Freakonomics interviewed Dan Wang about his book Breakneck back in September, see episode #647. It's a very interesting lens through which to view both societies, worth a listen!
NPR Planet Money did a segment on pig butchering scams back in May. They played along with one to get a first hand perspective of the process. It’s a fascinating listen, way more complicated than I thought, and tragic for both ends of the scam.
I was at a Drupal workshop years ago and the guy running it referred to .tpl.php template files as "tipple fipps". Not as absurd as "pup", but still made my skin crawl.
I also recall in the early 2000's hearing people call .html files "hotmail files".
Ditto, I took his discrete math course at NCSU in 1998. It was mainly taught by Tiffany Barnes day to day (who was also nice and a great explainer), but Bitzer was often present and always smiling and jovial.
I really regret having spent so little time interacting with my professors though. I was one of those kids that spent the least amount of time in class possible, almost never going to office hours, aiming to get the course work out of the way asap so I could "have a life". So much wisdom and life/industry experience was concentrated on that campus and at my fingertips, but I totally took it for granted. Seeing his obit amplifies this feeling; I wish I had cared enough at the time to meet and know the guy.
Will these converge on a common syntax for vector fields, indexes, and comparison functions in the near future? Or will vector implementations just add momentum to the increasing incompatibility in the MySQL-ish ecosystem?
Our vector implementation is fully compatible with the syntax for vector fields and comparison functions in MySQL 9 -- we have carefully backported all the changes to our version of MySQL 8 to ensure full backwards and forwards compatibility. The index syntax is specific to PlanetScale because the open-source MySQL 9 preview does not yet have support for ANN indexes on vector columns, but we're committed to being as compatible as possible in the future and to minimize fragmentation. I do agree that fragmenting the ecosystem is not great!