Technology, *sigh*

Recently, we bought a Honda Odyssey minivan, the 2024 model. It is more or less fully loaded. Against our will. We prefer basic vehicles, with no bells and whistles, as we generally treat vehicles as tools to go from A to B. But, we could not get anything less belled-and-whistled (is there such…

LLM and Google Search

Imagine you are responsible for Google’s search engine. Ever since ChatGPT happened, you have to think about how not to…

Turing Complete

Ever since my university days, when I studied theoretical computer science, I had this notion about computability that was…

My Programming Language is More Terse Than Yours

Ideology in Programming

Programmers have ideology. Yeah, that is a surprise. Some people are dead set on functional programming. If it is not…

LLM here, LLM there, LLM everywhere…

I played with ChatGPT a little bit a few weeks ago. Quite impressive. I mean, I asked a few…

What is a Programming Language?

This is a trick question. To answer this question, you need a definition of the word ‘programming’, and…

The Quest for ORM

Many years ago, in 1995, I believe, I was still working in a huge telecom company. The main languages we used were C and C++. Relational databases were just getting mainstream.

The project I worked for, a real-time system that coordinated long-distance telephone calls in…

Why Even Have the NULL Value at all?

Years ago, I read C. J. Date’s essay about NULL in relational databases. If you didn’t know Date, he was, perhaps still is, one of the major figures in relational database circle. And I learned tremendous amount of stuff from his writing, much more than what I got…

Fake it until you make it…

That mentality of “fake it until you make it” is actually the extremely version of what technology and engineering at the edge is about. Perhaps the word “fake” is not quite right here, but technology and engineering at the edge, the bleeding edge, is really about trying the…