I understood the comparison to be with Litestream, not SQLite in general.

Why would we compare Litestream (a backup solution) with Postgres (a database)? Would be like comparing Linux with NGINX.

Postgres has a similar replication solution built-in. It's like comparing Samba with Windows Server if your purpose is to run a SMB file server.

If that’s all you see, you probably need to level up your soft skills.

Certainly the things you’re talking about are real, and particularly severe in some environments, but there’s a lot of room to improve your influence without engaging in any of that.

> If that’s all you see, you probably need to level up your soft skills.

Not OP but I honestly don't see how this comment/tone is warranted in response to what they wrote.

You have yet to meet someone at a company you work for you who does one or more of the things I listed above to successfully advance their career?

Many do. More common the further up the ladder you get. But I’ve been able to gain enough influence to affect most of the things I care about without engaging in that, unless you consider being friendly and supportive (something that did not come remotely naturally to me) to be brown-nosing.

If you want to significantly influence a lot of high-level strategic decision-making at very large companies, then you do probably need to engage in nasty things like that. But most of us don’t work at that scope.

I don't think that's their point.

I think their point is that you can have influence without doing these things.

Then I was misunderstood as well.

As if anyone, myself included, would suggest that my listed items are the only way to influence your employer is a hilariously bad faith read.

I take issue with TFA framing the problem of people saying they hate "employment politics" as a you problem when I am of the opinion it is a leadership problem. Bad leaders fail to, or refuse to, see the things I listed as "bad politics".

Just take my supplements, bro. It'll fix your "soft skills", bro.

I think you were misunderstood as well, yes.

Could we please change this to a primary source and not an untrustworthy AI slop summary?

The view counts on that channel are orders of magnitude away from the fastest growing channels.

In this comment a hallucination?

No - they are the fastest growing by subscribers count.

Note that they exist for only a year and went from 0 to 36M subscribers.

OK, but given the view counts those are obviously fraudulent subscriptions

Yes, so they’re being incentivized to highlight products which they get a cut of, and more strongly to highlight more expensive products.

This is called affiliate marketing and it’s toxic.

That’s my impression but the specification repository doesn’t seem to mention that at all, when it seems like it should be a requirement.

The article mentioned this:

Users stay in control — they explicitly confirm each step before any action is taken.

It will take no time. I made three purchases this weekend where I started my search with ChatGPT because it gives me better results than Google, and it can also pull in or link me to Reddit comments.

I have it running a background research task now where it’s producing a comparison table of product options with columns for different attributes I’m interested in, including links to purchase it, so it can help me make a decision tonight. If this feature is available for what I want, I’ll be using it in a few hours.

Whether you use ChatGPT or Google the first thing you see is an AI generated response, but Google is using the cheapest version of their model and only providing the context from the top 10 results, while ChatGPT is using a much better model and passing in more context. Lots of folks are turning to ChatGPT instead of Google these days.

What did you buy

They get a cut for products that support this. So they’re incentivized to display those instead. It’s pretty close to standard affiliate advertising and the biases that introduces.

Sure, but still far from "trusting agents with my money"

“Real alphabetical ordering” is incredibly nonspecific. It’s underspecified even for ASCII-US, but essentially meaningless for those of us in 2025 who need to handle Unicode.

How do capital letters sort relative to lowercase letters? How do letters sort relative to digits? How do you consider code points that can correspond to different letters in different lettering systems with different ordering? How do you handle diacritics? Do you want the behaviour to be stable through Unicode normalization? Should it differ based on the character encoding? Should different representations of the same character, such as blackboard lettering or circled numbers, be sorted with other representations of the same character or grouped separately?

You can come up answers for these questions, but there’s no unambiguously correct option. The least subjective option is sorting based on encoded byte representation (if that is even specified), but that is not “alphabetical” and would not be intuitive to most users.

You're focusing on the wrong part of the problem when you say "essentially meaningless". Yes, choices must be made about how you order your "alphabet". But the meat of the request is that sorting goes character by character. That's a clear criteria, even with Unicode involved.

And I would say the reasonable way to define character is grapheme cluster and yes you want it stable to normalization and encoding.

How capital letters/diacritics/different representations affect the order of your alphabet, and which ones are considered equivalent, is something without a clear answer. Same for whether letters or numbers come first, and where punctuation goes. But you don't need consensus on that to fix the problem in the post.

I thought it was pretty well-known that capital letter come before lower-case. I think it's punctuation, then numbers, then capital letters, then lower-case. At any rate, that's what textbook indices do (assuming I remember correctly).

Unicode has many different representations of digits, and I would dispute using the term “alphabetical” to refer to digit ordering in any case.

You are starting to sound like a troll. Yes, unicode has many representations of digits. That has nothing to do with the question of whether 2.jpg should come before or after 10.jpg.

You think user deserve to have control, but you think that control only needs to extend to the treatment of those ten characters, nothing else?

I guess your position is coherent, but it’s very silly.

Those ten characters are of disproportionately high importance (to put it mildly).

You're wrong about that. See UTS #10 § 1.4.

(I did not downvote you.)

"Numbers. A customization may be desired to allow sorting numbers in numeric order. If strings including numbers are merely sorted alphabetically, the string “A-10” comes before the string “A-2”, which is often not desired. This behavior can be customized, but it is complicated by ambiguities in recognizing numbers within strings (because they may be formatted according to different language conventions). Once each number is recognized, it can be preprocessed to convert it into a format that allows for correct numeric sorting, such as a textual version of the IEEE numeric format."

Increasing the number of different possible combinations of settings your software can be running with by a factor of one nonillion is not a choice I’d make if I wanted to have any confidence in its reliability and security.

That's why you write small programs. It won't take long for most programs to bloat to the level where they're dealing with nonillions of combinations, whether the user has control over those combinations or not.