Tuesday, December 10

Geek

Daily News Stuff 10 December 2019

Undiscontinuation Edition

Tech News

  • Intel undiscontinued the Pentium G3420 - a 22nm Haswell part with two cores and no hyperthreading.  (AnandTech)

    Speculation is that this is because they don't have anything to replace it with due to 14nm shortages due to 10nm delays.

  • In Soviet Russia, flag poops on you!  (TechDirt)

    Russia blocked all of Shutterstock due to one picture of a Russian flag.

    Also, that joke dates back to 1934.

  • YouTube has asked the FTC how its users should comply with COPPA.  (Tech Crunch)

    This is utterly disingenuous, because YouTube creators are not violating COPPA. It is not possible for them to do so: They do not control the platform.

    YouTube is violating COPPA.

  • MicroPython is Python but micro.  (Real Python)

  • MessagePack has implemented timetamps as a standard extension type.  (GitHub)

    It doesn't handle timezones (this was the reason they rejected date/time types originally) but it can express any point in the history of the Universe to nanosecond precision.

    The choice of storage representations is slightly odd.  The 32-bit format has the usual limitations, but the 64-bit format still cannot represent dates before 1 January 1970.  You have to use the extended 96-bit format for that.

    This makes it useful in situations where you don't want to fight with JSON's wretched inability to distinctly represent dates at all.

  • On that subject, Amazon Ion looks mostly sensible and one of the better extended JSON varieties.  (GitHub)

    It has text and binary formats, and supports the usual JSON datatypes plus decimal (variable precision, as opposed to float), timestamps (with optional timezones), symbols, blobs, hexadecimal and binary integers, and, um, S-expressions.  No, I don't know why either.

    It also supports comments, which is probably a bad idea.  And type annotations, which are probably a good idea.

    I was looking for a suitable serialisation format for internal caches and queues in Minx 1.2 and had reluctantly settled on JSON despite the loss of type information, but may switch to Ion instead.

    I'll have to see how it performs.  JSON is pretty damn fast these days.

  • Speaking of pretty damn fast AMD's Epyc 7742 is that.  (Serve the Home)

    Sure it's $7000, but it runs faster than two of anything else.

  • MySQL 8.17 supports array indexes.  (MySQL)

    It doesn't support arrays as a column datatype, though.  So what you need to do is use a JSON column and a document path query that casts it to a virtual array field that can then be indexed.  Which is flexible but irritating.

    What this means is that a decade after I actually needed it I can finally just store a list of topics in the post records in Minx and pull them back out in the right order without a join or a sort.

    JSON columns in MySQL are kind of dumb; they are just text that is required to be valid JSON.  But I can deal with that at the ORM level, and pretend that the topics and tags arrays really are just arrays.


Disclaimer: Cabbage.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:23 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 507 words, total size 5 kb.

1 "JSON's wretched inability to distinctly represent dates at all."
The mind boggles.

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, December 11 2019 01:12 AM (Iwkd4)

2 "S-expressions. No, I don't know why either."
You know why.  Greenspun's tenth rule.

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, December 11 2019 01:15 AM (Iwkd4)

3 I was looking at the docs and the Python library maps Ion S-expressions to Python tuples, which is neat.  With JSON, a tuple just gets turned into a list.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, December 11 2019 01:21 AM (PiXy!)

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Apple pies are delicious. But never mind apple pies. What colour is a green orange?




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