The fact that people expect a data object, as argued by the author, is a very strong argument in favor of having one.
Onboarding new programmers to your codebase and making the codebase simpler for developers to reason about is a massive non-functional benefit. Unless you have a very strong reason to do things otherwise, follow the principle of "least surprise". In fact vibe coding adds another layer to this - an LLM generally expects the most common pattern - and so maintenance and testing will be orders of magnitude easier.
I agree that following expected patterns is a _prima facie_ reason to do something. That said, in this case:
1. The downsides of following it are severe, and
2. People often expect slightly different things, so you often don't get the benefits of following convention.
"Exactly-Once Event Processing" is the headline claim - I actually missed the workflow starting bit. So what happens if the workflow fails? Does it get restarted (and so we have twice-started) or does the entire workflow just fail ? Which is probably better described as "at-most once event processing"
I think a clearer way to think about this is "at least once" message delivery plus idempotent workflow execution is effectively exactly-once event processing.
The DBOS workflow execution itself is idempotent (assume each step is idempotent). When DBOS starts a workflow, the "start" (workflow inputs) is durably logged first. If the app crashes, on restart, DBOS reloads from Postgres and resumes from the last completed step. Steps are checkpointed so they don't re-run once recorded.
"Exactly-Once Event Processing" is possible if (all!) the processing results go into a transactional database along with the stream position marker in a single transaction. That’s probably the mechanism they are relying on.
How do the employment prospects compare to other Spanish cities? It's one thing to say prioritise quality jobs but it seems breaking the mold in one dimension is hard enough, but to do it for 2 dimensions at the same time is pretty tough.
The situation they describe is true in the overwhelming majority of Spanish cities of comparable size. It is an actively discussed topic in Spain that there is a serious problem with people having to move to Madrid or Barcelona for jobs and the rest of the country emptying out. Regions with no coast that aren't Madrid are now often called "la España vaciada" ("the emptied Spain"). Near the sea cities don't empty so much, but often most jobs are in tourism so there is still a lack of high-skilled jobs.
There are a few cities of that size that are more dynamic, because they have managed to attract some IT/biomedical/etc. Santiago, which they mention, probably falls into that bucket, although it's still far from being a skilled jobs powerhouse. And anyway it's an exception rather than the rule, and I'd say it's mostly related to having a university with over five centuries of history and all the ecosystem that generates, not to anything a mayor could do.
but don't you see, Communism is so bad that it changes the laws of fundamental physics!
But of course you are right, this is a total nonsense story but it is interesting to reflect on why somebody would feel compelled to tell such a lie and spread such propaganda.
Also interesting to reflect on what the capitalist analog of this story might be - do we trust that American food corporations would never knowingly ship unhealthy meat?
Calm down Igor, it's probably just a tall tale the seniors told the juniors and the juniors took it in as the truth.
Also didn't you have sarcastic Chornobyl jokes in the 80s if you lived anywhere near East or Central Europe? We certainly did have a lot of them in East Germany.
It is not being presented as a tall tale or a sarcastic joke. It's being presented as fact. I'm merely asking why people feel the need to make up stories and to propagate stories that are untrue. That is a question I am genuinely interested in.
Why, when we know this is complete BS, do people feel the need to 1) make it up in the first place and 2) propagate the story without engaging their mental faculties.
I don't really like your snarky initial take, even when I'm the guy calling bullshit in the first place in the thread.
People propagate falsehoods for numerous reasons. The first is, they don't know it's false. They hear a joke or a hypothetical story and repeat it as fact, and in the retelling it gets amplified. Details get conflated; someone hears a story about slightly radioactive cows and also about computers being affected by radiation, and blends them. Or an expat tells a story about his homeland, exaggerated slightly for effect, and is misunderstood by those who hear it based on their own biases.
In the end we only have so much brainpower. We don't always consider the plausibility of everything to a deep degree. I am nearly positive that you have propagated falsehood where you "should have known better."
And sometimes we tell things that are just a good story. I propagate the neural network tank recognition one to my students because it's a perfect story. I do say that I know it's probably false, but I'm sure some of them will repeat it to others as fact.
Right, you propagate it for a specific reason presumably, because you think it teaches them something about something even if it might not be true.
So that is your reason there.
I'm just interested in the undercurrent of why people seem to like this story and I think it pretty much is "Communism Bad" even though as mentioned otherwhere in this thread (and by me) capitalism has an awful record when it comes to food quality the one thing that is being knocked in this story.
It's the legend of the impossible to troubleshoot magical problem that actually makes perfect physical sense (even though it doesn't).
The communism-bad is merely an afterthought that adds a little more appeal to some people.
Indeed, my perspective reading this story... I need to teach a different group of students about SEU and SEL. The thought of radioactive cows from Chernobyl causing upsets is an absolutely "sticky" story that would make the idea of effects from ionizing radiation stay prominently in students' minds, and reinforce my position as a crazy teacher with students.
My reaction as I realized that it was BS and I couldn't justify using it was disappointment.
>do we trust that American food corporations would never knowingly ship unhealthy meat?
We know for a fact that many American businesses knowingly allow faulty and dangerous products on the market (see the Ford Pinto,) and that American food corporations have allow tainted meat onto the market.
But for some reason we don't fault capitalism for that the way we would fault communism for this, if it were true. If anything, the most likely reaction this happening in the US would be to deregulate industries so capitalism could capitalize even harder.
This is less historical record than medieval propaganda piece.
I get that it was written as such but even the article at the beginning pretends it’s an accurate representation of what the king got up to and then towards the end tacitly admits it’s an idealized representation of how a king should behave.
This basically brings into question all of the actual details.
Did he go to church every morning ? Maybe it was deemed proper that he did but as the king he just skipped it - we’ll never know.
Likewise listening to commoners- maybe this was done for show with some well cleaned up subjects every so often , or maybe it was a genuine practice , we don’t really know.
> This is less historical record than medieval propaganda piece
I think you could make a good case that the title is a little sensationalistic, but you could pick at US civics class in exactly the same way (and not just in recent history). The branches of government we learn about fail to include (or at least emphasize) the fundamental role of regulatory capture, lobbyists, and opaque/undemocratic three-letter agencies in real-world governance. Not to mention the fact that even the founding of the country was based on high ideals that were highly caveat-ed ("all men are created equal" unless those men are property).
Regardless of the extent to which ideals are lived out in practice, to many people it's notable that those ideals are there at all. In my experience as a US citizens, most people educated here seem shocked to learn that there can be any ideals behind monarchy besides divine right of kings/"I am the state" [1].
Separation of powers as it’s described in civics class also doesn’t even pass the sniff test. As soon as you hear the idea your first question should be “why wouldn’t the 3 branches collude to the detriment of the public?”
I agree, and I will also add that the entire post is just basically quoting from another source, and adding zero original thought. Just point us to the book so we can read it, it's really good enough to say "hey, if you want to know what a medieval king's day to day was, check out this really cool book".
Seems to really want to paint a picture of the king as a pious, diligent, man of the people, yet it only leaves me with the impression that what was intentionally omitted is the true nature of the man.
Just like any officially sanctioned biography of Trump would omit his late night reality TV binge watching, his gorging on fast food and his raping of children, this account embellishes Charles' best qualities while utterly ignoring his worst, so it is of no historical value whatsoever in terms of understanding who he truly was.
Given all the matters that a head of state has to attend to I would be surprised if they found time to go to church once a week, much less daily. Even with an on-site priest.
As for listening to commoners, I'll accept the possibility of kings that wanted to be accountable to their subjects. The problem isn't the king, it's the nobility. The nobles are going to be filtering the commoners that get to talk to the king, because the king isn't allowed to know any commoners directly. Hell, they might not even be able to speak the same language at all. England's kings all spoke either French or German for a long time, and French wasn't so much the language of France as much as it was the language that France's ruling class spoke[0].
Even if the king could understand commoners and had unfiltered access to them, it's not guaranteed that they could do anything with that feedback. Say, a peasant complained about what they pay to their lord. Does the king actually have the power to overrule the nobility? Will the nobility depose the king, or start a civil war that destabilizes the country?
The game everyone's playing is ultimately to convince subsistence farmers to "go big or go home" - i.e. to overplant and overproduce food, at the risk of crop failure, so that the state can seize some of that food and eat it themselves, nominally in exchange for "protection"[1] from rival states whose main difference is that their king is fake while yours is rightful. In other words: the king and nobility are wolves, the commoners are sheep, and it's bad form for predators to befriend their prey.
[0] At least until France erased their own minority languages in the 1800s and forced everyone to speak French, which I'm pretty sure counts as genocide
[1] Identical to the 'protection' paid to a mafioso
Oh god. I’ve met some seriously incompetent people when interviewing - to the point where I’m glad they are the one conducting the interview cause I never want to work with them. I’ve actually finished an interview where I was the candidate with “thank you, but I don’t think this is going to work out”.
To be clear, my point is more that lots of people who are competent at their core jobs and would be perfectly fine coworkers suck at interviewing (but are pressed into service doing it anyway).
reply