jonathaneunice

Quite beautiful.

Feels useful for watermarks that are pleasant to look at.

I hope this is a real wake-up call for teams running anything remotely SaaS-shaped. I count at least six substantial, lightning-speed attacks against multi-tenant as-a-service vendors since September. Not this year--just since last month. PingCAP/TiDB, Fireworks AI, Zeabur, OpenCode Console, Railway, now Northflank. All of them modern "we keep your content safe" players with high hopes and probably pretty good protections.

This is a full infosec emergency unfolding here. No matter how grinding it is to motivate a team to invest in protection or resilience (and it is grinding): We gotta get ready. Stat! The AI-accelerated attacker apocalypse has begun. It's boom, boom, boom, thanks for everything, on to the next. They have us sighted and are firing for effect.

So credential rotation, tripwire secrets, DFIR on standby, solid vulnerability and intrusion detection, real listening to that signal, minimized blast radius, spending caps and time limits and tight scoping on credentials, fast incident alerting... We need to get on a real war footing here.

To each their own, I guess. If I find out that yarn works was a type of textile mill and spinning factory, I then read on about other parts of the textile industry in New England. Maybe how it relates to the progress of steam engines vs. hydro power, or its place in the Industrial Revolution overall. It gives me an on-ramp to understand one thing and branch out to others. I don't know what AI models or agents you're using, but they must be weak sauce. Mine give me sharp and specific answers, at least 2-5 references per question, and I can branch out to that lovingly curated blog, to Wikipedia, to local historical societies and their curated collections. Et cetera.

I end up reading more sources and exploring more things. If you want to dismiss that as "trivia," or dismiss the topics I want to know about, okay. But it's important to me. You could equally deride search engines as wanton seas of advertising, and tell me I need to head to a library and its paper-based card catalog, the only true and proper way to do research. :shrug:

It's true there are a lot of weak models out there. I tend to use the frontier models, and they are great research assistants IME.

Contrarian take: I don't feel this way at all.

I end up thinking _more_ about many subjects, analyzing them more deeply, using AI. Before search engines, if I wondered about subject X, it was unlikely I'd have a resource at hand that could really tell me about X. Maybe ask around, see if anyone in my circle had some knowledge or an opinion. But for most topics, there were no options. No one would know what that company makes, or why tungsten in light bulbs, or whatever. And for most questions, I was not going to go to the library or start a full research project. Just too effort-intensive. Post search engines, I could do a little research, if I was really interested. Maybe 50% or 60% of the time get a reasonable answer.

Now using AI I ask a lot more questions: Why tungsten? What is this "yarn works" thing on the map? What is my local high school's per-student budget, and how does that compare to the other school districts in the state? What is this thing? What's its history? Why this not that?

I'm curious and interested in a lot of the world around me. AI doesn't seem to be making me dumber; it seems to be enabling a much higher degree of curiosity and, better yet, a much higher degree of "finding out."

Em dashes—love ’em!—but they do. not. need. personal. space.

Look for Golden Tiger, which became The Analyst. Xerox Special Information Systems built it in Smalltalk-80 for the intelligence community in the early 80s, when a spreadsheet alone was still novel. The Analyst was much more: an integrated analyst workbench with word processing, a spreadsheet with multimedia cells and live updates, charts, maps, sketching, outlines, databases, terminal emulation, and an expert-system shell, all hyperlinked and cut-and-pasteable into compound-document reports. It's the most famous full Smalltalk app AFAIK. Absurdly ahead of its time. Some features still aren't matched by Office or Workspace today.

But overall there weren’t many Smalltalk apps for individual users. Most were organizational: JPMorgan (derivatives risk), Orient Overseas Container Line (global shipping logistics), Texas Instruments (fab automation), Deutsche Bahn (scheduling the German railway system). These were complex internal systems built on a graphical, fast-development, integrated platform, when such things were rare and nowhere available off the shelf. Customers often considered them "secret sauce" or strategic differentiators and weren't going to say much about them externally. Vendors were often prohibited from naming customers. As of mid-2025 at least, JPMorgan’s Kapital was still in production, and JPMorgan was still hiring Smalltalk developers for it.

GemStone, the Smalltalk-based object database, had a similar customer list, including JPMorgan Chase, UBS, Siemens, TI, and Florida Power & Light. That's a backend rather than an app, though in the Smalltalk world the line between database and application tiers is much blurrier. Still in use, though ownership has passed through several hands since the 80s.

Many apps not written in Smalltalk per se were direct idea-descendants. NeXTSTEP and WebObjects were built in Objective-C at NeXT, then bought by Apple. (Objective-C was explicitly "let's bring the Smalltalk lessons to a broader world.") In its early days WebObjects could build database-backed GUI and web apps amazingly easily compared to any competitor, and Apple used it for its online store and the iTunes Store. Another cousin was Metaphor Computer Systems. Founded by Xerox veterans, it sold Analyst-like workstations that let brand managers at consumer-goods giants like P&G, General Mills, Pillsbury, and Sara Lee analyze and report on sales and mix data, often pulled from point-of-sale scanners. That level of "what's happening in the field?" integration, in near-real-time (hours not months), with everything pulled together on one screen, was essentially unique at the time. And that users could build their own charts, reports, and workflows without programming? No one else had that either.

So there were notable Smalltalk apps, and many of them operated at substantial scale. They just weren’t consumer apps. And a lot of the direct descendants were much the same.

Remember GNU's $POSIX_ME_HARDER? Later restated more softly / less offensively as $POSIXLY_CORRECT.

Efforts to standardize Unix go way back (e.g. /usr/group in 1984). Most people hadn't yet even remotely heard of Unix and we were already needing to smooth over fragmentation. POSIX first ratified in 1988. Unevenly-conforming implementations arrived a year or few later. But that ".1" was only the first, thinnest, most obvious slice of "we should all do this the same way." Overall we've been working to bring Unix and its descendants into alignment for 40+ years. Doesn't feel fully wrangled even now. There's a reason we still might need $POSIXLY_CORRECT.

OMGeeeee!

I too have plumbed the call stack for hidden-maybe-forbidden knowledge from the caller, and it is always fraught. No matter how good one's intentions. Forget dynamic type testing. Forget Perl's `wantarray` dynamic introspection of "what does the caller want?" Those are small potatoes. This is full on "who's calling me and what do I want to send back as a result?" The people who will never forgive you for type testing are going to straight-up excommunicate whoever wrote this! And yet...it makes complete sense. Based on the promises made, you have to do something... and you're already in "what is the least of the evils?" territory, because you're going to have to do something that someone—maybe a lot of someones—will call evil.

My admiration for Pendulum just increased. This is sin-eating.

That seems to be from ~1y ago. What am I missing?

Back in the day, essentially _every_ version of Unix had its own flags and/or interpretation of flags. Delightful for shops that freely put an HP-UX next to a SunOS, with a little AIX and IRIX over there and a DYNIX in the backroom. You'd think that'd be rare, but it wasn't. "Open standards will make everything compatible and interoperable" had not yet quite been exposed as a deathtrap Big Lie. Universities, multi-nationals amalgamated by M&A, orgs that believed philosophically in mix-and-match... lot of places had to navigate "-r on systems A, C, and M. -R on B, D, and others by default."

The Mini, all day, every day. But many other great options along the way!

Buying from Sun may have devolved into a direct-touch upsell disaster. Esp. compared to Dell which at one point was almost unique in having a working, easy-to-use web product configurator. Dell really nailed "getting products ordered and to the customer is part of the value equation"—a supply chain virtue no one else was really optimizing 1990–2005.

But selling to Sun Microsystems as a vendor was a joy. It paid bills like clockwork (net 35 IIRC). Completely showed up all the multi-$B IT competitors. They preached hyper-efficiency, but Sun delivered it in its own dealings. Unfortunately after the dot-com downfall Sun extended days payments outstanding (DPO) just like everyone else.

Let's make this easier. Please raise your hand if you AREN'T working on an AI-enabled project scheduling app.

A lovely visualization. Excellent use of Sankey / flow diagram.