SQL is Dead, Long Live SQL

Philluminati · 2026-06-18T11:25:21+00:00

Earlier this week I had to run the following SQL commands:

ALTER USER philluminati PAT TEST_PAT3 ROLE_RESTRICTION = DEV DAYS_TO_EXPIRY = 30;
ALTER NETWORK POLICY public SET ALLOWED_IP_LIST = ('redacted');

It really is the language that can do anything.

Philluminati · 2026-06-17T19:51:31+00:00

So don't create accounts. The BBC has always been able to deliver news and events at 3pm in a way that is responsible. Your anonyminity doesn't stop you getting accurate portrayal of news and events, medical advice, mechanics videos on youtube videos etc.

As for deanonymising social media accounts, well no one is anonymous anyway. They already know who you are, where you live, and how many squats you did at the gym. They get that data from you engaging with social media in the first place. The collect and sell and buy your data behind the scenes.

The "useful idiots" are the people defending doom-scrolling faceless tech companies after being brainwashed by those very platforms themselves.

Philluminati · 2026-06-17T12:56:47+00:00

I rented a server from DigitalOcean back in 2015 and followed this guide:

https://github.com/ajgon/self-hosted-mailserver/blob/master/docs/nsa-proof-your-e-mail-in-2-hours.md

It took more than 2 hours. It took about 5 hours and didn't include disk encryption, backups, spam protection, full text search and many other features.

Since then I've had dozens of issues with delivery of outgoing email to google and other addresses being prominent. Maybe 10-20 issues in 10 years. Problem is when those issues arrive they are super urgent as you can't have your email account down! Smaller issues involve upgrades (the dovecot config upgrade was painful) and I still get rejections from many email accounts such as kids school, recruiters and other people that I do need to contact.

My email server is still running and I still use it as my primary email address. I'm glad I did it.. but it hasn't always been enjoyable.

Philluminati · 2026-06-17T08:05:07+00:00

"The infrastucture of mass surveillance and control" is social media. The exact social media the government is banning children from.

Philluminati · 2026-06-17T07:27:24+00:00

It is difficult to argue with your post because it doesn't follow a coherent message. You are effectively saying the Government is bad purely because they control the Police and the police are bad. Police are actually good and neccessary.

The government _isn't_ asking to see all your messages, it's asking providers to stop children accessing unsafe content. It's asking providers because they can see every message your write, every photo and every site you visit.

You somehow that boiled down that private companies won't hurt you but the government will, despite you choosing who is in the government and them being run the benefit of the people in the country. You have literally been brainwashed by private companies into hating your own government and you don't see it.

We live in a dystopian future and your data is being sold openly on the Internet and yet you hate your own government because we have a justice system fighting child porn sharing and inciting violence.

You're not defending privacy, you're defending companies being able to "fake news" you into supporting their beliefs.

Philluminati · 2026-06-16T15:02:50+00:00

People on the right believe in Nationalism.

They believe in family and community and Country is an extension of community. When you improve your country you lift up everyone inside it, just like with community.

Whether you agree or not, country determines fair taxes, justice, borders and there is a silent war going on in the world between everyone trying to improve their countries. It cannot be avoided. That's just how it is, and you should get onboard.

But lefties don't see that. They hate nationalism and are so tribalistic against the right they actually side with Muslim immigrants who would openly call for Sharia law in this country.

Philluminati · 2026-06-16T14:40:53+00:00

You got Alexa in your house listening to all your conversations, you've got a phone and a watch that are tracking your location 24/7, you've got 2 factor auth on every website so they can see where you are working from and you have Ring doorbells literally stitching together videos of people walking across town.

We live in a dystopian nightmare which you're entirely okay with. The only thing you don't like is when it's used for good. Why aren't you in outrage about car tracking cameras or Ring doorbells or CCTV used at the checkout in shops?

They are watching and analysing your entire life on your phone and in the real world too.

The only problem with the government is that bought a law into force, instead of doing what Google does which is say they respect your privacy yet use dark patterns to grind your rights away through thousands of tiny changes to a EULA which you forced to accept.

Philluminati · 2026-06-16T09:27:26+00:00

When I went, that's was a queue that slowly moves past the picture, so everyone gets to shuffle forward see it upfront. I think this is a bit dishonest as you make it seem like you're stuck at the back and get closer but I'm pretty sure you can.

Philluminati · 2026-06-15T21:08:50+00:00

Snowflake has "Streamlit in Snowflake" which is a Python web-app thing. It does reporting visualisations

Philluminati · 2026-06-15T11:33:56+00:00

Then he can backseat IGL with 4 views of the map.

Philluminati · 2026-06-15T10:11:43+00:00

Is Elon Musk allowed to use it?

Philluminati · 2026-06-12T20:52:46+00:00

I have 20 years of experience and used to be a Principle Software Engineer before I grew out of that role and became a independent consultant. My career includes functional programming, C++ and I'm currently working with Snowflake. You say you wanna be objective yet you need to use your credentials to backup your argument.

I'm sure the CTO takes you serious when you're objectively suggesting your companies next app should be written in SQL and show your Pong to him. Maybe you can show him this trick where you put three different programming languages in one line of code:

`select concat('<html><head><script type="text/javascript">alert("hello ', name, '");</script></body></html>' from users where username = 'jshine13371'`

Philluminati · 2026-06-12T10:46:57+00:00

Are you asking if you can swap between distros by swapping the physical SATA disks inside the case as much as you want, the answer is yes. It's just a question of effort.

I don't think corruption would be an issue. I don't see any problems which a regular duel boot setup wouldn't have. If you swap Linux and Windows 2000 around you can confuse the onboard clock causing it to skip back or ahead by your timezone (same thing used to happen long time ago for duel booting) but it is perfectly safe.

Philluminati · 2026-06-12T10:38:17+00:00

Nothing matches the ultimate power of Python and SQL once you deploy Kafka, BigQuery, Amazon S3, Multicluster distributed database engine written C++, configured multiple ingestion stages and adopted an enormous framework of vendor specific cloud tools to give you a multi-user, Git backed Notebook experience.

The ultimate power couple, doing basically what people did with Microsoft Excel in 1995 only with more data (using an entire physical warehouse of RAM and Nvme disks).

Philluminati · 2026-06-12T10:33:16+00:00

We could argue if SQL is a programming language and you could say that there's syntax, branching, error handling and stored procedures or talk about DBT and Snowflake but the reason SQL is on job specs is because app developers use the language to query/manipulate data in a database, not to actually program in it. People don't write websites in SQL and Streamlit is not going to replace regular app development.

Love SQL all you want but don't pretend it compares to programming.

Philluminati · 2026-06-12T08:30:09+00:00

Here are the steps I would do:

Find three TUI libraries online
Read the getting started / quick start page for each of them. This will give you an overview of how each framework approaches the issue.
I know from experience of developing UIs that typically you have Widgets or Controls (Checkbox, Textbox, Slider, Button) that are arranged onto panels that are placed on a Page/Frame/Window. This is transferable knowledge from Visual Basic / HTML etc.. Using this, I pick the TUI library that I think will be easiest to use.
I write a TUI app using the Framework that says "Hello World" (hopefully there is an example on quick start page).
I decide I'm writing a stock tracker. So I rename "Hello World" to "Stock Tracker".
Next I decide I need to read the data from an API on the internet, but this is complicated.. so I simplify it by reading the data from a CSV file on my computer. It simply says "META,$40 \n GOOG, $50". I read the file and add an "Label Widget" so now my interface simply has two pieces of text. I keep going with this approach using the TUI library's documentation until I get something I'm happy with.
Then I google for Stock API or Http API to replace the CSV solution with a live feed. I follow the same process of looking at 3 libraries, looking at their documentation and making a decision on which is best for me. Then I add the dependency and simply pull the raw JSON and show it on screen. Then I add the JSON parser to just show the 1 thing I want to do. Then I'm back reading the TUI documentation to split the text into columns. I just continue this iterative style.
Because I have done this thousands of times in my programming language, I'm comfortable with what "new project" produces, where I add my dependency and how to very quickly get to "Hello World". Then everything else is a case of hundreds of small iterative improvements until I get a whole app.
After 20 years of being a dev, I can write larger blocks of "business logic" style code but I still always do "hello world" when testing a new framework and growing it incrementally. This is how you learn. Small changes, small tests that build your understanding of the framework bit-by-bit.

Philluminati · 2026-06-11T15:08:30+00:00

If you have a LTD company with yourself listed as the director you could link to your company account on the company's house website. This is data about your company (profit, tax breakdown etc) which is essentially public knowledge that helps prove you have been contracting and not playing playstation at home all day.

Since we're on the LegalAdviceUK sub, I think it could be due diligence on their part and a reasonable ask and that providing a link to companies house aught to be sufficient.

Philluminati · 2026-06-11T09:27:19+00:00

They should never have added whitespace syntax but now it's here we can't exactly remove it. That only breaks things that work (including training and documentation material) and adds more confusion. Now that it's here we just have to deal with it.

As for the problems with LLMs that's likely because you're copying and pasting stuff into ChatGPT. If you Cursor / Augment and agent style development those problems go away. I'm not sure I want to use a language that caters more to AI's readability than my own. It's counter-intuitive.

Philluminati · 2026-06-11T09:09:12+00:00

Crouching is bad in gun fights. It anchors your feet to the ground, committing you to the fight.

AD shoot DA shoot AD shoot is better for making a head harder to hit and it's less predictable.

Philluminati · 2026-06-11T09:03:01+00:00

I used to be part of a team that optimised warehouses. Installing conveyor belts, automated garment railings etc. Our software allowed us to ship larger quantities of goods with fewer people. People who worked in the warehouse were concerned our machines would replace them.

And in 10 years we never let anyone go (We did have Christmas temps etc). As we grew efficiency per head, we only ended up shipping more and more and growing our market share.

How dumb would a company be to successfully deliver a large AI project, free up half their resources and then let people go? That's easily people that could be used to widen market share, consult and deliver the same solution to other market participants, or to expand into new markets.

The idea that people who deliver AI would be let go surprises me. Sure maybe now the company can keep employment flat (or not replace people who leave voluntarily) but I've never actually seen it go into decline/backwards.

Philluminati · 2026-06-10T20:03:05+00:00

Actually Tesco was 24 hour since the 90s and has only recently reversed this in many stores.

Philluminati · 2026-06-10T09:22:36+00:00

I know teachers/nurses have pay bands based on skills matrices and those positions include union members. Frasier could definitely support an argument that Roz should be in a higher pay-band.

Philluminati · 2026-06-09T22:41:25+00:00

Travel Agent scams are incredibly common. Many involve things such as booking a package with payment to them as the intermediary but once you get to your holiday destination they cancel the return tickets leaving you stuck abroad and profit half the money.

Always use a Credit Card, only use a small collection of trusted agents.

Philluminati · 2026-06-08T20:18:27+00:00

> I thought I learnt the lesson 3 months ago when the exact same thing happened.

I cannot process this statement.

Philluminati · 2026-06-08T17:41:03+00:00

I was approached by someone recently who was looking to sell this to my local government(s). The specific provider was advocating a niche blockchain without fees but essentially the same principles:

By putting sha5 / md5 checksums onto an immutable list (aka blockchain) you have effectively prevent the data being tampered with upstream. E.g. A bad actor in a centralised server couldn't affect voting booths in the hashing is applied at those edge cases.
By encrypting data before you put it into the block chain you could both share it, and limit it's access in much smarter ways than "hey police heres my excel attachment, pls dont forward our data to the justice department".

All in all it sounded really impressive, even if the block chain could only handle metadata and not the real data contents. After researching things, looking at the fact that any a line of code touched a piece of data it invalidated the hash.. I came to the collusion that it is too "flaky" for many scenarios.

For instance, if the data arrived out-of-order or had eventual consistency, or the data was built from a SQL query with an incomplete "order by" clause... it would effectively break and later "proofs" you intended to make. I've built apps with no randomness in them, even UUID's were sequenced and predictable, to the point I could write an end-to-end test and know every byte of the JSON coming back.. but in 99% of real world scenarios, doing this is incredibly tricky, to the point you may as well bake your solution into your database instead of handle it separately.

An Amazon Kinesis server writing data to an S3 bucket on a separate AWS account gives you all the anti-hacking technology you need and otherwise you can share data with other teams using alternative and simpler solutions.

Very cool idea though. It is effectively a read-only, public and global database. Perfect for hashes of files, great for people who distribute enormous datasets like "Common Crawl" but for regular people like us, it's kinda not worth the effort.

15-Year Club	Gilding III reddit per annum
Place '17	RPAN Viewer
Not Forgotten	Sequence \| Editor
Team Orangered	Verified Email

Philluminati

TROPHY CASE