giovannibonetti

Have you heard about "default allow" and "default deny" in the domain of cyber security? Traditionally PCs, especially for home use, were built around the former idea, where the user supposedly trusts most of the stuff installed.

The problem is that malware may sneak in, and then the user needs a horrible piece of software called anti-virus that needs to apply complicated heuristics to try and separate one from the other. It kind of worked ok for many years, but as the world evolved and the dangers kept increasing, little by little we have been going towards the other idea – default deny – where apps are considered harmful until proved otherwise, and the honest app developers have to jump through multiple hoops to get their apps available to users. That's the app store model, which kind of works, but is cumbersome and expensive for the app developer.

Anyway, going back to the VM discussion, I think we may end up applying the default deny idea further into the OS Kernel to reduce those risks further. After all, a small kernel has a much smaller risk surface and perhaps it can be formally verified to be secure under some reasonable assumptions.

I think advertising has soared in valuation over the last few decades because society and technology have evolved to a point where it is viable for many people to own small businesses with a handful of employees, if any. That has led to an explosion in the number of businesses, mostly concentrated in a few sectors (e.g. fast food), and to differentiate oneself in a crowded market you need ads.

Temporal workflows are my main building block for supporting agents working in multiple steps.

In my company, we're pretty happy with Claude plus Metabase CLI (self-hosted). We quickly get any dashboard we want, regardless of the skill level of the person asking.

Many startups can now work in ways that were only fathomable in Big Tech before. Do you want a build system like Bazel for your monorepo? You can have it. Do you want to rewrite your app in a faster language? Sure, go ahead. Do you want to have native apps in all platforms? Yes, please.

> When the tools enable more creation at scale by tasteful creators, we'll start to get closer to content abundance. We're not there yet.

This reminds me of the comparison between Japanese manga and American comics/graphic novels. Some people say the former offer a much wider variety of content and ideas because it is often started by a single (often quirky) author, whereas the latter is usually designed by a committee, which ends up favoring more bland ideas. Anime usually starts of as manga, and that's why anime is so creative as well.

Perhaps AI will help single authors create more work by themselves, and we'll have a renaissance of comic books and other forms of (mostly digital) entertainment in the west. And we'll spend less time watching those TV shows on streaming platforms that follow the same few recipes.

Where does the language stand in the array-of-structs vs struct-of-arrays choices? Does it offer an annotation to choose that like in Zig?

What differentiation? Most work is bread-and-butter after you get a few years of experience. If you LLM's can automate 50% of that, it would transform society already.

Because LLMs make mistakes, and you want to prevent that? No wonder Rust is becoming the default language for high-performance LLM-written code. I hope Roc becomes a viable option soon, as it reaches stability.