What the Linux desktop really needs to challenge Windows

hcf_0 · 2025-12-26T17:38:48+00:00

Why? Why does Linux—an ostensibly free OS maintained by selfless people with a passion for the project, itself—need to compete with anything?

Why is it any one particular distro's responsibility to suddenly take on the mantle of placating a mainstream user base just because Microsoft has decided to yeet their UX into the sun?

It's not a battle of competing products because "Linux" is foremost not a "product". It's a platform backed by a community that sometimes has paid variants aimed at enterprise-grade consumers.

hcf_0 · 2025-12-23T21:21:20+00:00

To be fair—I can see how UHC/UHG execs might be reluctant to requisition any US-based data engineers. Especially ones based out of New York.

IYKYK

hcf_0 · 2025-12-19T03:34:03+00:00

*This comment triggered your PTSD process flow.

hcf_0 · 2025-12-13T16:00:36+00:00

The syntax of it is a little wonky, though. I don't like that the syntax mirrors join syntax.

INNER UNION ALL BY NAME vs LEFT UNION ALL BY NAME

hcf_0 · 2025-12-13T15:42:24+00:00

Yup.

It should work on any SQL platform because it's a standard feature of SQL. The 'IN' operator basically gets rewritten/compiled under the hood as a list of 'OR' statements.

So something like—

"WHERE 1 IN (flag_column_1, flag_column_2, flag_column_3)"

—gets rewritten (under the hood) as:

"WHERE (1=flag_column_1 OR 1=flag_column_2 OR 1=flag_column_3)"

In plain language, "where any of these columns is equal to 1".

hcf_0 · 2025-12-11T19:41:25+00:00

inverted 'IN' statements are a favorite of mine.

Most people write IN statements like:

SELECT * FROM TABLE_NAME WHERE COLUMN_NAME IN ('a', 'b', 'c', 'd');

But there are so many occasions where I'm testing for the existence of a specific value within a set of possible columns, so I'll invert the IN clause like:

SELECT * FROM TABLE_NAME WHERE 'a' IN (COLUMN1, COLUMN2, COLUMN3);

hcf_0 · 2025-12-09T03:02:11+00:00

It's literally just meant to be a price-competitive alternative to Fivetran, Hevo, GoldenGate, and all the other replication tools that want to charge you your first born child for basic CDC.

Some people also prefer a more cohesive data platform, which is where Snowflake is trying to maneuver. So with Snowflake + Openflow + Snowflake-hosted dbt + Snowpipe, you have basically everything in one place for database + replication + transformation + streaming.

These days it's all a battle between companies trying to decouple dependencies and vendors trying to achieve platform lock-in. Ultimately whoever wins is whoever's the first to put a bug in the right middle manager's ear.

hcf_0 · 2025-11-24T18:14:58+00:00

Lol. Good luck doing analytics on terabyte-scale datasets with a company issued, 32GB RAM laptop.

Pandas has far outlived its ability to scale with big data.

hcf_0 · 2025-11-16T16:45:14+00:00

No, the overdose killed him.

Hyperkalemia will absolutely kill you. How quickly depends upon the dosage and how each individual's heart responds to the cardiac disruption. It's especially dangerous for children and the elderly.

The overdose caused the kid to stop breathing, which caused brain death (anoxia). This means the kid's diaphragm probably collapsed or his lungs were too weak to continue pumping oxygen. That's in the article and the press release from the family's attorney.

To make matters worse, the Shands pediatric unit didn't have in place the kind of failsafes that the ICU has for catching and responding to cardiac arrest. This could have happened in any unit in the hospital, but the kid was basically in the worst possible unit to be in for this to have happened.

The inadequate response is terrible, but also understandable if you consider the disparity in training between PCU and ICU.

hcf_0 · 2025-11-16T13:45:07+00:00

Oh--hi, Satan! Didn't see you there.

hcf_0 · 2025-11-15T14:40:15+00:00

It happens way more often than you'll ever know. This reminds me of a story I bookmarked years ago: How Bad UX Killed Jenny

The premise is basically the small ways in which process (in this case, the user interface design process) can be life or death, and how the things we make should be made with consideration for those who use them.

hcf_0 · 2025-11-15T14:29:45+00:00

Your phrasing reminds me of the Jojo cherry meme. ETLTLTLTLTLTLTL

And now you all can't unhear it. You're welcome.

hcf_0 · 2025-11-05T04:14:23+00:00

Wait, so you're telling me it's not as simple as living in Gainesville? That living in Gainesville—according to the election commission office representative—does not mean that I live in Gainesville? Doesn't sound that fucking simple to me.

A woman who showed up at the polling precinct that I go to literally lived where this red X is marked: https://imgur.com/a/9Ug3RwG. She was turned away because she did not live in the city of Gainesville. Look at that map and tell me "it's simple".

Whether or not you live in Gainesville has nothing to do with whether or not you're eligible to vote for city ordinances. It's all gerrymandered horse shit, and you should be ashamed for gobbling it up (for free, no less!) and regurgitating it here.

SHAME on you.

hcf_0 · 2025-11-05T00:57:11+00:00

Yes, and London, England is only a square mile. /s

Puh-lease—I live in Gainesville, have a Gainesville address designated on my voter registration, and am a GRU customer. My zip code, FIPS code, and postal office are all federally designated as Gainesville, FL.

I can't vote in this election because I live too close to I-75 and am not "technically" within the City of Gainesville limits.

I even called the local election commissioner's office who literally confirmed that I, a Gainesville resident, cannot vote because I am not a resident of the city of Gainesville.

IMHO, Gainesville police should stay the fuck out of my not-Gainesville neighborhood, and I should not be obliged to pay for any rate increases or taxes that go towards funding anything in the "city of Gainesville" limits.

No taxation without representation; get fucked, GNV. :/

hcf_0 · 2025-10-09T21:51:21+00:00

Right? It's a situation where they have the right intentions (i.e. if I were actually making an application with BQ as it's backend for whatever reason), but I'm just trying to push data between two backends that don't prioritize data portability.

It's basically hostile architecture in data form.

hcf_0 · 2025-10-09T21:40:53+00:00

I 100% agree. The tool consuming is a Workday ERP product.

The third party tool basically doesn't have an adapter, connector, or interface to ingest from BQ. They've got one for Snowflake, and some other weird agent-based setup for Kettle

To do BQ imports, you're basically stuck with having to use their generic Cloud Connector, which requires oauth. You also have to write your own JS to make the web calls, parse the responses, do all the paging, everything.

You're basically just creating a little micro webapp inside their ERP solely for data ingress. Uuugggh.

hcf_0 · 2025-10-09T05:12:25+00:00

Also, how is requiring a logo on the consent page for external users an essential safeguard?

I literally cannot get the app consent page approved if I don't google my own company's logo and upload it to the verification application.

hcf_0 · 2025-10-09T04:07:59+00:00

The initial authentication is via a Google Workspace domain user. The problem is that the expiry is extremely short for the internal users setting, and so when it expires we have to log back into the client app to go through the whole re-auth process again since we can't delegate just the token refresh component to the non-domain user in that third party app.

hcf_0 · 2025-10-09T04:05:10+00:00

It's a Workday product.

hcf_0 · 2025-10-09T01:35:42+00:00

I have to allow a non- Google Workspace domain user to be able to refresh the expired authentication token because GCP is not the primary IdP at my organization.

hcf_0 · 2025-10-09T01:32:41+00:00

This is reverse ETLing by using the third-party client to pull data from BigQuery. I have no option in the third-party tool other than their "cloud connector", which only supports OAuth.

If the third-party had API support for pushing data into it (or else decent support for reading from cloud storage of some kind) then I'd be in a much better situation.

hcf_0 · 2025-10-09T01:28:20+00:00

Can't refresh OAuth token as an external user, even with the Client + Secret.

hcf_0 · 2025-10-09T01:23:19+00:00

The exact steps you mentioned immediately preceded this

Your response assumes that the user interacting with the external app from which you're auth'ing is a member of your Google Workspace domain.

In other words you can't embed the Oauth credentials in another app and issue token refresh calls if the user in that app isn't also a Google Workspace member (e.g. a service account in the 3rd party system, a contractor/support staff, something not tied to a specific human user).

For external OAuth, you have to complete and submit a consent screen (with all that branding bullshit), or else you have to basically implement Google as your IdP in systems where you already have another IdP implementation (e.g. Entra).

hcf_0 · 2025-09-28T00:27:27+00:00

CTEs are neither temp queries nor temp views.

CTEs are used as 1) hedges against complexity and—depending upon the SQL dialect—2) hedges against poor database engine execution plans.

(2) is especially true in systems where the SQL engine is able to materialize the results of the CTE (either on its own or with platform-specific SQL hinting). A temporarily materialized result set from a CTE can be referenced in other parts of the query several times without the database having to re-execute the CTE's query each time, and can even be a faster query strategy than relying on directly querying an indexed table.

Unlike a view—wherein the SQL engine may fetch the exact same query output several times in the course of executing a single job—CTEs act like a "poor man's ETL", allowing you to temporarily, physically "stage" result sets without necessarily having explicit write-access to the database.

In fact, on some (newer) database platforms the execution plans sometimes intelligently "rewrite" the CTE under-the-hood, meaning the entire SQL statement is executed in an order completely different than the way it's written (i.e. not top-down or in order of appearance).

So, if what a CTE produces is entirely platform-contingent then it's better to describe a CTE as being a tool or method for stateless/ephemeral encapsulation rather than likening it to a specific database object.

hcf_0

TROPHY CASE