>f you go by the rough count of their currently verified accounts, only ~0.16% of monthly active users are producing content of any real value.
Maybe I'm an outlier but of my hundreds of follows ~1% have checkmark. The bulk of my followers are artists, photographers, niche bloggers, subculture news aggregators which are all creating content.
The verified checkmark is basically a non-entity to my time on twitter, maybe it's different if you mainly follow more mainstream western pop culture and political/news media.
The complexity in twitter is that you have one channel per user, so you want to scale the "personnalized timeline". Whereas telegram/discord have clear channels.
Author here. I hope the article didn't come off as me claiming SQLite is underrated. I find that it's a great piece of software for understanding database internals. There's not a lot of moving parts or abstractions in between the API and the raw bytes on disk -- at least not compared to other databases.
Technologies have waves on HN. A couple years ago there were a ton of Go articles. Lately there's always a Rust article on the front page. Right now, I feel like SQLite is a refreshing escape from many of the complex deployments that have been in vogue lately.
But SQLite is underrated. It’s an absolutely amazing piece of software which is why I am still bitter at the deprecation of WebSQL in favor of the far inferior IndexedDB.
We were using SQLite in production way before it was cool on HN. I remember back in 2017-2018 describing how we use SQLite as the principal database engine for our multi-user product, and was basically tarred and feathered by the hosted SQL crowd.
I think the most intoxicating thing about SQLite is that you don't have to install or configure even one goddamn thing. It's a lot more work and unknowns to go down this path, but you can wind up with a far more robust product as a result.
> I think the most intoxicating thing about SQLite is that you don't have to install or configure even one goddamn thing.
There are a lot of configuration options when compiling SQLite, and some of its defaults are pretty conservative (e.g. assuming no usleep and default to `sleep` unless `HAVE_USLEEP` specified). Generally I recommend looking into how Apple configures its SQLite (SQLite provides https://www.sqlite.org/c3ref/compileoption_get.html to query) and modify to your needs.
Definitely look into compilation options if you plan to embed SQLite into your application.
Less of an option if you are writing open-source apps and don’t control how SQLite is deployed on the target. My feed reader Temboz uses FTS5 to good effect but I have to supply fallbacks if it isn’t available.
>Reading is merely a surrogate for thinking for yourself; it means letting someone else direct your thoughts. Many books, moreover, serve merely to show how many ways there are of being wrong, and how far astray you yourself would go if you followed their guidance. You should read only when your own thoughts dry up, which will of course happen frequently enough even to the best heads; but to banish your own thoughts so as to take up a book is a sin against the holy ghost; it is like deserting untrammeled nature to look at a herbarium or engravings of landscapes.
Against badly run T-72 tank divisions maybe. Against a modern tank with an active defence system and infantry cover? I strongly doubt it. There are more than a few known cases of tanks getting hit by Kornets and surviving and Javalin is contemporary.
>US interventionist foreign policy, despite its terrible track record, has really put European security and US interests at risk
Isn't it the opposite? It may be too early to tell but NATO is reinvigorated, Europe is once again turned back towards the Atlantic faction, Russia's economy is faltering, Ukraine is out performing what anyone expected militarily and Russia's army looks shambolic.
I have seen that video linked often in past month and it seems like Mearsheimer's biggest miss was how weak Russia truly is and how irrational Putin may act. If we expect Russia to fiercely defend its interest in Ukraine as IR realists then shouldn't we also expect the US to use Ukraine to twist the knife in the current Russian state?
> Europe is once again turned back towards the Atlantic faction
Pardon, but in the last couple of years it was the United States that gave off more than one signal that they felt that NATO was outdated and that it would be each for themselves from now on. The EU response to that was to form a European military alliance.
The United States gave off more than one signal that their NATO allies (particularly Germany) should stop violating the written agreement and spend the required 2% of GDP on defense. Some of our European allies were just freeloaders, taking advantage of US security guarantees without contributing any meaningful capabilities in return.
Maybe I'm an outlier but of my hundreds of follows ~1% have checkmark. The bulk of my followers are artists, photographers, niche bloggers, subculture news aggregators which are all creating content.
The verified checkmark is basically a non-entity to my time on twitter, maybe it's different if you mainly follow more mainstream western pop culture and political/news media.