site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 11, 2024

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

7
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

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