09:49 Suprised we aren't seeing more of this
At risk of committing an act of necromancy, I'll disagree a bit here. There are a lot of no-sql tools with different paradigms which didn't exist 10 or 20 years ago and that one couldn't assume any new hire would be familiar with that they'd have to learn on the job. New hires are going to need to learn the particulars of your tech stack and in-house tools, so learning a different DB engine then one they've used before is probably not an insurmountable challenge. Using the most common tools in hopes of making hiring easier is fine as far as it goes, but so does using best-of-breed tools that fit your particular problem set and expecting some amount of in-house training/acclimation.
That said, I'm not sure where Pick would fall into this, while I'm sure it is innovative in it's own way, and has it's own cheerleaders (hi Wol) I don't think it represents some hidden arcane field of computer science that doesn't exist in equivalent forms in other tools. There are only so many different ways to make efficient data structures in memory or on disk that have different tradeoffs. The no-sql evolution was about offering tools using specific data structures that fit well with the problems they were solving but weren't commonly available or efficient in SQL-fronted database engines, because SQL servers were targeted at different problems. I'm not sure that's the case anymore, the SQL-fronted engines like PostgreSQL or MariaDB have added storage and indexing methods which offer some of the same data structures which made no-sql engines useful, and the other no-sql engines have thrived in their niches refining the use-cases which spawned them. I'm not sure Pick would be any different than someone coming from PostgreSQL learning Redis/Valkey or someone familiar with Cassandra learning sqllite or etcd
So building a tech stack for hire-ability seems foolish, it's one property among many and if you hire for competency and willingness to learn then they can pick up the specifics, familiarity with more components of your stack is nice but lack of familiarity with one component is not a deal breaker.
09:49 Suprised we aren't seeing more of this
At the risk of pouring petrol on the flames I'll just point out I was programming Pick way back last century - in fact it predates Relational, and probably SQL too ... (it nearly predates me, and I'm on the verge of retirement.)
> and that one couldn't assume any new hire would be familiar with that they'd have to learn on the job.
I'm expecting end-user "new hires" to pick it up quickly and easily - people who don't have an IT/CS education.
> I don't think it represents some hidden arcane field of computer science that doesn't exist in equivalent forms in other tools.
Efficiency?
> There are only so many different ways to make efficient data structures in memory or on disk that have different tradeoffs.
Efficiency? Native 4NF in the database is pretty unbeatable ...
> I'm not sure that's the case anymore, the SQL-fronted engines like PostgreSQL or MariaDB have added storage and indexing methods which offer some of the same data structures which made no-sql engines useful, and the other no-sql engines have thrived in their niches refining the use-cases which spawned them.
Efficiency? IME, SQL cannot query those striuctures particularly efficiently. Efficiency? The majority of an ENGLISH (one of the names of the Pick query language) query lives in the table schema (note I didn't say view!). Efficiency? Your normal query is a short one liner, that has no optimiser because the possible gains aren't worth the candle. Efficiency? ENGLISH is optimised for accessing 4NF data.
Bear in mind also that Pick is a second-gen NoSQL. As in NotOnlySQL, not NoSQL. If you want to query Pick using SQL, go ahead. Why would you, though, seeing as you'd be replacing one line of ENGLISH with screeds of SQL (Unless, of course, you cheated and took advantage of all the ENGLISH buried in the table schemas.
At the end of the day, I have to work with Excel formulae, and SQL queries all day. I CRINGE at the volume of code, the time wasted working out what the hell is going on, the time wasted writing huge multi-line SQL programs, all the stuff I could do in ten minites in Pick that takes a week in VBA/SQL/Formulae. Maybe (almost certainly) I'm a crap SQL programmer, but a lot of colleagues, who are a lot better at it than me, fare equally badly.
Efficiency! At some point in the near future I'm going to get the opportunity to pitch a rewrite of our system. I am - SERIOUSLY - going to bid that I can rebuild the majority of our shit single-handed in six months. Our IT department is saying "maybe we'll get round to looking at it in 18 months". I'm not stupid enough to think that doing it single-handed is a good idea though. I want to build a team round me (with the intention that they rewrite their systems in the same sort of time frame :-) So when IT come and take a look at it, they'll say it'll take five years for them to replace our system that we built in six months ...
Cheers,
Wol
09:49 Rebaselining?
- patches that were missed before (and what percentage of those were eventually manually picked)
- did not select patches that had been selected before (and what percentage of those had followup discussions due to issues)
I'm not saying it doesn't have "significantly more accurate recommendations", but I'd be interested in numbers.
08:18 Half-Life 3 Is Reportedly Playable In Its Entirety
According to Valve insider Tyler McVicker, Half-Life 3 is finally playable from start to finish and could be announced this summer, with a release as soon as winter 2025. Engadget reports: Besides McVicker's hours-long livestream, there have been other recent hints about Valve's progress on its highly anticipated title. In March, Valve concept artist Evgeniy Evstratiy claimed that he was in the room where Valve made Half-Life 3 on CG Voices Podcast. In the same month, another Valve leaker, Gabe Follower, claimed that Half-Life 3 would be the "end of Gordon's adventure," potentially signaling a non-cliffhanger ending to one of gaming's best franchises. Outside of these rumors, internet sleuths discovered code referencing HLX, which is widely thought to be the codename for Half-Life 3, in major updates to Deadlock and Dota 2.
06:48 How Riot Games is Fighting the War Against Video Game Hackers
Riot Games has reduced cheating in Valorant to under 1% of ranked games through its controversial kernel-level anti-cheat system Vanguard, according to the company's anti-cheat director Phillip Koskinas. The system enforces Windows security features like Trusted Platform Module and Secure Boot while preventing code execution in kernel memory.
Beyond technical measures, Riot deploys undercover operatives who have infiltrated cheat development communities for years. "We've even gone as far as giving anti-cheat information to establish credibility," Koskinas told TechCrunch, describing how they target even "premium" cheats costing thousands of dollars.
Riot faces increasingly sophisticated threats, including direct memory access attacks using specialized PCI Express hardware and screen reader cheats that use separate computers to analyze gameplay and control mouse movements. To combat repeat offenders, Vanguard fingerprints cheaters' hardware. Koskinas admits to deliberately slowing some enforcement: "To keep cheating dumb, we ban slower." The team also employs psychological warfare, publicly discrediting cheat developers and trolling known cheaters to undermine their credibility in gaming communities.
06:48 Open Document Format Turns 20
The Open Document Format reached its 20th anniversary on May 1, marking two decades since OASIS approved the XML-based standard originally developed by Sun Microsystems from StarOffice code. Even as the format has seen adoption by several governments including the UK, India, and Brazil, plus organizations like NATO, Microsoft Office's proprietary formats remain the de facto standard.
Microsoft countered ODF by developing Office Open XML, eventually getting it standardized through Ecma International. "ODF is much more than a technical specification: it is a symbol of freedom of choice, support for interoperability and protection of users from the commercial strategies of Big Tech," said Eliane Domingos, Chair of the Document Foundation, which oversees LibreOffice -- a fork created after Oracle acquired Sun.