Who is going to end up capturing all this value being generated is going to be very interesting. Back in 1980, who’d have thought MS would capture the majority of the value from PCs over the next 3 decades, and not IBM?
Linus Tech Talk (LTT) did a whole series on doing this on the pool at the channel hosts’ house. Extravagant home upgrades are a frequent topic on that YouTube channel… business expense write off yada yada. My general takeaway was, yikes, all that piping and infrastructure would be a nightmare to maintain and will likely just be closed off whenever an issue comes up (or he sells). I’m no expert, but I am a home owner, and have come to form a deep appreciation for maintaining simplicity when it comes to the operation of your house.
Perhaps this is a controversial take, but I believe security runs in opposition to many other quality attributes (i.e., usability, interoperability). Not to say that there aren’t designs that could exist that are optimal for security and these other quality attributes simultaneously, but security massively reduces the potential design space to the point where there is no rule that at least one of these optimal designs must exist.
Quality is an opinionated measure of a design, which involves tradeoffs based on your goals, values, etc. Valuing security very high, even at the expense of every other aspect of quality if necessary, is completely understandable. But that’s a value that isn’t universally held.
If your point is that security should at least be considered when measuring quality these days (like, it’s a top 10 ‘ility’ at least): fair enough.
I remember Matt’s Scripts Archive as an absolute gold mine for learning how to make web applications through example in the pre-PHP days, which was pretty challenging when all you had to work with is CGI and maybe SSI if your hosting provider was particularly advanced. It’s what got me started as a web application developer 30+ years ago. I guess I probably learned about security the hard way by following his examples. But it got me headed broadly in the right direction I think.
I remember being very proud of how I extended his forum software to support threaded messaging and pagination.
Applications like Photoshop will one day be regarded as the castles of this era. Technically impressive, but economically/politically irrelevant. While they could be reproduced at a fraction of the cost there just isn’t any point to it because there are much better ways to allocate capital.
I had a similar experience. Back then gamers were an outsized part of the online community, so if you wanted to build a site that got some actual use and engagement, building to that audience was a good strategy. And of course, it helps when you are part of that audience.
I learned about this technique from Owen Wilson’s character in the otherwise exceptionally forgettable movie “The Haunting (1999).” Paradoxically, you are the one doing them a favor by effectively giving them permission to ask for help in the future.
I interned at a company called Stratus which did hardware fault tolerant computers in the 80s/90s. I think they called it a “Pair and spare” approach, where every component had 3 copies running and comparing state every cycle. If one component’s state stopped matching the other 2, the failing component would be taken offline and the system would call home for a replacement to be fedexed overnight. I think just about every component was hotswappable too. Pretty cool, but expensive, and other architectures for improving availability, or mitigating impact from loss of availability, won out (except for a handful of exotic use cases).
To perhaps give a little insight into why this is on the front page by someone who upvoted it: I didn't realize it was so open and easy. Now I do. The Golang code simply serves as proof in how open and easy it is.
> Even at the time, the task didn't seem like "enough" for a show-the-world blog post.
Its an old (de facto industry) standard, but maybe more relevant than ever. I'm interested in moving more of my compute usage off-cloud these days, which is why this is of interest to me right now. I suspect many others feel the same way.
Might be a good time to post other tidbits of knowledge you have like this, targeted at software engineers that are starting to get more into infrastructure management. Standards that are ubiquitous and just work are awesome.
It is completely possible that the path that got them to this point was the optimal path given their goals and knowledge at the time. And wildly enough, maybe it was even the optimal path with perfect knowledge of the future as well.
I don’t think people are spending their time on more pressing issues. I think they are just are hooked on an endless stream of content that is built for addiction and is always within arms reach.
I think the idea is that if they cannot perform any cognitive task that is trivial for humans then we can state they haven’t reached ‘AGI’.
It used to be easy to build these tests. I suspect it’s getting harder and harder.
But if we run out of ideas for tests that are easy for humans but impossible for models, it doesn’t mean none exist. Perhaps that’s when we turn to models to design candidate tests, and have humans be the subjects to try them out ad nauseam until no more are ever uncovered? That sounds like a lovely future…
I do love the concept, but a little part of me died
each time I came across an article with a very strong AI voice. That just feels antithetical to the ‘small web’ ethos because it obscures the ‘neighbor’ behind it.
I’m not so sure an increasingly large context window will be seen as a critical enabler (as it was viewed 6 months ago), after watching how amazingly effective subagents and tool calls are at tackling parts of the problem and surfacing the just the relevant bits for the task at hand. And if increasing the context window isn’t the current bottleneck, effort will be put elsewhere.
> There's a middle ground of "written by human and LLM together".
Absolutely, but I’d categorize that ‘bit’ as the innovation from the human. I guess it’s usually just ongoing validation that the software is headed down a path of usefulness which is hard to specify up-front and by definition something only the user (or a very good proxy) can do (and even they are usually bad at it).