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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   28890 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 11, 2024

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Local scout leaders, church leaders, etc. Two of my bishops growing up (I'm LDS) were huge role models for me.

My biggest secular role models as an adult are probably John Carmack and Richard Hipp, but that's because I work in software development.

I haven't much experience with scout and church leaders though I also was a teenage admirer of John Carmack. I realize I knew very little about him until I listened to his four hour Lex interview

What makes him a good young role model? Even in a space like video games he can make a mark and be successful

  • deeply throwing himself into his work; stories about how Michael Abrash would leave him at the office on Friday and come back on Monday and see that John had been there the whole weekend hacking away trying to optimize Quake
  • shamelessly learning from every source possible (he mentioned consuming programming magazines and even reading ads for educational value)
  • was not credentialed but he didn't let that stop him
  • was actually kind of a young cyber-criminal (black hat hacker) but that didn't define his future
  • doesn't let his obsession with nerdiness have him eschew physical fitness: he's also a fit and in-shape BJJ practitioner
  • still ate pizza his whole life, every day, from Domino's
  • presumably still found a happy healthy relationship with a woman and is a father that provides for his family and also spends time with them?
  • mentions stuff about taking vacations to hotel rooms next to an airport just so he can get away and concentrate on his work undisturbed
  • oh also bought himself Ferraris to play with after he became wealthy why not

Okay he seems pretty awesome. Someone kids could look up to.

Does this stuff make him a conservative male role model though?

Eh Carmack probably isn't a super good role model of conservative values outside of a role model for the value of hard work and education, I agree. Though he is anti-woke to some extent (good friends with Musk, guest speaker at an explicitly anti-woke sci fi convention, etc.).

Richard Hipp on the other hand would probably be a good conservative role model. Devout Catholic, family man, hard worker and successful. Also massively impactful worldwide (you probably have a few dozen instances of SQLite running on your phone or desktop as we speak). And appears to be very humble in spite of that.

I guess I was hoping to see a definition of "conservative role model" that didn't automatically imply religious.

Seems like the ghist of it is

  • happy embracing fatherhood
  • devoted/providing husband
  • works hard
  • successful at work
  • proud of work

that didn't automatically imply religious.

To be honest, I don't really think such a thing exists. Non-religious conservatives are a thing, absolutely, but the most prominent and famous ones seems to have, uh, colorful personal lives at best. I love Clint Eastwood and his movies, but I definitely would not want to emulate his personal life.

Non-religious conservatives, in my personal meatspace experience, don’t want other people- their children included- to become non-religious, and plenty of them would rather they were religious.

Mm, I'll take your word for it. I'm pretty unimpressed by SQLite :P

If you need a SQL database and don't need multiple concurrent writers nothing beats SQLite in terms of performance and simplicity. But yeah if your usecase falls outside of that it's not really a good fit. Though the SQLite docs explicitly acknowledge that.

After experiencing some shocking data mangling, I noticed this part of SQLite3's documentation and it made me run screaming

A column with NUMERIC affinity may contain values using all five storage classes. When text data is inserted into a NUMERIC column, the storage class of the text is converted to INTEGER or REAL (in order of preference) if the text is a well-formed integer or real literal, respectively. If the TEXT value is a well-formed integer literal that is too large to fit in a 64-bit signed integer, it is converted to REAL. For conversions between TEXT and REAL storage classes, only the first 15 significant decimal digits of the number are preserved. If the TEXT value is not a well-formed integer or real literal, then the value is stored as TEXT. For the purposes of this paragraph, hexadecimal integer literals are not considered well-formed and are stored as TEXT. (This is done for historical compatibility with versions of SQLite prior to version 3.8.6 2014-08-15 where hexadecimal integer literals were first introduced into SQLite.) If a floating point value that can be represented exactly as an integer is inserted into a column with NUMERIC affinity, the value is converted into an integer. No attempt is made to convert NULL or BLOB values.

STRICT tables might interest you:

https://www.sqlite.org/stricttables.html

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