I sail the high seas of the Lemmyverse, posting snarky + Lefty comments

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: May 7th, 2023

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  • Rail is fundamentally superior to roads + cars at an engineering level.

    All at the same time:

    • Rail has a smaller footprint

    • Rail moves multiple times more people or cargo per hour

    • Rail has multiple times more fuel efficiency

    The fact that USA’s policy has been designed to favor cars only makes them more ‘practical’ than rail if you consider political constraints more binding than physics constraints.

    I’ll grant that trucks have tighter turning radii and maximum operating grade. If we truly only used them when those characteristics are needed THAT would be ‘practical’


  • ELI5: a database is the “memory” of a program.

    Every piece of data that any software uses almost certainly comes from and goes to multiple databases.

    Once the data is stored, you can execute “queries” to have powerful access to update many records at a time, read particular records based on their relationship to other records, and so much more.

    Your bank balances, your purchase history, your emails, every part of your digital life is almost certainly spread across a constellation of databases.

    Bonus Fediverse content:

    Lemmy itself uses the Postgres database extensively. Posts, users, comments, votes and more are all individually stored in the database.

    Mastodon also uses Postgres. If a post goes up on Lemmy, and a Mastodon server is federated with it, the Lemmy server will send out a HTTP request to the Mastodon server containing the contents of the post. The Mastodon server will use this information to write its own record of the post in its own database.

    Regarding your question about VMs: You can run a database inside a VM, or give the VM access to an outside database via queries, or both! You might run SQLlite (a small and excellent embedded database) on the VM to track its local state, while also running queries against a large postgres database to synchronize with other services in the cluster.