I'd guess that the very large majority of people don't know that americans use 12h time, no. Why would they?

It is a bit strange, like being surprised some countries drive on the left side. xkcd 1053 of course, but people are still allowed to be surprised when someone went their entire life without picking up a fairly common factoid.

I'm skeptical. Switching between time formats when you're used to it requires 0 cognitive effort, and certainly doesn't warrant a button. Eg in France, people use 24h time for display but talk in either 12h or 24h time depending on personal preference, so you might look at "17:00" and say "5" without even thinking about it, it's just a different name for 17.

It’s not quite the same when a schoolchild or a farmer has to figure out different train timetable formats depending on the railway company. It was the 1980s, and these were the first affordable watches available…

The SNCF doesn’t change its format when you travel to Brittany or Alsace.

True (and can confirm) but this assumes a lifetime's habit of interchanging the two.

It doesn't take long to learn to interchange. If you start today you won't be doing it tommorow, but if you keep it up in a few months you will. At least for the common times - you might have to think about what 10pm is if you normally go to bed before then.

I've not interacted with mysql a whole lot, but when i did I was regularly surprised that it didn't have stuff I was missing from Postgres. Off the top of my mind:

- Query planner is much worse (just yesterday I had to USE INDEX to sped up a query by 300x, I'm near-certain postgres would just have gotten it right) - Indexes are much more limited: no GIST, no GIN - No transactional lock (`pg_advisory_xact_lock` in postgres). This one was very surprising, it's a really useful thing and I had to implement it myself as a lock table

At least you have access to USE INDEX on MySQL. On Postgres it's not rare to have a query suddenly perform awful in production because some switch flipped in the planner and now it's picking some random index

Good news is that they just added a plan stability feature in pg19. It's actually full planner hints, so you can edit the plan to whatever you want if you have no fear, but the main motivation is exactly index stability.

I looked it up because I'm interested in the subject but it seems it's only a proposal right now? At least according to this 5 month old blog post https://rhaas.blogspot.com/2026/03/pgplanadvice-plan-stabili...

Edit: Never mind, found it https://www.postgresql.org/docs/19/pgplanadvice.html

Recent MySQL comes with a rewritten optimizer (which they call "hypergraph") that will soon become the default, but you can already use if you want to.

One application I'm working on (CRUD, but with fairly complicated business logic) is seeing large performance improvements, especially on reports which join many rows from 10+ tables.

I regularly test the same dataset on both PostgreSQL and MySQL -- we support both, and this new optimizer puts them pretty close.

The current default optimizer has some pathological cases where reports run 8-10 times slower on MySQL compared to PostgreSQL. Not with this one.

https://blogs.oracle.com/mysql/the-hypergraph-optimizer-is-n...

the vast majority of people have not taken Marketing 101, and it'd be strange to expect them to have. I know you're not literally talking about a Marketing 101 course, but the point is the same

I’m not talking about a literal Marketing 101 course, but I’m also not entirely facetious about this all being taught in a first or second Marketing class (having attended those).

I agree we should not expect everyone to have taken a marketing class - but I sure expect the author of the piece to have demonstrated some curiosity about some of the terms. And we know they did, because the author decoded them into plainer language in their table. So why present these elements as an abnormal thing for McDonald’s to compute about them, rather than something an undergrad might be expected to compute as part of a project?

habits, no. But difficult argument to make that lab-grown meat requires _less_ of a "moral value realignment" than plant-based food?

what a strange comment! It's totally fine, you do whatever you want, but it sounds like "I used to be an alcoholic drinking two 12-packs a day, now I don't even care about beer: I just have 6 a day and that's not because I want to be drunk but just because I feel like it". Like, sure it's quantitatively better but... it's not really qualitatively very different is it

Our ecosystem dying is also pretty suboptimal.

Sure.

But that isn’t happening.

I think it's far from being this simple. What you're describing is productivity on a greenfield project, but what's really interesting is productivity when working on an existing large codebase, with existing conventions, architecture decisions (or lack of)... How easy is it to do a product pivot, to rearchitect for performance, etc etc etc.

not the same as scam, but how is it not spam?

I run a few small businesses and quite regularly get unsolicited emails/calls.

There's absolutely a real, qualitative difference between contact from a real human being who respects everyone's time and has done actual research, and someone who is just playing the numbers game and blasting as many people as they can (regardless of how "warm" the leads are).

It's a bit of a spectrum, but if someone has taken the time to handwrite and research an email or call, I'll at least try to give them the courtesy of a response.