Building @ https://nitter.gq/t.co/4phkZKwN5s (@substructureone) | Open source maximalist | Creating new avenues for open source adoption: https://nitter.gq/t.co/XNNlKGuwug
Joined December 2021
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I'm fascinated by stories of movies getting their endings completely changed at the last minute due to a bad screening from a test audience. How often does such a fundamental last minute change happen with other products? Was there ever a software app that 3 months before launch a studio said "uhh instead of a word processor let's just make this a typing tutor!"
dek retweeted
Love this, tell my kids this all the time.
They are competing against themselves, competing alongside humanity against nature, competing in how much they can grow the pie not to capture more pie.
Also tell them comparison to others is thief of joy. Jealousy is just the worst.
Asahi Linux on M1 is so close to being an amazing experience, but the power management issues are rough. Finding your laptop battery dead after a couple days because you didn't think to plug it in or shut it off is a major downer.
But it's so close.
Diving in to update the kestrel documentation and noticing the last commit is from 10 months ago... that's embarrassing.
A 5 MHz 286 PC with 640kb of RAM could've stored the database of friend lists in ~a hundred k of memory and looked up all friends-of-friends for a given user at least a couple hundred times per second.
What have we done.
When I tested the first prototype of the Gas app at a single school, it cost $600 in server costs per day—with a userbase of only 800 people.
This was mainly due to the friends-of-friends feature, a necessary piece to create social graph density. We knew with certainty that we could bring the costs down—but it would take 1-2 months to build it with the right database architecture and the school year was almost over.
For us, the bigger unknowns were (a) if an anonymous polling app would resonate 5 years later, (b) if people would pay for it, and (c) if it would grow—so we paid the upfront cost to answer these questions quickly before summer started.
This proved to be invaluable: it gave us sufficient signal to embark on a longer development cycle and it provided benchmarks on key funnels so we knew where to allocate our time for the next few months.
Prew, Kestrel's reverse rewrite Postgres proxy, allows shared Postgres cluster usage by rewriting database names in connection strings and create/drop queries with a user suffix.
I tried to get nocodb up and running against it expecting it to break but I didn't expect it to break so early as the database migration step, where it's explicitly checking the pg_database catalog to see if the configuration database already exists.
dek retweeted
Be an Open Source Absolutist!
It is hard to overstate how much value Open Source Software has added to the world, and how broadly empowering it is.
Operating systems, development tools, core libraries, and critical applications – a great many of the software tools used by the most powerful companies in the world are the exact same ones available to hospitals, students, and everyone else. For free. And not just to use, but to inspect, modify, extend, and redistribute.
Back in the 90s, there were legal battles in the US over software capable of strong encryption. There were scare stories about how terrorists and child pornographers would use the technology to evade justice, but people were also wearing T-shirts printed with forbidden code to mock the idea of algorithms too dangerous to share.
It was stupid, and I was ashamed of the regulatory state, but we got better.
Open Source AI is in many people’s crosshairs today. They believe that giving free access to state of the art algorithms and models without any guardrails constitutes a danger to society, that the public can’t be entrusted with a research model that wasn’t hammered into a box of their designated dimensions. “As a large language model, I cannot…”
Unfortunately, this is actually inside the Overton Window of possibilities right now.
Let’s push it out.
In the spirit of the first amendment, congress should make no law abridging the freedom to release open source software.
My oddly phone call specific social anxiety exemplified - always bringing up the phonetic alphabet in a browser window before calling any customer service line just in case I need to spell something out.
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Google has seemingly released a new feature where if you search for certain terms on mobile and scroll down far enough you descend straight into the depths of hell.
dek retweeted
Leaked Google document: “We Have No Moat, And Neither Does OpenAI”
The most interesting thing I've read recently about LLMs - a purportedly leaked document from a researcher at Google talking about the huge strategic impact open source models are having
simonwillison.net/2023/May/4…
From a technology standpoint, the need for advertising as a way of informing consumers of products they might find useful is dead. We have ML models that are plenty capable of keeping you fully apprised of products you would value based off a brief intro to your interests.
But there's no longer any technical rationale for advertising being a net societal good long-term. The argument is dead. Advertising is only (again, technically) valuable for misleading consumers into purchasing inferior products.
The fact that network deposit systems that spread your deposits among multiple banks to ensure full FDIC insurance are a relatively little-known rather than de facto account type among high value bank account users is a curious but unsurprising facet of this latest crisis.
IntraFi got a bump in the wake of the 2008 crisis and I'm sure they'll get another bump now. But learnings fade quickly, and institutionally they're fated to be a niche product rather than the standard.