That's an expensive mistake to make, though frying your HDDs is usually a lot cheaper than frying your GPU.

It's seriously annoying that this is the case though. Unless you kept the cables in the original package or in a labelled container, you cannot safely use them again if you owned more than one modular PSU.

It wasn't actually very expensive in money, because I was still able to RMA the pair of fried drives, but it did cost me $30 in shipping, a month of waiting, a lost delivery via UPS, and tons of time dealing with customer support for both UPS and Seagate to actually get a second set of replacement drives.

On the bright side, the actual replacements that eventually got to me were both 2TB bigger than the originals. They didn't tell me about this, so I'm not sure if they silently upgraded me to apologize for the wait, it was an accident, or they happened to be out of stock and just grabbed the next size up.

I don't think extinction-level events or something like killing a majority of the human population is particularly plausible at this moment. States don't host their nukes with AWS and a permanent connection.

But you could create scenarios where an AI with very, very roughly the current capabilities could potentially nuke everyone. Let's assume an agent decides that the way to solve its task was to get the US to fire all nukes on Russia. The agent would need to hack some government systems to understand how exactly to access them. Then it would need to get the content of the card with launch codes the president has, and identify which code is the correct one. Maybe that information is available somewhere and it can get to it, I obviously can't know that.

Then it could fake a call from the president, synthesizing his voice and ordering a nuclear strike. If it hacked enough systems to get into whatever communication pathways would be used in such a case. Would the soldiers listen to this order and follow it, I don't know.

Or maybe the agent can get in somewhere in between, to avoid the need to know the president's launch code. And fake a call from a military commander to the launch sites.

I think other scenarios that would cause significant harm, but aren't as bad as nuclear war are more plausible. And in those shutting down all data centers would probably be the way to stop it. The AI can probably hide in other datacenters, once it is at a point where it's running amok with some bad goals. But if it presents a huge and immediate threat at that point, humans will also go to great lengths to stop it.

bioweapons are probably easier.

Killing each other is relatively straightforward. Keeping people alive (e.g., curing cancers) is considerably more difficult.

I imagine that AI augments both our destructive and constructive powers.

With the exception of multiplayer games with invasive anti-cheat measures, a very large number of games works very well on Linux now with Wine/Proton. When using Steam this mostly works just out of the box without fiddling.

You just need the rule of law for that. It helps to not elect blatantly corrupt people as president.

Problem is that apparently the US will occasionally elect a corrupt president, so we need stronger measures in place for when that happens.

We've got one. It's called impeachment. Unfortunately the system wasn't originally intended to have parties and party loyalties, and assumed that Congress would never have a majority to give a free pass to a corrupt President because he was their guy.

We we need more checks on the executive and balance of power between the branches. The founders failed to see a scenario where all three branches would collaborate to anoint an executive rather than competing for power against each other.

No, you cannot, in a democracy, write the rules in such a way to magically and automatically guarantee that bad things cannot happen, because the core conceit of democracy is that the will of the people can happen

If your people want bad things to happen, there is no text anywhere that can prevent it.

You cannot constrain people with laws without enforcement, just as a rule. Real life isn't like code where you write it and it just happens. If you want to restrain Trump to the rules, then the people in power have to believe the rules are more important than campaign promises, and for that you need the voting public to believe it is more important to maintain rules than it is to get your pet policy goals executed on.

The entire problem is that tens of millions of Americans think rules are bad and don't see any problem with there being no rules because they often believe that everyone has the same beliefs they do. And if they don't, they should be gulag'd for being unamerican.

A democracy can agree on rules ahead of time, but that cannot ensure future compliance. As long as people have more support from "Getting things done" compared to "Breaking literal law". This administration breaks very clear cut laws. What could possibly be a law they wouldn't dare to break with their current supporters?

Those supporters don't believe in a rule of law. It's simple as that. It kills democracy. You cannot have a democracy when compromises cannot be relied on.

This was predicted when the Republican party started to court the religious fundamentalist vote. They internally complained that it would kill the party.

Bush's speech writer is cited as saying: If conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy

America has a very large, very organized, very passionate body of people who toe the line of their fundamentalist "Christian" organizations. There are lots of different surveys on this, but the general minimum is that 10% of Americans affirmatively believe that god created the earth as it exists today, unchanging, within the past 10k years.

that belief requires you to believe all of science is a giant conspiracy in league with Satan himself to make you turn away from god. A minimum of 30 million Americans are firm believers in the conspiracies and anti-reality beliefs espoused in Chick Tracts.

The entire Satanic Panic was these people acting on this stupid belief. Chick Tracts are demonstrably false in everything they espouse, but when you have homeschooled your child and bought only the stupidest "textbooks" for them to learn from that state matter-of-factly that science is a conspiracy, of course people end up believing that earnestly. These people believe at all times that they are in a literal war with the devil. In war, all things are permissible of course. They believe, against direct evidence and literal text from the founders, that America is a Christian nation (but notably, not any of the christian faiths that existed when America was founded). These people have spent generations cultivating an entire parallel media ecosystem, an entire parallel education system, that will never ever ever confront them with reality. Go watch christian media, it's utterly insane the things it believes. Every single popular teen movie gets remade with the plot replaced with a surface level similar one where the government is executing "Christians" for being "Christian". They live in perpetual victimhood. If you have convinced yourself that equal treatment is persecution, you will do horrible things.

The CIA quite literally played on these fears as part of the red scare, playing up Communism's atheism. This is still taught by parents to children to this day.

The reason our currency says "In god we trust" and the reason we have "Under god" in our pledge is directly down to this bloc being extremely powerful and having an utter disrespect for the rule of law.

The founders didn’t place their faith in the rule of law, the population or benevolence of politicians or oligarchs. They designed checks on power through balancing the allocation of authority across three branches that each have the right to override the others and further separation between federal and state power. We need more checks and a modified balance between branches.

In EF Core this will almost certainly generate a query like "SELECT name FROM users WHERE id = 123 LIMIT 1;". The LINQ expression is transformed into SQL, and any expression that can't be transformed will cause an error to be thrown.

Certain methods like First() in this case materialize expressions. Only those trigger a DB query.

EF Core does not lazy load by default. You have to explicitly include relations if you want them on an entity. You can enable lazy loading, but in the default configuration you usually don't have the N+1 problem.

Isn't Linq a lazy-loading interface by default? The example they gave was a Linq query.

I'm not a C# user in my professional life so I'm happy to be corrected, BTW, just citing the source of my misinterpretation

Yes, but in this context this just means that until you call ToList()/ToListAsync() you have an IQueryable. That represents a query, but isn't executed yet. Only at the point where you call a method like ToList (in this case First() is the relevant one) is the actual DB query performed.

The LINQ query in the comment above would only execute a single query like "SELECT name FROM users WHERE id = 123 LIMIT 1;" and would not even fetch the full entity, only the name.

Right, which was my point. They used Linq to get around the limitations of an ORM more-so than using an ORM itself (by fetching an entity and accessing its 'field'). They're evading the N+1 problem by writing a query by hand still, just not in SQL itself.

The bit about lazy loading was a bit of a side-note more than my main point.

But using LINQ to query stuff is a core part of this ORM. And even if you access the full entity, it won't do an N+1 in the default configuration. You have to explicitly call Include() on any relation you want to fetch and it'll either fetch all of them with one query or do one query per relation type. There's a different footgun here with AsSingleQuery() and AsSplitQuery(), but that's a separate topic.

Remember kids, writing queries in an ORM is a betrayal to the ORM gods.

You are supposed to manually count the question marks in your raw SQL like the JDBC gods intended.

    String sql = "INSERT INTO users (name, email, age, status, country) VALUES (?, ?, ?, ?, ?)";
    PreparedStatement pstmt = conn.prepareStatement(sql);
    pstmt.setString(1, "Alice");
    pstmt.setString(2, "alice@example.com");
    pstmt.setInt(3, 30);
    pstmt.setString(4, "ACTIVE");
    pstmt.setString(5, "US");

There is absolutely zero chance an ORM can ever get close to the performance of this query, so write it by hand!

After all, the primary promise of ORMs has been that you do not have to write queries, it's right in the name! Object Relational Mapper!

> You are supposed to manually count the question marks in your raw SQL like the JDBC gods intended.

    String sql = "INSERT INTO users (name, email, age, status, country) " +
                 "VALUES            (?,    ?,     ?,   ?,      ?      )";

But I get your point.

In applications like NMR or MRI you still want to cool down your superconductors as much as possible even if they can handle higher temperatures. As far as I understand this still increases the amount of current they can handle and so increases the maximum field.

The largest commercially available NMR spectrometer has 28 Tesla, and that is a hybrid magnet with both conventional superconductors and high-temperature superconductors. And it's cooled with liquid helium.

If you run a single application, or a few instances of the same application, you don't need an external pool and most frameworks have an internal connection pool anyway.

Not sure if I'm missing anything here, but if I want case-insensitive search I simply create an index on lower(column) and use that to query.

VACUUM is something you need to pay attention to at scale. And at that point you need to know your DB anyway and tune it. For smaller applications (and I don't mean only toy applications) it usually isn't an issue.

>if I want case-insensitive search I simply create an index on lower(column) and use that to query

Or even pg_trgm trigram indexes, which are case-insensitive by default and support similarity search to accept typos and misspellings.

They're also massive.

MySQL had some problematic design decisions initially. They might be fixed now, but the impression remained. And later there was the added complication that they were bought by Oracle, so you didn't really know how this would turn out in the end.

PostgreSQL also had more features back then, e.g. the JSON support is very nice if you need to do anything that doesn't neatly fit into the relational model.

Not only where the problematic design decisions, but large numbers of people said for years "nobody will never need/want that anyway so stop talking about it". That is they didn't even attempt to talk about trade offs, you were just wrong if you suggested anything else.

Then people who knew something got involved (or likely were involved all along - but I never followed MySQL so I'm not sure) and fixed those because they matter and suddenly the crowd shut up.

The books get trashed because loose pages are much easier to scan.