Practically speaking keeping an eye on locks and transactions is a good idea, as is watching out for your statistics on key core columns going bad when they shouldn't. (analyze and vacuum sometimes don't actually do anything when you need them to...)

(And how much that "imposter syndrome", from either source, then drives later hard-work/success and how much doesn't.)

They both do have very concrete point systems with a parallel set of less-measured but very real externalities, don't they?

This brings me to a bit of a related story.

A family member of mine who attended Princeton and was an undergraduate Residential Advisor (RA) in the dorms responsible for care of freshmen recalled hearing a presentation in the early 2000s to parents of students from an academic dean or faculty member. The dean boasted to the parents how great their kids were, describing how each year in the last decade they kept adding more work to the students and the students kept rising to the challenge. My family member RA, very aware of the resulting stress the students were under was horrified. This family member thrived at Princeton and loved it, but is quite wary of trying to put their own children on a track to get there or go there.

This event correlates with the increasing fraction of students at Princeton going into finance which began in the early 1990s and which peaked in 2006 with 46% of students at Princeton going into Finance. I had not considered a correlation between student psychological stress and psychology of "gaming"/cheating and the psychological going into finance until your comment.

At that time, there was some sense that perhaps many Princetonians went into Finance because they had to pay of the huge loans from the price tag. After a couple decades on working on financial aid improvements, now that Princeton (tuition) is free for people with family incomes under $250k/year and has been for a while, and still large numbers (admittedly not quite as large) are still going into finance, I'm not sure some of the psychological factors around taboo topics like gaming/cheating and/or more prosaic related factors like reducing cheating while properly sizing the expected workload for the non-cheating population have been explored.

Or you don't control your key material.

Or your tech supply chain.

Or leave your device unattended.

Or aren't susceptible to the same "five dollar wrench" attacks used by certain in-person Bitcoin wallet thievestgat are also available to state actors.

I could go on...

Skimming the original article, I didn't really understand why the author didn't discuss "WITH" CTEs (for SQL newbies, common table expressions, see https://modern-sql.com/feature/with ) as alternative composition mechanisms.

Or even SQL views. But your ergonomics comment makes sense to me.

IIRC (corrections welcome) Windows's window manager broadcasts the contents of the "copy" operation to any application that requests to receive the ? WM_CLIPBOARDUPDATE event... so any windows malware or even legit application with legal fineprint basically gets a plaintext message with the contents even before the "paste" occurs. All running apps are trusted.

Here's an example blog entry from "grumpy-sec"(?) laying this out (2018): https://share.google/0til1YzbF4xFRY7ls

Not to mention newer Microsoft conveniences like logging your clipboard history to your disk so it doesn't go away when your computer reboots, and/or syncing it to the cloud.

Snowflake's implementation only works within a single Snowflake account, not cross-account, which implies if you want to clone across dev/qa/prod you must manage those environments within a single Snowflake account.

BigQuery has a very similar "table clone" feature. It works across GCP projects (accounts) but not across organizations.

Redshift and Azure Synapse do not really have this feature at all.

Databricks, Microsoft Fabric and the Iceberg Nessie-only catalog do support something similar, often called shallow cloning.

(Nobody really supports cross-region cloning... which makes sense if you think about it.)

Gates was having interviews with John Brockman's edge.org in 1996: https://www.edge.org/conversation/bill_gates-digerati-chapte...

Gates was at The Edge dinners in 2010: https://michaelshermer.com/articles/my-dinner-with-bill-gate...

Jeffrey Epstein funded The Edge in the late 90s early 2000s, then not around 2008/9 during his first trial and prison, then again after he got out:

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/peteraldhous/jeffrey-ep...

https://epsteinweb.org/john-brockman/

People before me have observed how Trump's moves all are ego driven, or self serving or serve Putin or Israel or gas companies, and I'm here to add to the mix a different conjecture.

Trump's moves all tend to increase inflation in a plausibly deniable way. Tarrifs, fed-fighting, wars, etc.

And that is a deeply unpopular but elite-viewed necessity for handling America's national debt.

Inflation allows the wealthy class to get away with extending government spending without admitting/pursuing austerity which was political suicide under Carter.

The wealthy shelter in their land and stock portfolios which keep growing unlike cash and also benefit from said spending, while ordinary people pay the extra regressive tax that is inflation. The elite can then turn around and blame the little guy for supporting Trump and their hands are clean.

I always warn people (particularly junior people) though that blindly dropping duplicates is a dangerous habit because it helps you and others in your organization ignore the causes of bad data quickly without getting them fixed at the source. Over time, that breeds a lot of complexity and inefficiency. And it can easily mask flaws in one's own logic or understanding of the data and its properties.

I built apps in an active-active bidirectional replication telecom Sybase environment and was deeply involved in migrating it to MS SQL server in the early 2000s. I remember a fair amount of paranoia and effort around the transition as our entire business and customers' phone calls depended on it (for "reasons") but in hindsight it went quite smoothly and there were no regrets afterwards.

The Microsoft went and added a nice BI stack to the whole thing which added a new dimension of value creation at a new low price point.

But Vanguard under Bogle always played both sides of the fence at least to some extent. They have always had that actively managed Windsor fund, right? And Wellington?

I think your article headline shows you have a fair bit more to learn about Bogle. Or at least you haven't made your case on that front. Bogle was at least as much about low cost and aligning interests of the investment client as he was about passive indexing, though he is known more for the latter.

Here's a writeup with a couple pointers to more on the topic from Bogle: https://www.bogleheads.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=388377

One part of it has interesting new resonance in the era of agentic LLMs:

alankay on June 21, 2016 | root | parent | next [–]

This is why "the objects of the future" have to be ambassadors that can negotiate with other objects they've never seen. Think about this as one of the consequences of massive scaling ...

Nowdays rather than the methods associated with data objects, we are dealing with "context" and "prompts".

It got mentioned in WSJ of all places as news of it spread.

For the history+app from its creator, see:

https://lurkertech.com/buzzword-bingo/

(Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buzzword_bingo )

I'm glad to see, 25-30 years later, the hackers/cynical-tech-workers who birthed it getting justified by actual social science research.

Going back pre-Iraq-war, back when there were "inspections" and "sanctions" on Iraq, you can dig up "page 19" articles in NYTimes where -- if I recall correctly -- the US was caught putting spy equipment on the IAEA monitoring equipment in Iraq. This is (according to Iraq) what in large part triggered Iraq to kick out US inspectors. Then the Iraq (2) war started because they wouldn't let in inspectors.

Iran's theory, glossed over at the time but also reported in the rare western press articles was that the US intentionally got caught. (So that the Saddam would have explicit pressure to get the US kicked out, so that then they (US/Israel) could have a pretext to take out Iraq.) I don't know if Iran had any actual evidence to that effect or it was a bit of a conspiracy theory; I never actually read Iranian news sources whcih might have had details (or might have revealed just empty posturing.)