HN is probably not the best forum for theological debate...
But e.g. modern American evangelical churches are to me quite clearly quite far from the original meaning of the texts with some theology outright invented in 18th and 19th centuries.
It really is the case that what you bring to a text colors what you get out of it, and the more people insist that they are reading a text "as it is clearly written" the blinder they seem to be to this.
The question being what text to whom? The original text in the context of the culture of the original audience or an English translation interpreted as though addressed to a contemporary audience?
The point was that when you do this you participate in name-calling/slurs, not making an argument.
Many things that you personally think are good (I don't know you but say for instance ideas around democracy or liberty) can also be described as viruses in the same way.
Sorry, I didn't mean to make any statements about you personally, at all (and I do feel you are interpreting my comment uncharitably).
It has nothing with knowing you or not to do at all, I was just commenting on the contents of your post, not about you.
I meant that the act that you described (comparing religion with a virus) is in itself using the name-calling-aspect-of "virus". One is borrowing the negative connotation for a purpose, because one has (for other reasons) decided that the religion or ideology is bad.
The descriptive property of virus that you then mention (as in being "viral", packets of information in cell etc) equally applies to liberty, democracy and other things that (at least I) consider good.
> Sorry, I didn't mean to make any statements about you personally
Hakuna matata.
> I meant that the act that you described (comparing religion with a virus) is in itself using the name-calling-aspect-of "virus".
The comparison is more than a mere slur. It’s also a useful metaphor when discussing how religions & ideologies spread through a society, or “go viral”.
> The descriptive property of virus that you then mention (as in being "viral", packets of information in cell etc) equally applies to liberty, democracy and other things that (at least I) consider good.
Correct. I would still not call the viral framing charitable, but it is equally useful here, and I’ve used it for these & adjacent concepts before.
Not sure how to read your post. Is your argument that since humans have never been _demonstrated_ to be wiped out by a synthetic virus already, it is not likely to happen in the future?
I'm trying hard to make your post make any sense at all..
I guess you believe everyone gets the same starting point and same opportunities? How did you come to believe such a thing? Have you looked around to see what society is like?
I'm not saying that; I'm saying that people can make decisions with very different outcomes even if they started out the same, and vice-versa. But if you're already brainwashed with socialist ideology, then obviously you can't see that...
conversely, people can make the same decisions in the same-ish environment, with very different outcomes. it sounds like you discount the effect of luck in timing, or geography, or acquaintance, which are wildly different from just making intellectually robust decisions.
I can agree that not calling it "reasoning" may be correct.
But who knows what human "thinking" is really about. If I find a solution to something it is seldom by painstakingly tracing that A and B leads to C (for that I'd need pen and paper). Rather, thoughts just swirl around and then suddenly a solution, or a hunch about a direction to go in, pops into my mind. Who knows what such thoughts "look like" in humans. It is not all of it I can introspect.
Yes I can sort of follow along some kind of train of thought in my head, but there's a lot going on between each thing I'm consciously aware of that I'm not aware of at all, which probably dominates what you are consciously aware of. (Humans are experts at post-rationalization and so on.)
I see this pattern a lot in AI anthro discussions: (1) Assume humans are some kind of perfect idealistic reasonable beings. (2) Hold LLMs up to the standard of an perfect idealistic reasonable being. (3) Conclude that LLMs fails this test, and are therefore not "intelligent", or in this case "thinking", like humans are.
Problem with the argument is comparing humans in anyway to something that is idealistic, reasonable, intelligent in the sense that is implied in these discussions. Human minds are a mess too and fall short of the same standards, just in very different ways from LLMs.
Indeed, except for in the rare cases we painstakingly trace externalised logic we have zero evidence that humans verbalised explanations of our reasoning matches our internal states either, and plenty of evidence via Sperry's split brain experiments that we're prone to outright making up rationalisations for our reasoning.
But if you observe that the agent day after day do handle user input safely; and also routinely run an agent that scans for security vulnerabilities and observe it finding cases where input is not handled safely in existing code, you may conclude that the chance of an issue is at the same level at, or probably lower than, if a human wrote it and a human reviewed it.
("Escaping" user input is not good practice though, use parameters, assuming you are talking about SQL.)
Even if the fake is super-fast compared to postgres (1%) in CPU resources: Why spend extra engineering effort to build something that has less fidelity?
CPU for test runs is cheap... and if you use any AI agent at all, tests runs faster than the agent does work. Why does it matter how much faster they run?
The goal of a regression test suite is to catch issues before you deploy to prod. That 95% is a nagging source of doubt. CAN you just release the code straight to prod? Or not?
Many times integration tests including the real postgres and real migration catches bugs for me before they go to prod.
Personally I would just never go with 95% fidelity in tests. Testing with the real postgres is just so good.
And just to get test coverage for the migrations themselves?
(In my case I also use stored procedures, RLS etc that needs those; with your setup that is just not on the table I think or you loose coverage of critical code.)
If you are unit testing something then sure mock out everything you are not concerned with.
But for service layer tests I don't agree with you, including the actual production repository implementation and the DB is very useful.
It is like e2e tests, just leaving the frontend out. I really like having a lot of such tests to be productive with backend development.
To have a 100 such e2e tests complete quickly, spinning up SQL DBs cheaply is essential.
Also for actual e2e tests with frontend I prefer cheap DB clones rather than reusing DB between tests and having to worry about state between tests.
I think perfect layering was more relevant in the 2000-2010 with less powerful machines. Just making pseudo-integration tests and including more than may be strictly needed is fine. It completes quickly enough. When it breaks it is usually obvious what broke without limiting was code is included in the test.
I feel like the article is leaving the most important part out ; how to allocate that "offset" (sequence number) which allows consumers to keep tabs on how far they have read and query if there are new messages in the fallback. There are a few schemes, some more creative than others, but it is not a trivial problem to solve without complexity or possibility of lock contention (or races with consumers if you do it the wrong way). Most people I guess have writers acquire a lock, for instance on a single row in a state table, for allocating the next sequence number for an event topic.
What is the best way? Perhaps a tool that reads CDC and writes allocated event sequence numbers to another table would work ok, or would that have long latency?
And that CDC processor should then do the NOTIFY too.
Also on the consumer side in some usecases batching can drastically improve throughput. You don't even use LISTEN/NOTIFY then. Just run the consumer in a loop and each iteration process all new unprocessed messages, and store your last sequence number processed between iterations.
But e.g. modern American evangelical churches are to me quite clearly quite far from the original meaning of the texts with some theology outright invented in 18th and 19th centuries.
It really is the case that what you bring to a text colors what you get out of it, and the more people insist that they are reading a text "as it is clearly written" the blinder they seem to be to this.