At $dayjob we've actually used this property once or twice: if you need to merge two tables you can keep the positive ids for the first one, and use negative ids for the second one. It only works once, but damn if it's not effective when you need it, and it conveniently flags all the records with an id under some limit (positive and negative both) as "pre-transition" record when you're looking for patterns.

No, it's long, long gone.

When I did it, the script was a bit of a mess of trigger setup, and then a backfill that only monitored replica lag, as if the status of the much less heavily used failover instance was somehow the most important part of a database. Hopefully that's no longer true, and none of this is necessary any more.

So I essentially split it in half, so I could keep only the trigger setup, and carefully read the queries the backfill would perform so I could duplicate it. And then wrote a very simple loop of "select N records, copy to new table, check how long that took. scale up by min(5%, 100), scale down by 30%, if outside target bounds".

Intentionally very polite to the main DB, because once the triggers are in place it really doesn't matter how long it takes. It dropped down to single digits at peak load on some days, so I think that was the correct choice.

> it's interesting that some people are on the internet but is very well insulated

Not sure I'd call it "insulated", the internet is just very, very vast, even when considering "just" the English-speaking web. Then you have all the other "versions" out there too that are kind of hidden to most people :)

Anecdotal, but also first time I heard about AO3, and I'd consider myself having broad interests and generally well-read, although my interests doesn't include fanfiction so maybe not so weird I haven't heard about it before.

I’d say AO3 is the insulated part.

Having been an active internet user for longer than most AO3 users have been alive, the first time I heard about it was a few years ago in a student radio show about the fanfic genre and culture. Poorly written smut featuring popular culture characters has just never been my thing. Probably because I’m not that much of a fan of any specific fictional setting or franchise in the first place.

this is the first i've heard of it

First time I read about it, not exactly sure what it is, by quickly glancing at it. Looks like a collection of links to some fan-fiction stuff.

The internet’s big. I’m aware of it due to a moderate tvtropes addiction (there’s a enough crossover that it’s hard to miss) but probably otherwise wouldn’t be familiar.

I have never heard of it, and I've been pretty active on the Internet since the early 2000s.

I ask in complete earnest: is that your honest reaction to seeing it, or did you hype it up for your comment? Personally very little could evoke that kind of reaction from me. Maybe a little, "oh, that's an interesting thing to be turned on by" but for the most part, who cares?

New to the internet?

The link is in the reddit comments.

It's Dead Dove though.

Meanwhile if I keep reminding people where the wall is and how fast we are approaching it I’m considered “negative”. That”s the real reason this stuff happens. If someone noticed, the got tired of harping on it and without the constant barrage everyone else immediately let it go out of sight, out of mind.

I wasn't sure what the percentage of porn is, so I counted the number of works for each maturity rating:

    4,247,583: Teen And Up Audiences
    4,173,082: General Audiences
    2,816,083: Explicit
    2,271,446: Mature
    1,676,061: Not Rated

> enough to vitrify the admin

Not sure it was that solid.

I don’t think I turned the admin into glass, nor vilified them - just pointed out that this sort of thing is readily avoided.

But sure, I committed a hate crime.

> There's no SLA for Harry Styles porn

But what about my good night's sleep? How can I go to bed without reading about my favorite blorbos?

I mean I’d assume they went for a 64bit integer. In a few million years, people who are into weird porn about whatever the temporally local equivalent of Harry Styles is (probably some sort of robot) will once again be mildly inconvenienced.

In 13 years, the Unix timestamp will probably be a much bigger problem.

It's not like those two billion things just materialise in your database, right? Someone must have watched that graph climb, and climb, and climb, approaching the limit.

Doesn’t an 18-character alphanumeric ID give you 18^36 combinations? 1.54 x 10^45 seems like enough combinations.

Maybe don't: https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Don't_Do_This#Don.27t_use_s...

Using uuids can cause lots of problems with indexing, fragmentation, row size and index size