Kingdom of God rather than and contrasted with the ways of any earthly government.
An example of this emphasis is in the Quaker approach to aid and development.
From a Quaker Service Australia report on a project in Cambodia:
KCD has demonstrated how language skills training can promote inter-ethnic peace in other locations.
A shared language is a critical prerequisite for promoting understanding between these diverse ethnic communities …
This project provides ethnic Vietnamese children with the language skills they need to overcome many of their current disadvantages and provides opportunities for children from different ethnic groups to work and play together.
… With the start of Khmer language classes, most Vietnamese children are learning Khmer for the first time.
A focus on material needs is important, but a distinctly Quaker-flavored form of community development is to focus on the language barrier that allows fear and estrangement to survive.
Sometimes, I get to tell someone who didn’t know that the internet depends critically on vast networks of subsea cables which connect all the earth’s continents.
This usually happens with people who don’t work in tech, but even those who are professional web developers learn this at some point.
People are usually surprised, as if they had thought about it, the idea that the internet happens “in the cloud” often leads them to the impression that most of the internet’s communication happens “through the air” like radio.
I myself was surprised, when I looked into it, that we’ve been doing this since the 1850s:
Recently, I’ve started following an industry blog which tracks developments in subsea cables.
This short recent post stood out to me as a very neat example that demonstrates how the internet gets built.
Here’s most of this very short post, and one of the maps:
Microsoft has applied for several maritime usage licenses to do ship surveys of proposed routes for new subsea cables connecting Ireland to the UK. Its SOBR2 cable will connect Ireland to Wales as opposed to the usual Cornwall landings. It will apparently land at Malahide Beach and/or Portmarnock on the Irish side.
It is not clear to me whether the intent is to branch the cable or whether there are two landing options. Details are sparse on the cable itself. My educated guess would be a 96 pair unrepeatered cable because it minimizes capex and maximizes bandwidth punch with such systems easily handling a couple petabits per second.
The site survey will focus on the top three meters of the sea floor. It will take samples to ascertain the texture and composition of material with an eye towards a deep burial of the cable itself. The samples will help determine not only burial depth but also how well armoured the cable will be. The Irish Sea is notorious for fibre cuts due to fishing. The Sea is heavily trafficked.
This terse summary refers to so many things we don’t usually consider when we wonder how our internet traffic gets to servers in America or Europe:
Maritime usage licenses from the nations which govern waters the cable will be laid in
Surveying routes and the geology of the sea floor
Choosing places for the cable to “land” at each end (the impact assessment contains a wealth more detail)
Technical details of the cable construction (including whether it needs to be armored against fishing vessels!)
Last year, I was lucky enough to visit Cornwall.
I learned that some of the earliest transantlantic cables landed there - being, of course, one of the westernmost points of the English isles.
Sennen Cove, near Land's End. This is not where the cables landed, but it's a nice photo.
This is behind the reference in the post above to the “usual Cornwall landings”.
My work in tech doesn’t usually need me to care about infrastructural details like this.
But I really enjoy knowing a bit about how the world around me fits together, what it is made of.
A big part of my life in the past year has been working towards creating more affordable housing in Sydney.
As a layperson with no position of power, this isn’t an easy thing to just do.
However, I find it such a worthwhile challenge that I’m going to keep doing it for as long as I can.
Our public and social housing sector has withered.
It is seeing new investment under the current Labor government, but it will take a long time for it to recover.
As a software developer with a relatively high income, I am not eligible for public housing.
That’s probably as it should be!
But I don’t want my only other option to be playing the housing-as-investment game of snakes and property ladders.
I don’t want to participate in a system which I see as poorly-designed to suit the human needs of security, community, sustainability and affordability.
The examples are rife, but here’s just one study which describes the shortcomings of the developer-led approach to housing.
An improvement: rental co-operatives
I’ve come to believe that the best way to deliver on the needs of the middle of the housing market is via European-style limited-equity co-operatives. Under this model of long-term secure rental:
A property (or multiple properties) are owned by a co-operative, which is a particular type of member-controlled private company.
The members of the co-operative have a right to reside in its property as long as they adhere to the co-operative’s bylaws.
They also have an equal right to vote in the governance of the co-op.
Members typically “buy in” to the co-op with the equivalent to a small deposit on a home, which is refundable when leaving the co-op.
Members then pay rent to the co-op while living there.
Members of existing developments, and potential residents of new ones, are often involved in the design and planning stages.
This is crucial to ensure housing is designed not as a marketable commodity, but for those who will actually live in it.
(I’m leaving out a lot of detail here.)
In some European cities, this democratic not-for-profit housing sector provides as much as 20% of dwellings.
This is not without significant government support, of course… but our current housing system also benefits hugely from government support!
There is growing awareness of and interest in this model in Australia. Have a look at:
While I don’t think a co-operative sector is a panacea for the many issues we have, I strongly believe it would be a huge improvement.
At its best, a co-operative housing sector can deliver quality affordable housing to people on a range of incomes, not only those who are relatively well-off.
Sydney Cohousing
At the start of 2024, trying to work out how to go about creating a La Borda-style development in Sydney, I found and joined Sydney Cohousing.
We are a small group of Sydneysiders who want to promote the ideas of the co-housing movement in Sydney.
We want more opportunities to live in places where we know our neighbours, where people of diverse backgrounds, of all ages, of different levels of income can live side-by-side.
Our main project right now is creating a co-operative development of affordable co-housing in urban Sydney.
It’s going to be a big challenge; we are blazing a trail that is new to Australia.
All these separate elements exist here already, but not all in a single project.
In November, I was elected to be the secretary and president of Sydney Cohousing.
(No congratulations are necessary; we’re a small association, and the six of us on the committee pretty much share the work.)
In 2025, I hope that we can make significant progress on our goals:
Building a community of people who want to live in this kind of co-operative, non-profit, community-oriented housing.
(And those who want to help it become a reality even if they don’t want to live with us!)
Finding funding to develop our financial model, which is common elsewhere in the world but innovative in Australia, and requires legal and industry expertise to define.
Searching for land or existing property, and funding for the development itself.
Advocating for our vision with local councils and the state government, with allied organisations, and in public.
I think Australians deserve better than what’s on the market right now, and I’m so keen to be part of making that happen.
The Description of a New World, Called The Blazing-World is commonly considered a very early SF novel. It has strong elements of the fantastical as well as science and engages with and criticizes science. It is also unique with centering on women characters.
“Generally, developers focus more on the number of bedrooms and location than on architectural design or room layout,” says Prof. Oldfield. “They prefer generic, standardised apartment layouts that meet the minimum regulations because they’re cheaper to make and easier to sell, but that is fundamentally mismatched with what families want.”
The most radical dimension of the plan is to use the city’s utility franchise rights to build wires between properties, so that they can share excess solar power locally. Most everywhere in the country, customer-led upgrades have to stay on the customer side of the utility meter; crossing that boundary to sell power to a neighbor violates the utility’s legally enforced monopoly. This stands in the way of visions for interconnected neighborhoods generating and selling power with each other based on who needs it at a given moment.
Is the bankruptcy actually bad? Sure shareholders will get wiped out. Guess what? GOOD. They deserve it. They opted for an illegal deal instead of a legal one. Plus Spirit will keep flying as a competitive airline, at least for now. This particular kind of bankruptcy isn’t necessarily a bad thing, it just means you reorganize the creditor relationships but keep the entity as a going concern.
These alternatives to box plots can be used to communicate a wide variety of useful insights, don’t require the audience to understand complex concepts like quartiles, and show distribution shapes clearly (i.e., they don’t make everything look bell shaped). More to the point, they make more visual sense than box plots, so audiences grasp them in seconds instead of minutes, and they’re less prone to misinterpretation. Ultimately, this means that using these chart types instead of box plots substantially improves the odds that your audience will understand and act on your distribution-based insights.
Theories of scientific and technological change view discovery and invention as endogenous processes, wherein prior accumulated knowledge enables future progress by allowing researchers to, in Newton’s words, “stand on the shoulders of giants”. Recent decades have witnessed exponential growth in the volume of new scientific and technological knowledge, thereby creating conditions that should be ripe for major advances. Yet contrary to this view, studies suggest that progress is slowing in several major fields of science and technology.
Virginia has no prior programming experience but has started combining code she finds around the space into her own creations. Here’s part of a birthday surprise she left me over winter break. Even our visiting ethnographer Goetz created a great spatial music game in Dynamicland (also no prior programming experience). Like learning French by going to France, people in Dynamicland learn programming through immersion.
What Day learned from the “Coffee Cup Mass” was that the ceramic cup from which the homeless Christ sips her morning coffee is no less holy and no more profane than the gold chalice that holds Christ’s blood in the form of wine at the Mass: “There Christ is with the poor, the suffering, even in the cup we share together, in the bread we eat.”
Part of the problem in the case of these Americans in Mexico is that they could not understand the language. But that is only part of the problem. The more significant issue is a deeper incapacity to listen to others not because you do not speak the language but because you have already decided that you know what is best for them. Then, convinced of your wisdom and goodness, you are prepared to impose your will on the other.
The constraints of hypermedia, and the desktop form factor, created empowering software. The keyboard and mouse allow high-bandwidth, high-frequency interaction. They permit creation. Users were expected to be “computer literate”, to learn to operate the computer before a specific software program. Desktops are interactive. Phones are cramped, bad at multitasking, impossible to type on. Nothing is expected of mobile users. Phones can only be interpassive.
