It’s about making APIs more flexible, permissive, and harder to misuse by clients. It’s a user-centric approach to API design. It’s not done to make it easier on backend. If anything, it can take extra effort by backend developers.

But you’d clearly prefer vitriol to civil discourse and have no interest in actually learning anything, so I think my time would be better spent elsewhere.

As I already said, it’s very simple with JSON Patch:

[
  { *op": "replace", "path": "/Name™, "value": "otherName"}
]

Good practice in API design is to permissively accept either undefined or null to represent optionality with same semantics (except when using JSON Merge Patch, but JSON Patch linked above should be preferred anyway).

The semantics of the API contract is distinct from its implementation details (lazy loading).

Treating null and undefined as distinct is never a requirement for general-purpose API design. That is, there is always an alternative design that doesn’t rely on that misfeature.

As for patches, while it might be true that JSON Merge Patch assigns different semantics to null and undefined values, JSON Merge Patch is a worse version of JSON Patch, which doesn’t have that problem, because like I originally described, the semantics are explicit in the data structure itself. This is a transformation that you can always apply.

Zalando explicitly forbids it in their RESTful API Guidelines, and I would say their argument is a very good one.

Basically, if you want to provide more fine-grained semantics, use dedicated types for that purpose, rather than hoping every API consumer is going to faithfully adhere to the subtle distinctions you’ve created.

Only if using JSON merge patch, and that’s the only time it’s acceptable. But JSON patch should be preferred over JSON merge patch anyway.

Servers should accept both null and undefined for normal request bodies, and clients should treat both as the same in responses. API designers should not give each bespoke semantics.

Used in English translations of the Bible, so if you grew up Christian you probably have heard it before.

Omaha is a lot less left-leaning in my experience. It’s very purple. Lincoln is solidly blue.

I just recently purchased a house in Lincoln. Just quickly looking on Zillow for Omaha and home prices look to be very similar to what I was seeing here in Lincoln. Property taxes in Omaha are also a fair bit higher than Lincoln.

There’s other stuff too, like lower crime rate in Lincoln, better/more parks, LPS being generally a lot better than OPS, etc.

I guess it ultimately depends on what you’re after. If you want something more big city, then Omaha obviously has Lincoln beat. But for a more relaxed pace of life and for raising a family, Lincoln is where it’s at.

There are a number of blue cities in the Midwest. What’s the lowest temp you want? I live in Lincoln, Nebraska and it’s pretty great: nice weather most of the year, low cost of living, blue city, tons of parks. Only downside is dealing with red state bullshit from the state government.

Glad you got fired. Vaccines should always be mandatory save for legitimate, doctor-validated medical exemptions.

Anti-vaxxers are fucking stupid and should either be educated properly or, if they still refuse to do their civic duty after being de-programmed of misinformation, punished. You are only allowed to participate in society if you take the necessary steps that you are morally and ethically obligated to do in order to protect it from preventable, transmissible disease. We had eradicated polio until stupid motherfuckers like yourself decided that it would be a good idea to forgo the standard polio vaccine schedule that we’ve had for decades. Now, we saw the first case in 30 years in 2022 because someone selfishly thought that their personal beliefs were more important than the health and livelihood of everyone else.

Yep. Postgres is fantastic and there’s no justification to use proprietary bullshit like that.

The issues are primarily with Azure, I believe.

From what I recall, particularly the younger generations that exclusively use mobile devices (though of course this is not limited to them) actually have terrible tech literacy across the board, primarily related to spending all of their time in apps that basically spoon-feed functionality in a closed ecosystem. In particular, these groups are particularly vulnerable to very basic scams and phishing attacks.

VMware workstation supports using a GPU. You can even use it in “pass-through” mode to give the VM full, exclusive access to the GPU.

Yeah that’s what I was referring to by “archaic”. Pretty much anything using the LAMP stack falls in that category. I don’t generally see new things using it.

Databases aren’t related to VMs or containers.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database does a good job of describing what a database is. That page also has a lot of examples of uses of databases.

To answer your question about MySQL: in my experience it’s rarely used outside of classrooms or archaic systems. Postgres is a much better general-purpose option for SQL. Sqlite is also nice for different use cases (such as a database on a mobile device).

I used to work for a company that made software built on VMware. The biggest customer was using hundreds of thousands of VMs. Pretty sure they’re working on moving off VMware now because of all this bullshit.

But yeah, it’s gonna take a long time to move off.

I know it’s a joke, but just wanted to say that Uranium used for fuel is not something you can actually use for weaponry directly. It requires enrichment to increase the concentration of U-235 to weapons-grade levels.

Sure yeah, but like, I work remote and will always work remote (I live in a city with a pretty mediocre tech scene). On top of that, I work in a non-mainstream programming language (Haskell). So it’s hard to envision what I could actually do.

I’m very pro-union btw, it just seems like there are certain things that can sometimes make it more difficult to make happen

Generally agree with your points, even though I"m honestly not sure what a union would look like like in practice.

But I just wanted to say that this job is definitely harder than plumbing. I usually do my own plumbing and it’s not really that bad. It’s not my favorite thing to do and can sometimes be a pain in the ass, but it’s way less taxing imo.

Teaching kids is hard as fuck though and good teachers are priceless. Honestly quality caregiving of any sort is massively underrated.

You do not understand how these things actually work. I mean, fair enough, most people don’t. But it’s a bit foolhardy to propose changes to how something works without understanding how it works now.

There is no “database”. That’s a fundamental misunderstanding of the technology. It is entirely impossible to query a model to determine if something is “present” or not (the question doesn’t even make sense in that context).

A model is, to greatly simplify things, a function (like in math) that will compute a response based on the input given. What this computation does is entirely opaque (including to the creators). It’s what we we call a “black box”. In order to create said function, we start from a completely random mapping of inputs to outputs (we’ll call them weights from now on) as well as training data, iteratively feed training data to this function and measure how close its output is to what we expect, adjusting the weights (which are just numbers) based on how close it is. This is a gross simplification of the complexity involved (and doesn’t even touch on the structure of the model’s network itself), but it should give you a good idea.

It’s applied statistics: we’re effectively creating a probability distribution over natural language itself, where we predict the next word based on how frequently we’ve seen words in a particular arrangement. This is old technology (dates back to the 90s) that has hit the mainstream due to increases in computing power (training models is very computationally expensive) and massive increases in the size of dataset used in training.

Source: senior software engineer with a computer science degree and multiple graduate-level courses on natural language processing and deep learning

Btw, I have serious issues with both capitalism itself and machine learning as it is applied by corporations, so don’t take what I’m saying to mean that I’m in any way an apologist for them. But it’s important to direct our criticisms of the system as precisely as possible.