I will be the first to acknowledge that humans are a bad judge of performance and that some of the allegations are likely just hallucinations...
But... Are you really going to completely rely on benchmarks that have time and time again be shown to be gamed as the complete story?
My take: It is pretty clear that the capacity crunch is real and the changes they made to effort are in part to reduce that. It likely changed the experience for users.
IMO, this isn't entirely a "new world" either, it is just a new domain where the conversation amplifies the opinions even more (weird how that is happening in a lot of places)
What I mean by that: you had compiled vs interpreted languages, you had types vs untyped, testing strategies, all that, at least in some part, was a conversation about the tradeoffs between moving fast/shipping and maintainability.
But it isn't just tech, it is also in methodologies and the words use, from "build fast and break things" and "yagni" to "design patterns" and "abstractions"
As you say, it is a different viewpoint... but my biggest concern with where are as industry is that these are not just "equally valid" viewpoints of how to build software... it is quite literally different stages of software, that, AFAICT, pretty much all successful software has to go through.
Much of my career has been spent in teams at companies with products that are undergoing the transition from "hip app built by scrappy team" to "profitable, reliable software" and it is painful. Going from something where you have 5 people who know all the ins and outs and can fix serious bugs or ship features in a few days to something that has easy clean boundaries to scale to 100 engineers of a wide range of familiarities with the tech, the problem domain, skill levels, and opinions is just really hard. I am not convinced yet that AI will solve the problem, and I am also unsure it doesn't risk making it worse (at least in the short term)
I genuinely think systems like Unison are "the future of computing"...
But the question is when that future will be.
Part of the beauty of these sorts of systems is just that the context of what your system actually does is in one system, you aren't dealing with infra, data, and multi-service layers
Maybe that means it is a much better foundation for AI coding agents to work in? Or maybe AI slows it down? we continue to try and throw more code at the problem instead of re-examining the intermediate layers of abstraction?
I really don't know, but I do really want to learn more about is how the unison team is getting this out in the market. I do think that projects like this are best done outside of a VC backed model... but you do eventually need something sustainable, so curious how the team things about it. Transparently, I would love to work on a big bet like this... but it is hard to know if I could have it make financial sense.
With all that, a huge congrats to the team. This is a truly long-term effort and I love that.
not disagreeing with your point here, or in the follow-ups of the pain of https for "local network" apps... but I really wish that we could get to a place where we could get away from this distinction. Obviously, ipv6 is not that easy or realistic, but that really is, imho, the "right" long term answer.
Having gone down the path of being able to just spin up "local" services that get a publicly routable (but most often firewalled off) ipv6 IPs and then good DNS integration is really neat... but still requires lots of technical chops. I wish that weren't the case
My point is not that value extraction wouldn't happen, my point is simply that in addition to the value extraction we also made other huge shifts in economic policy that taken together really seem to put us on a path towards an "AGI or bust" situation in the future.
Is that a bit hyperbolic? isn't this just the same as dotcom and housing bubbles before where we pivoted a bit too hard into a specific industry? maybe... but I also am not sure it would be wise to assume past results will indicate future returns with this one.
> I was discussing with a friend that my biggest concern with AI right now is not that it isn't capable of doing things... but that we switched from research/academic mode to full value extraction so fast that we are way out over our skis in terms of what is being promised, which, in the realm of exciting new field of academic research is pretty low-stakes all things considered... to being terrifying when we bet policy and economics on it.
That isn't overly prescient or anything... it feels like the alarm bells started a while ago... but wow the absolute "all in" of the bet is really starting to feel like there is no backup. With the cessation of EVs tax credits, the slowdown in infra spending, healthcare subsidies, etc, the portfolio of investment feels much less diverse...
Especially compared to China, which has bets in so many verticals, battery tech, EVs, solar, then of course all the AI/chips/fabs. That isn't to say I don't think there are huge risks for China... but geez does it feel like the setup for a big shift in economic power especially with change in US foreign policy.
I think the answer to that right now is highly workload dependent. From what I have seen, it is improving rapidly, but still very early days for the software stack compared to Nvidia
Really impressive... but wow this is light on details.
While I don't fully align with the sentiment of other commenters that this is meaningless unless you can go hands on... it is crazy to think of how different this announcement is than a few years ago when this would be accompanied by an actual paper that shared the research.
Instead... we get this thing that has a few aspects of a paper - authors, demos, a bibtex citation(!) - but none of the actual research shared.
I was discussing with a friend that my biggest concern with AI right now is not that it isn't capable of doing things... but that we switched from research/academic mode to full value extraction so fast that we are way out over our skis in terms of what is being promised, which, in the realm of exciting new field of academic research is pretty low-stakes all things considered... to being terrifying when we bet policy and economics on it.
To be clear, I am not against commercialization, but the dissonance of this product announcement made to look like research written in this way at the same time that one of the preeminent mathematicians writing about how our shift in funding of real academic research is having real, serious impact is... uh... not confidence inspiring for the long term.
I had an ex90 on pre-order for a long time, placed it within the first ~30 days of it being open.
It looked to be (and is!) an absolutely beautiful vehicle and also seemed to be making choices in the hardware (lidar) that I hoped, would, eventually deliver a combination of safety and self-driving capabilities that would be unmatched. I was willing to pay a premium and knew that it would take some time for the self-driving to come to fruition, but figured it would be a capable vehicle until that point in time.
But dang, what a botched launch. Not only were there all these issues, which are insane to me that Volvo didn't have more people in social media / subreddit, but also from a financial perspective the car is just insanely hard to get into. Lease terms were absolutely terrible.
I ended up getting a Hyuandai Ioniq 9 and am really glad I went that direction. Yeah, it doesn't offer as much as a Tesla in terms of FSD, but it also has better build quality and interior quality nearly matching the Volvo. I like the styling (but I know some do not), and it has actual physical controls for the stuff I care about and the best heads up display I have used (favorite feature: you get photos of incoming caller). NACS is also great... but I can't bring myself to take 2 spots yet at superchargers.
I am experiencing a strong sense of "why didn't I think of that" while also really hoping it isn't another strong, family friendly concept that gets quickly enshittified for profit.
Seriously, kudos, for a great concept, good website, and really, not that bad of pricing. Sure you can do it cheaper DIY... but where is the fun in putting an office-styled VOIP capable phone in a kid's bedroom? (though converting an old-phone to tunnel over VOIP sounds like a fun weekend project to do with my pre-teen)
But... dang, does it feel like yet another thing that will start great and get terrible over time or just dropped and be e-waste. Kid cell-phone plans that don't give me choice of provider, youth-focused budgeting/saving apps that are 4x more expensive than just a classic bank account and require an app to effectively use, and by far, worst of all, all the "kid" versions of tablets, youtube kids (which I can never get to not show ads even though I pay for premium!), that claim to give parents control... but really just seem like the minimum effort to make parents feel like they are putting in guardrails while still being designed to maximize the addiction early.
While I am really glad we are trying to build tech that helps kids have a better relationship each other while still using technology... it seems like most still fall to pressure of profit and either term into extremely over-priced offering that is hard to justify or can't make it and turn into junk with no re-use.
Once again, this product, right now, does not look to be that... but now having been bit a few times, I am much more cautious and either worry it will become e-waste or the price jacked up by 3x what it is today.
I absolutely sympathize with this and was/still is my opinion... but the only "evolution" of that is the hope that, while I don't think you can prevent the scams and short-term pain on labor markets... you maybe, actually, genuinely get a tool that helps change some of the dynamics that has led to the absolute discrepancy in power today.
If AI is truly as revolutionary as it could be... well, who is to say it isn't the pandoras box that destabilizes the tech giants today and gets us back to a place where a team of 10 can genuinely compete against 1000. And not in the "raise cash, build fast, and get out while things are good" trend... but actually in building, small, more principled, companies that aren't pushed to do the unsustainable things that current market pushes them to do.
Once again... it is more likely than not to be a pipe-dream... but I am starting to think it may well be better to be realistic about the momentum this freight train is building and see if it can be repurposed for my world-view rather than to cede the space to the worst of the grifters and profit-seeking-at-all-cost types.
What I find most interesting here is the explicit mention of using Socratic method and how, paired with it not being a human, seems to be what allowed for deeper introspection of one's own beliefs.
For me, the hardest part by far of any conversation like this is the patience to listen and then respond in a way that allows for introspection. It is like swimming upstream, it just tires you out really quick.
The trope of an old wise one who does a lot of listening but can say a lot with a few words maybe is less about the wisdom gleaned and more about patience developed.
I don't think we can call AIs wise, they typically aren't succinct, but the patience they definitely do better than average human and maybe that is their biggest advantage in any context where they are educating
I hope this is more common knowledge these days... but this is good framing and makes really clear the costs.
What this article doesn't cover... and where a good chunk of my career has been, is when companies are driven to break out into services, which might be due to scale, team size, or becoming a multi-product company. Whatever the reason, it can kill velocity during the transition. In my experience, if this is being done to support becoming multi-product, this loss in velocity comes at the worst time and can sink even very component teams.
As an industry, the gap between what makes sense for startups and what makes sense for scale can be a huge chasm. To be clear, I don't think it means you should invest in micro-services on the off-chance you need to hit scale (which I think is where many convince themselves of) nor does it mean that you should always head to microservices even when you hit those forcing functions (scaling monoliths is possible!)
That said, modularity, flexibility, and easy evolution are super important as companies grow and I do really think the next generation of tools and platforms will be benefit to better suiting themselves to evolution and flexibility than they do today. One idea I have thought for some time is platforms that "feel" like a monolith, but are 1) more concrete in building firmer interfaces between subsystems and 2) have flexibility in how calls happen between these interfaces (imagine being able to run a subsystem embedded or transparently to move calls over an RPC interface). Certainly that is "possible" with well structured code in platforms today... but it isn't always natural.
I am not sure the answer, but I really hope the next 10 years of my career has less massive chasms crossed via huge multi-year painful efforts and more cautious, careful evolution enabled by well considered tool and platforms.
I had the awesome, yet terrible experience to work on an obscure Nintendo feature.
By networking, I am assuming you mean console stack... which I had experience with myself, and yeah... not great. But even more, their web services (more than 10 years ago at this point, hopefully better now) were so, so bad.
The thing that struck me then, and continues to seem true, is how much they just don't really seem to care and that they singularly focus at being good at innovating where it matters: games and differentiated hardware.
Young me thought they were silly for being so "behind the times". Older me respects it more.
Yeah, engineering high scale distributed data systems on top the cloud providers a very weird thing at times.
But the reality is that as large enterprise move to the cloud, but still need lots of different data systems, it is really hard to not play the cloud game. Buying bare metal and direct connect with AWS seems a reasonable solution... But it will add years to your timeline to sell to any large companies.
So instead, you work in the constraints the CSPs have, and in AWS, that means guaranteeing durability cross zone, and at scale, that means either huge cross az network costs or offloading it to s3.
You would think this massive cloud would remove constraints, and in some ways that is true, but in others you are even more constrained because you don't directly own any of it and are the whims of unit costs of 30 AWS teams.
But... isn't that a core ethos of open-source? That you won't ever come even close to capturing the full value provided by a piece of software... but the nature of the problem is such that the value could never be created unless it was open.
I like to think of this as a "reverse" faustian bargain. By sticking to some agreed upon "moral" agreement of this open contribution and communal governance, you create a huge market that you get to try and least capture a piece of. If you break that bargin, you risk the project. And it isn't like this is some theoretical bit... it has been shown again and again in different communities.
I fundamentally don't understand how you can spend so long in open-source and think that this agreement doesn't apply to you. That may seem "cruel" in that someone else can profit from you... but that was always part of the bargain that made your business exist in the first place.
That does not match my experience. Engineers learn a new tool, that tool is successful in solving a problem. Whether it is recency bias, incorrect pattern matching, or simply laziness, the tool is used again but with reduced success. Repeat that process a few more times (sometimes in different organizations) and now the tool is way outside the domain, ill-fit to the task at hand, and a huge pain.
That often happens with engineers who pushed that tool getting promoted a few times and building their career on said tool, which is where I have seen this being pushed down, but I think it is important that in most cases are still engineers
Man... this stuff sucks. If I were panic, I would do the same... but I also wouldn't want to be the one at google to navigate this.
With Google Drive now being at the center of so many companies for storing business data, I am certain it is a juicy target, and third party access with full access to read and write to that big hard drive full of proprietary data is one that I would understand want to lock down... but not like this?
I don't think the market is anywhere near to shifting where business are going to dump google drive en masse, but as the ecosystem shrinks because so few companies can afford the cost to play in google's backyard, it does make me wonder how many companies are going to absolutely resent google, comparable to the way they resented oracle.
But... Are you really going to completely rely on benchmarks that have time and time again be shown to be gamed as the complete story?
My take: It is pretty clear that the capacity crunch is real and the changes they made to effort are in part to reduce that. It likely changed the experience for users.