Waiting for PostgreSQL 18 – Add temporal PRIMARY KEY and UNIQUE constraints

In this article, and a follow up we learn about upcoming changes to Postgres 18 that will make temporal modeling much easier. A welcome change. Maybe soon after that we can get libraries to leverage it in popular web frameworks.

Rightward assiggment in Ruby

It’s now possible to use rightward (->) assignment in Ruby. The tweet talks about using it in “pipelines”:

rand(100)
  .then { _1 * 2 }
  .then { _1 -3 } => value

value # => 7

I am very fond of pipelines like that, but feel that the => is not very visible. What I want to write is:

rand(100)
  .then { _1 * 2 }
  .then { _1 -3 }
  => value

But that doesn’t work, because the parser balks. I can use a \, but that makes it awkward:

rand(100)
  .then { _1 * 2 }
  .then { _1 -3 } \
  => value

value # => 87

Goodhart’s Law Isn’t as Useful as You Might Think

when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure

Long dive into concepts from operations research that go deeper than the pithy “law” and explain the mechanisms at play.