SQL can make 2D data, but it extremely bad at it. It’s a good opportunity to wonder whether this part can be improved.
“Pivot tables”: I often have a list of dates, then categories that I want to become columns. SQL can’t do that so there is a technique of spreading values to each column then doing a MAX of each value per date. It is clumsy and verbose but works perfectly… as long as categories are known in advance and fixed. There should be an SQL instruction to pivot those rows into columns.
Example: SELECT date, category, metric; -- I want to show 1 row per date only, with each category as a column.
```
SELECT date,
MAX(
CASE category WHEN ‘page_hits’ THEN metric END
) as “Page Hits”,
MAX(
CASE category WHEN ‘user_count’ THEN metric END
) as “User Count”
GROUP BY date;
^ Without MAX and GROUP BY:
2026-03-30 Value1 NULL
2026-03-30 NULL Value2
2026-03-31 Value1 NULL
(etc)
The MAX just merges all rows of the same date.
```
SQL should just have an instruction like: SELECT date, PIVOT(category, metric); to display as many columns as categories.
This thought should be extended for more than 2 dimensions.
DuckDB and Microsoft Access (!) have a PIVOT keyword (possibly others too). The latter is of course limited but the former is pretty robust - I've been able to use it for all I've needed.
! There is right-hand priority in France! The absence of “Yield” sign means you must let the car from the right go, if they don’t have their own sign, EVEN if they’re from a smaller road (apart from private roads).
You were probably victim of a French person using their priority correctly, which is very misleading because you would have been found full-guilty. I call it an “implicit priority to the right” and municipalities use it abundantly to create slow traffic, but foreigners don’t always know that smaller innocent secondary streets can have priority OVER the main road of a village.
Oh yes, the local shooting out of a narrow lane often has the legal right to do that. I think that is mad. If you want that behaviour, the the main road should have a stop sign.
Particularly in small hamlets, where there is a stone cottage on the corner, there is no visibility of incoming traffic. MOST of the little streets will have a stop/give way, but you can't be sure. It's like playing Russian roulette.
Just terrible road design because of an ancient rule from the horse and carriage era.
Absolutely terrible road design. I’m just saying: Yes it is enforced, active, alive and used.
Worse: It is inconsistent. My father was rolling out from a neighborhood from the right, hit a car: He didn’t have the right of way because the “cadastre” (the registry of ownership maps) said the land belonged to the neighborhood and therefore was private property. But in MY neighborhood, the neighborhood land belongs to the city and it would have given him priority.
I think as a country becomes more international, there are fewer unintuitive rules and more explicit markings required for everyone. That France didn’t change that is a mark of cute traditionalism.
Those monuments (from humans or from nature) should be obvious knowledge, but I generally don’t know any of them. It helps pacing the road trip, and be able to say “Mom, I’m at the level of the [Sainte Baume, for me]”.
They are shown on Michelin maps and atlas. We love to travel using the atlas and stopping on interesting sights or roads. Usually in France you can go from A to B the fast and boring way, or the slow and scenic way which is perfect for holiday time
Respectfully, if we didn’t shutter men all the time, maybe there would be paradoxically more time for women. Unless we make it a zero-sum game where we’re all extremists who would lose if it makes the opponent lose too.
Mixed school is a bane for men, for example. I’m full on with the Mollahs on this one.
Sodium lamps were deemed dangerous for driving” because they made it difficult for drivers to distinguish shapes, since they were different from day shapes. A kid in bright 1980ies colors (Little Red Hood) would look black under those lights.
LED was presented as a sharp improvement because of the large spectrum of white light.
The sodium lamps are in fact safer for driving, because they preserve drivers' night vision, which improves visibility into the shadows, and because they cause less glare.
What they aren't good for is LED manufacturers' bottom line, and the lighting industry spent a lot of lobbying money to entice friendly politicians to heavily subsidize them with public infrastructure budgets, with those subsidies then misleadingly sold to the public as "efficient" and "environmentally friendly".
They're also not very good for reading the newspaper or doing critical color analysis. Thankfully such tasks do not need to be done at night in the middle of the street.
That would make sense. Otherwise I have no idea how people wouldn't have noticed how much more difficult it makes seeing anything outside of the sharp cutoff of the light cone (or, of course, for the person being dazzled on the other side).
SOC2 requires to ensure all computers have the software updates installed. While certification apps can check every desktop with a monitor, ABM could just do it and enforce it.
It used to be necessary to use a slew of dodgy providers like Jama, with is 2000 website (and why would I trust any small company with all my enterprise data). ABM didn’t provide the MDM part and that was most annoying. It seems normal to integrate account management and MDM, so I’d love to use it.
That ABM is full of bugs, the Apple team incompetent, and D&B being Dumb and Dunber is another question.
> Surveys exist, interviews exist, focus groups exist, fostering communities that you can engage is a thing, etc.
We all know it’s extremely, extremely hard to interact with your userbase.
> For example I was paid $500 an hour
+the time to find volunteers doubled that, so for $1000 an hour x 10 user interviews, a free software can have feedback from 0.001% of their users. I dislike telemetry, but it’s a lie to say it’s optional.
—a company with no telemetry on neither of our downloadable or cloud product.
> We all know it’s extremely, extremely hard to interact with your userbase.
On the contrary, your users will tell you what you need to know, you just have to pay attention.
> I dislike telemetry, but it’s a lie to say it’s optional.
The lie is believing it’s necessary. Software was successful before telemetry was a thing, and tools without telemetry continue to be successful. Plenty of independent developers ship zero telemetry in their products and continue to be successful.
It is expensive. Add to this: On this audience, people will lose their passwords, leave outdated information, transfer their business, and not connect often — I bet the security is more costly that a technical audience.
“Pivot tables”: I often have a list of dates, then categories that I want to become columns. SQL can’t do that so there is a technique of spreading values to each column then doing a MAX of each value per date. It is clumsy and verbose but works perfectly… as long as categories are known in advance and fixed. There should be an SQL instruction to pivot those rows into columns.
Example: SELECT date, category, metric; -- I want to show 1 row per date only, with each category as a column.
``` SELECT date,
MAX( CASE category WHEN ‘page_hits’ THEN metric END ) as “Page Hits”,
MAX( CASE category WHEN ‘user_count’ THEN metric END ) as “User Count”
GROUP BY date;
^ Without MAX and GROUP BY: 2026-03-30 Value1 NULL 2026-03-30 NULL Value2 2026-03-31 Value1 NULL (etc) The MAX just merges all rows of the same date. ```
SQL should just have an instruction like: SELECT date, PIVOT(category, metric); to display as many columns as categories.
This thought should be extended for more than 2 dimensions.
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