I saw the post on the clojure subreddit! I’m stoked to try it out.
Ever since I saw Martin Kleppman’s “Turning the database inside out” talk I’ve wanted an easy way to hook into a transaction log. Apache samza/kafka is very cool but I’m not going to set it up for personal projects. It’d be VERY cool to make materialized views straight from the log!!
> It’d be VERY cool to make materialized views straight from the log!!
This is what Materialize does. You point it at some PG (or MySQL, or... probably lots more by now) sources, and then you can define arbitrary views on top of those sources using SQL (with the full power of relational logic: fully precise joins, etc.) The views are maintained incrementally, so they update almost instantly when the underlying data updates; you don't have to manually refresh them.
Disclaimer: I worked on Materialize for five years, and it is a commercial, proprietary project. But it is source-available (https://github.com/materializeinc/materialize) under a BSL-style license, and it has fairly generous terms for free usage.
Is money still made from console exclusives? I feel like I see less of them these days. The biggest games are cross platform monsters, and the smallest are indie games.
Crazy to think that the Horizon Zero Dawns of the world would be propping up all of console gaming??
But maybe that’s why Xbox is looking to get out. And trying new monetization strategies (gamepass is on Roku or something)
In principle the consoles themselves and the exclusives are both loss leaders. Or, sold at cost, anyway. The actual money is made from the 30% cut on any third party game sales, and the online subscriptions required to play online.
Consoles are expensive. Once a consumer has bought one, they're likely to stick with it for the generation. This is why we have flame wars about them. Only a small minority has several high-end gaming devices.
Lmao yeah I checked the domain after that. Cannot believe a person seriously wrote that. Inspired by the concept of a piece of cloth is one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen.
Sometimes I think they’re messing with us. This is more ridiculous than that monitor stand from a few years ago
No, you just aren’t familiar with the term. It has a specific meaning in the context. It’s this: https://www.moma.org/collection/works/100361 and it’s well known to customers familiar with the popular Issey Miyake label (which does something like $85 million in sales)
In tech we also use common words or phrases to trademark new ideas. It's not ridiculous or unusual. But it may be unfamiliar to you if you are not interested in fashion (common in these parts, as apparent in this thread) and fashion topics are easy targets for technical brothers.
You linked to something called “a piece of clothing” styled as A-POC.
The article referred to ‘the concept of “a piece of cloth”’
I’m not sure they are the same thing at all. If you are going to invoke a piece of artwork wouldn’t you get the name right and reference it directly? Wouldn’t you also use the base concept that makes the art interesting instead of 3d knitting as well? Would you reference that it is specifically tied to the completely different pleated clothing line instead of A-POC?
see my other reply. "cloth" is the correct one. and no I wouldn't use the original A-POC for a phone case (no one wants a piece of rigid fabric for a phone case). the construction has more to do with A-POC as it is made from one piece of material without seams while the pleated line has seams and is pleated. if you're curious you can see m.a+ for another spin on "one piece of material", where even shoes are made with one cut of leather
The MOMA project seems not to be rigid fabric, but it is clear that the description there is not exactly canonical.
In any case the press release was worded so weirdly that it seems inevitable that only superfans would make the connection to a piece of art from the 90s, and the rest of us would just make fun of 'the concept of "a piece of cloth"'
A–POC (A Piece of Clothing) and a piece of cloth communicate different ideas to most people. The MoMA article showed how the press release could have been written to be clear to anyone interested. And tech people should consider this in their writing.
"Cloth" is the correct one, sorry for not reading the link closely. I chose to share that one because of the illustrative photo, but they are incorrect in calling it "piece of clothing"
A–POC (A Piece of Cloth) and a piece of cloth communicate different ideas to most people. The Met article showed how the press release could have been written to be clear to anyone interested.
but this product isn't for most people, it's for Issey Miyake's customer base. That's why this is buried as a newsroom update and the marketing is elsewhere rather than the apple.com front page
Ah ok thank you for the explanation, that’s actually super cool. At first it sounded like some ridiculous and unrelatable modern art stuff. Makes a lot more sense now.
It's not translated from Japanese, it's originally in English. "A-POC" for "A Piece of Cloth". It refers to garments sewn from a single cut of a ream of cloth. It was translated into Japanese as 一枚の布 which isn't any more meaningful, but the original trademark is in English.
edit: What are you disagreeing with? That's what I'm referring to. The Issey Miyake trademark, which the label uses as "A-POC" as an English acronym, and translates into Japanese only to explain it to the domestic market rather than as the trademark itself. I linked that MoMa article elsewhere in this thread
Sure but the way his company translates "a piece of cloth" into Japanese has the same literal meaning. There's nothing more meaningful, it has the same exact meaning. My opinion is that it's chosen to be deliberately simplistic - what could be simpler or less expressive than a piece of fabric with fashion - because it highlights how much innovation in craft and resulting form results from the simple description taken as actually an extreme constraint: nothing but a single piece of cloth. And then when you perhaps think about it more, or see some of the work, you realize the complex ingenuity of it, in stark contrast to the simplicity of the phrase itself. That contrast enhances the impact by highlighting the gap between the humble description and the complexity of the result which nonetheless remains faithful to that simplicity.
A more illustrative term might be more easily understandable, at the cost of elegance (in simplicity and constraint) and surprise (from your underestimation of the work based on its name). The term is branding.
BTW another reference is Maurizio Amadei's "One Piece" work. Here's an installation/artwork he did that makes it easy to understand: https://lucentement.com/blogs/journal/m-a-by-maurizio-amadei... He also has many products labeled "One Piece [X]" such as "One Piece Wallet" or "One Piece Boot", where they are made from a single piece of leather (never cut into multiple pieces) and with a minimal number of seams. He chooses a similarly simple term, "One Piece", with enigmatic effect.
That use of quote marks is Japanese. It's used for emphasis, it gives the thing in quote marks an air of specialness like it's a fancy philosophical concept.
Yeah I can relate big time. Makes it hard to finish projects. I’ll spend days figuring out how to work around some problem, finally figure it out, and then have nobody to tell about it.
My girlfriend is gracious and pretends to be interested. But building stuff is less fun and more work when you don’t have somebody to be excited with.
I don’t know any ruby but I dabbled in elixir and I gotta ask: why do you prefer parenthesis-less function calls?
I like when parens/brackets are reliable wrappers for chunks of code. Like being able to ‘vi{‘ in vim to select a function body. Or ‘%’ to jump to the matching paren.
Do you find the language more readable without it? Less visual noise?
> why do you prefer parenthesis-less function calls?
I don’t feel strongly about it, but you gotta admit that this is remarkably easy on the eyes yet also easy to follow:
parts = version_string.to_s.split(”.”).map(&:to_i)
The Elixir equivalent, likely a series of pipes, would be just as easy to follow but substantially more to read, more symbols to parse etc. I don’t feel like this here line of Ruby makes any sacrifices in understandability compared to this Elixir port we’re both imagining.
To me the latter is no less clear so yeah, substantially more.
For context I write Elixir once a week and Ruby once a decade. In particular in this case elixir’s (and erlang’s) arity disambiguation (the slash) seems like unhelpful noise. Enum.map only accepts single-arity functions so it seems weird to me that the language couldn't figure that out for me.
Yeah, I don’t really understand the hatred for parentheses. Lisp famously has parentheses everywhere, and it looks a bit noisy at first but the precedence and scope is never ambiguous and with Vim you can always do % to find the match.
I would even say that the parens are a huge benefit of lisp. I guess that’s obvious though cause parens are like half the syntax.
But once you get used to it:
- you don’t really notice the parens anymore (definitely not the trailing ones anyway)
- you get the advantages of structural editing. So many nice shortcuts for moving stuff around. After working in clojure, typing typescript feels so clunky. How do you focus the next argument? Jump to the enclosing function scope? Yank the body of the closure? You just have to actual navigate to those things and select them, so uncouth!!
Fast check is fantastic!! I found it to be pretty verbose but I think that’s just a typescript limitation. It’s VERY well typed, which was a nice surprise. Such a great library. Shrinking, model based testing, it’s really comprehensive
I think testing culture in general is suffering because the most popular styles/runtimes don’t support it easily.
Most apps (at least in my part of the world) these days are absolutely peppered with side effects. At work our code is mostly just endpoints that trigger tons of side effects, then return some glob of data returned from some of those effects. The joys of micro services!!
If you’re designing from the ground up with testing in mind, you can make things super testable. Defer the actual execution of side effects. Group them together and move local biz logic to a pure function. But when you have a service that’s just a 10,000 line tangle of reading and writing to queues, databases and other services, it’s really hard to ANY kind of testing.
I think that’s why unit testing and full on browser based E2E testing are popular these days. Unit testing pretends the complexity isn’t there via mocks, and lets you get high test coverage to pass your 85% coverage requirement. Then the E2E tests actually test user stories.
I’m really hoping there’s a shift. There are SO many interesting and comprehensive testing strategies available that can give you such high confidence in your program. But it mostly feels like an afterthought. My job has 90% coverage requirements, but not a single person writes useful tests. We have like 10,000 unit tests literally just mocking functions and then spying on the mocked return.
For anybody wanting to see a super duper interesting use of property based testing, check out “Breaking the Bank with test contract”, a talk by Allen Rohner. He pretty much uses property based testing to verify that mocks of services behave identically to the actual services (for the purpose of the program) so that you can develop and test against those mocks. I’ve started implementing a shitty version of this at work, and it’s wicked cool!!
Ever since I saw Martin Kleppman’s “Turning the database inside out” talk I’ve wanted an easy way to hook into a transaction log. Apache samza/kafka is very cool but I’m not going to set it up for personal projects. It’d be VERY cool to make materialized views straight from the log!!
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