I wasn’t taking about new fields. I was talking about resource partial updates (eg PATCH, or commonly the U in CRUD).

If you just want to update a single field on a resource with 100 fields, rather than GETting the entire resource, updating the single field, and PUTting whole thing back, just do a PATCH with the single field.

Likewise if you’re POSTing a resource that has nullable fields, but the default value isn’t null, how do you indicate that you want the default value for a given field? Do you have to first query some metadata API? That doesn’t seem ideal, when this existing pattern exists

Imagine you’re writing a CRUD API, which is pretty common.
If null attributes aren’t included in the payload, and someone does an update (typically a PATCH), how do you know which fields should be nulled out and which should be ignored?

I agree for many cases the two are semantically equivalent, but it’s common enough to not have them be equivalent that I’m surprised that it causes arguments

For many uses it is semantically the same.
But for cases where you need to know if something was intentionally set to null or was simply not set, the difference is enormous.

Ah yes the difference between “unset” and “intentionally set to null”, the bane of API devs who work in languages that don’t inherently distinguish between the two.

I love when an API takes a json payload, and one of the json fields is a string that contains json, so I have to serialize/deserialze in stages 😭

That’s not agile.

It’s not bad, it’s just not agile. Agile exists for projects where that simply isn’t possible. Its sacrificing a bit of potential best-case productivity to ensure you don’t get worst-case productivity.

The problem is that people realized that they could sell agile training to middle management if they changed it to be about making middle managers feel empowered and giving progress visibility to upper management.

But in those cases, isn’t fear supposed to be balanced by some reward? Competing instincts/motivations?

But specifically fear instincts seems strange. It makes sense to us because we’re us, but look at it more clinically: we seek out to stimulate the instinct that keeps us safe. That means that it’d doing the exact opposite of its purpose. If we seek to stimulate our fear, that means we seek to put ourselves in situations where fear is a reasonable response, which is exactly what fear was evolved to prevent.
How did this behavior develop, and how did we survive once it did?

That’s still a pretty messed up pass time if you’re not anthropomorphizing. It’s a crazy way to have evolved.

I like that “safe space” theory, that seems very plausible.

It’s still a bit messed up though, because that part of our brain can’t distinguish between play fear and real fear, so we get “rewarded” for both which seems like a very risky move, evolutionary.

I can imagine the aliens being like

How did they survive to become the apex species?

Although with all the brinkmanship and poor threat analysis we’ve exhibiting now on a global scale, perhaps we won’t survive as the apex species for long, so 🤷

HOW DARE YOU 😉

I imagine that’d be just as fucked up to aliens:

Their brain injects feelgood drugs to reward them for being scared??? and they got addicted?!?!

Im gonna edit my post because everyone is too hung up on extreme sports.
Horror movies also fall under the same category of thing. It’s not about the risk, it’s about triggering fear response. I just picked extreme sports because I couldn’t fit the whole premise in the title

Maybe I’ll edit my post because you’re not the first person who misunderstood. I’m specifically talking about thrill seeking, not extreme sports specifically. I couldn’t fit the whole premise in the title so I just picked an example 😭

Extreme sports was more supposed to be an example. Horror movies are the same.

People go out of their way to feel scared, what would aliens think of that?

He wanted to drain the swamp to make room for the sewage he pumped in

That’s not due to performance enhancing drugs and body mods though, right? That’s due to diet and associated lifestyle.

Although I think I still see your point; some sports not only encourage but require the top echelon of the sport to sacrifice their long-term health for the sake of a competitive edge. I’d use sumo as a cautionary tale as to why it’s a bad idea, rather than proof that athletes are willing to make that sacrifice.

You’re wrong, they are trying it. Search for the Enhanced Games

I don’t necessarily agree that decentralized is fractured by design, nor that “working as intended” means that it’s the best solution for this/every situation.

I’m saying that as we decentralize, we get both advantages and disadvantages. I’m saying that this is a situation where we can’t both have our cake and eat it too.

For example:
We could decentralize communities themselves, preventing them from fracturing. Instead of having communities hosted on a single instance, communities could be feeds aggregating all posts tagged as belonging to that community. Then if you defederate an instance you simply stop seeing posts from users in that instance.
But then good-faith mods are defanged and can no longer protect vulnerable community members from antagonistic actors.

I think my straw example tradeoff is a bad one, that’s too much decentralization of power.