mattbillenstein

We had the Sun workstations in college (some with that crazy laser mouse) and I think towards the end of my tenure, most of the labs were switching to linux boxes, but at that same time Solaris x86 actually came out - so on commodity hardware you could run Solaris which was kinda fun.

I did this a little, but the things you could do with actual Linux started to get interesting for me at that time - building routers for our shared home network, hosting Quake servers, doing actual programming with gcc etc and the hardware support was a bit better as I recall.

I also interviewed at Sun in Boston - I think the small group servers group or something - I really liked the engineers I met there and I did consider working there for a minute, but ended up in Silicon Valley which I think was better fit for me.

I think this sorta forgets how slow the cpus were - I was running mostly ASIC design workloads on big Sun hardware in 2001 and we eventually got some x86 boxes that were only 32 bit but could run some of our jobs - and the single-threaded perf of these commodity machines was amazing compared to the Sparc boxes. When x86-64 came around, this was the death of all the Sun hardware in that group.

Also sometime in 2000 I had interviewed at Compaq - the old Alpha group who I think later worked on Itanium at Intel. They were constantly frustrated because they couldn't even get a build from Synopsys of the design tools they needed to run on Alpha and were forced to use Sun hardware they described as "gasping and wheezing" to design their crazy fast cpu.

Sun lost on a bunch of fronts, but I think the amazing thing is they let happen to them what they did to the other big UNIX vendors before - they were eaten from the bottom by faster cheaper hardware.

Ran duplicity - it's really a blunt hammer, lots of duplication, rotation, etc.

Then switched to Restic - so much better - highly recommend this.

This is interesting - what I've found with Ex-Googlers is they sorta can struggle not having access to Google infrastructure - these guys are much higher-level and I'm sure can hire the talent they need to build the lower-level stuff though.

I've mainly heard of successes of the networking stack in FreeBSD at Netflix and Whatsapp - but largely, I don't know anywhere else that uses it in production.

For a firewall/router I use Ubuntu - it's what I use for everything else, so it's comfy.

I do believe OpenBSD is very very good software, but I do wonder if just given it's small install base if there are vulnerabilities simply nobody knows about. I guess may it doesn't matter since Linux is so much more widely deployed, perhaps that's just a better platform for hackers to spend their time.

Founder culture definitely has fraternity vibes - people with no other discernable talent other than being above average looking and having connections with other similar people end up in positions they have no real idea how to do.

In other words, there are a lot of people "playing startup" in the valley - some of the VC money flows too easily and there is always going to be an ecosystem of people to try to put it to work.

Sorta amazes me how people in various levels of power will not say the obvious thing or actively discourage saying the obvious thing because it might offend Elon.

Recently all the big bank CEOs involved with the SpaceX IPO - a lot of money in that for them - but a company trading at 100x sales is clearly crazy.

Yeah, but he has a lot more money now - grifted literally billions - so I guess more is more, so idk.

It's probably as much about PR as it is about money - Puffy is a heavy lift on the PR side...

Spreadsheet + GOOGLEFINANCE("AAPL")

I tried using refurb'd Thinkpads as my travel machine for a long time - they're very brittle hard to fix laptops - kinda like Macbooks.

The Framework on the other hand is so easy to work on and get parts for - I know this isn't probably a main selling point for most users, but if you need this, Framework is like the only game in town.

The fuhrer will be disappointed.

I tend to use a few services on each cloud as possible so it's easy to switch between them; spinning up an Ubuntu VM that's identical on nearly every cloud is a superpower.

And, so if you keep it simple like this, it's not too complex and the costs are knowable - mostly VM hours and S3 for most of what I run.

But, the thing I've become increasingly disappointed with is simply the performance. The cpus are _slow_ - being forced to use EBS for a lot of things is _slow_ as hell; and starting/hydrating new VM volumes is super duper slow (have fun paying for fast launch).

So, for what you pay vs what you get, it's a huge difference, albeit very convenient.

Increasingly, I think about like racking stuff - like run most of your workload on dedicated hardware somewhere close to an AWS region and then burst into the cloud as needed and just use s3 in that region. Reduced cost, better performance for what matters, and you just pay for hands-on in the datacenter. Send them servers and just manage it all remotely.