> SHAKEN system, short for Signature-based Handling of Asserted information using toKENs [...]
> The name was inspired by Ian Fleming's character James Bond, who famously prefers his martinis "shaken, not stirred". STIR having existed already, the creators of SHAKEN "tortured the English language until [they] came up with an acronym."
LLMs are really good at making backronyms, in fact it might be one of the things they're best at. Try prompting any soulless overlord with "give me a backronym for <WORD> that relates to <SUBJECT>".
So maybe it's bad backronyms that demonstrate the soul. I don't know who's idea it was to allow a computer to generate whimsy, that should be interdicted by a fourth law of robotics.
I've been learning about how manga and anime is made in Japan, they're fascinating industries that doesn't seem to have an analogue elsewhere, at least in the West.
For manga (Japanese comics), they're mostly black and white and serialized in manga magazines that cater to a specific genre (like action or romance) [1], and when there's 12-ish chapters published, those are published as a standalone book (単行本 tankōbon) [2] which goes for ~$5 new (inside Japan). So series are published continuously, with the tankōbon lagging behind a bit. The industry is half digital and half pen-and-ink, with a lot of artists using both for different tasks. Often there's only one writer/artist who may or may not use assistants for backgrounds, shading, etc.
I highly recommend finding some episodes of Naoki Urasawa's [3] Manben [4]. He's a legendary manga artist himself, and in the show he sets up static cameras in another mangaka's workspace for a few days, then both he and the artist watch back the footage and talk about it in a casual interview.
Anime is even more fascinating, because there's so many people involved and it's still so manual / analogue. I'd encourage anyone to scan through this video explaining the timesheet process and the different redraws for every frame [5]. Surprisingly, most anime seems to be animated inside Japan in small offices, whereas most animation in the West seems to be (largely) outsourced to Korea. And not always South Korea [6]!
This is an important part of Data-oriented Design: the representation of the data should be pragmatically tied to its access patterns, not dogma.
Richard Fabian's DoD book gives the example that (x,y,z) is almost always better as a classic array-of-structs rather than a struct-of-arrays, because if you're accessing one dimension, you probably are want to process the other two dimensions at the same time:
Which SQL-specific QoL enhancements do you miss? I was really excited to use DuckDB for things like structs and enums, but after a while I just went back to regular SQL and used it for its other features.
I think I had a pretty good understanding of set theory through programming, and although I tried to get into the more mathematical side of it, I found most things to be 1. trivial (because I was used to thinking in lists, sets, hashmaps, etc.), or 2. irrelevant to me. The latter was a shame, because I've always liked the abstraction of math, but I couldn't help but feel I wasn't learning anything actionable when learning more about sets (though maybe I'm wrong).
What had a big impact on me was the relational model, specifically after reading Richard Fabian's Data-oriented Design book [1]. I had watched Mike Acton's famous Data-oriented Design talk [2], then Andrew Kelley's talk [3] where he explains speedups in the Zig compiler using DoD principles (largely using methods from Acton's talk), but Fabian's book tied these concepts to database normalization and the relational model.
Most DoD advice is very "exercise left to the reader", because it's about matching a specific problem, but using the relational model and considering your data's primary and foreign key relations can be really powerful. I just wish more of that power was exposed through regular programming language interfaces, rather than having to pull in and marshal data through a DB. I might have to try C# and Linq.
Relational model too, yes. But the biggest "aha" moments I've had mentoring devs on thinking in SQL came when they understood that the result of a query is itself a set. So you can join two selects, join that result with another select, then group on the whole thing.
Those kinds of patterns would often replace manual loops in stored procedures and opened up set theory-focused way of thinking. These patterns are made more performant and easier with good relational modeling, of course.
MacOS has a great keyboard locale switcher, but the lack of real compose keys limits things. Most characters you can press and hold and get some accented versions, but it's very slow if you're typing in French or something in the EN layout. It also has a built-in character picker, which is really nice but even more slow.
It's fun running into Vista references in contemporary TV shows, which run the gamut from "it's like a good pair of jeans" [1] to "Vista! We're going to die!" [2]. I was too young to form much of an opinion on it, but I remember it feeling quite unstable. I can say I preferred Windows 8 to Windows 7, though.
> SHAKEN system, short for Signature-based Handling of Asserted information using toKENs [...]
> The name was inspired by Ian Fleming's character James Bond, who famously prefers his martinis "shaken, not stirred". STIR having existed already, the creators of SHAKEN "tortured the English language until [they] came up with an acronym."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STIR/SHAKEN
(Unrelatedly, seeing a slash used casually within the URL slug feels so wrong)
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