We have some VMs on Azure and some on Hetzner, and the latter have much better performance (especially since they give you basically infinite IOPS, which matters a lot for your database) and connectivity (especially lower latency).

The large hyperscalers were ever only worth it if you need/want all the additional PaaS infrastructure they provide, like Lambda, SQS and so on.

Of course the developer is navigating a minefield every time they use volatile, that's why it's called "volatile" - an English word otherwise only commonly used in chemistry, where it means "stuff that wants to go boom".

For the fourth iteration (guarding against phantom blue from shadow pixels), I wonder if it may help to also take into account how close the pixels in each cluster actually cluster together in the actual photo. (None of the heuristics used here seem to be interested in the position of the pixels at all, only in their values - as-is, it seems one could sort the photo's pixels before running the program and get the same result.) Actual objects usually form connected areas, whereas at least in the fruit image, the phantom shadows are spread across the entire photo in largely disconnected chunks.

    (I'm kidding, but I'm sure someone has a pie-in-the-sky geoengineering startup 
    about to disrupt topography using either AI, blockchain, or both.)

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qattara_Depression_Project#Fri...

That is no longer true, you can use user IDs now.

For the other problem, you can enable self-deleting messages in group chats, limiting the damage when a chat does become compromised. Of course, this doesn't stop any persistent threat, such as law enforcement (is that even the right term anymore?) getting access to an unlocked phone.

So users have been taught that the term "delete" means "move somewhere out of my sight". If you design a UI and make "delete" mean something completely different from what everyone already understands it to mean, the problem is you, not the user.

(In my opinion, replicating this via a `validity tstzrange` column is also often a sane approach in PostgreSQL, although OP's blog post doesn't mention it.)

[1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/relational-databases/t...

Not that I think it's a reasonable approach to language to be pedantic on this. RC being GC is, of course, true from an analytic approach to language: a garbage collection system is defined as a system that collects and frees objects that are unreachable and thus dead; a reference counting pointer collects and frees objects that are unreachable and thus dead; therefore, reference counting is garbage collection.

One problem with this is the vagueness: now, the use of a call stack is garbage collection; after all, returning from a function collects and frees the objects in the stack frame. Leaking memory all over the place and expecting the operation system to clean up when you call `exit()` likewise is "garbage collection".

But more importantly, it's just not how anyone understands the word. You understood perfectly well what I meant when I said "you would be hard-pressed to find a modern AA game that does not already use a GC"; in other words, you yourself don't even understand the word differently. You merely feel an ethical imperative to understand the word differently, and when you failed to do so, used my comment as a stand-in to work through the emotions caused by your own inability to live up to this unfulfilled ethic.