pstoll

Way to Know Your Customer, CashApp!

Her next lawsuit needs to be CashApp and their grotesque negligence on that front.

About f’ing time a government made this have real consequences.

Sure any centralization of infra is an obvious risk for a myriad of reasons eg DoS, manipulation, honeypots, etc.

But again my point applies - the chances they get enough people using it that it becomes a meaningfully worse security target than lots of other existing things seems … super low.

It’s a big world, people make many choices I can’t understand (nix? Haskell? Php? <flame wars to /dev/null>). Even if this product nailed it - the number of people who can use it is minuscule - yes even as we add Claude-enabled PMs to the software dev ranks.

Alt view with the old saying - “put all your eggs in one basket … and watch that basket!”

Post-ZIRP reality of corporate self-interest being re-established.

You should be more than hesitant - don’t do it. They literally market them for quick demos. And not long lived production.

Reality check - you are not pushing “_a lot_” of traffic relative to any hyperscaler or large scale CDN. They push hundreds of Tbps sustained. You don’t peak at a few Mbps.

They can monitor extreme outliers. It’s not an issue for them.

The women who made up the workforce of telephone switch operators would like to have a word.

Meaning - every new technology has both been perceived as a threa and often forced change in society. Agree maybe “it feels different” this time, but don’t you think everybody before us just said the same thing?

Also not clear if this is an actual called action.

wtf it's paywalled after the first little bit. was not expecting that from a "blog".

I'm looking for a place to direct people to see the math behind it, seemed like it had potential.

Did they finally make a viable version of spanner for themselves?

Except that Mac ultra M3 they talk about is now only being sold in the 96 GB configuration. It’s no longer being sold in larger Ram configurations by Apple Apple because of the global RAM shortage. And you can not add memory after purchase because it’s integrated/soldered on.

Agreed on - it took a long time to get to the “so what is new here” vs the broader topic of distributed consensus. Stylistically would prefer more upfront “here is what is novel here”

TBH I’m doubtful of most people building their own crypto libs and distributed consensus implementations. But maybe cloudflare can pull it off. Good to see them pushing the state of distributed consensus.

Take aways:

* it’s not in prod yet. I suspect those many round trips are going to get expensive on median aka typical redistributed deployments. Curious to see how it goes once in the wild.

* they say it isn’t likely suitable for eg databases.

* they talk about formal verification, which is good and feels appropriate.

Looking forward to seeing more!

“In the building” the building happened to be their secure data centers, not their offices.

Feels like all the write ups that point out the short comings of eg Python for scientific computing.

Sure, except that once you have a community at critical mass around a reasonably good tool, that trumps most other things. Momentum builds. People write tutorials, explainers, better documentation, etc. it hits escape velocity.

Feels like Lean, with Terrance Tao as a strong proponent / cheerleader, is in that space.

Everyone who argues “but language X is better” … may not be wrong, but they are not making the argument that matters. Is it better than the thing everyone else knows and can use and has more people hours going into it to improve it?

Feels like a “worse is better” situation; or maybe “good and popular is good enough”.

PLG. Any article I have to search for an acronym and don’t find it - nope.