rektide

These asks are so at ends with one another.

FoundationDB is not easy to set up. And it ships with near nothing out of the box; you have to build layers atop it's foundation to do nearly anything. But the polish is through the roof and it's one of the least likely systems to turn into a live hand gernade on the planet.

Etcd is a quite excellent piece of technology that is actually, relatively speaking, quite easy to set up, is quite polished, has few all in all drawbacks. It's great tech. But software alone isn't going to change the fact that you're operating a distributed system.

The biggest problem, in my view, is that there are so few opportunities to get any real experience with most of these systems. You kind of need to be running thousands of decent sized instances all at once to begin to appreciate the weirder sides of what could happen & what you need to do in response. For most people, many of these distributed db systems operate just fine. Until one day they don't, and then they are totally hosted & either suffering extended outages, rollbacks, or worse. Simple things like node rotations usually go smoothly, but don't generate the same kind of hard-fought experience. Your ask about starting out feels like it's asking for the safest most secure route, but only battle hardened rainy-day ordeals are ever going to actually get you to a place of comfort.

Hence... maybe just use postgres instead.

Operational experience would be my first guess.

A lot of folks already know how to backup, replicatie, & stream postgres quite well.

As nation's try ever so hard to dynamite the Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace & exert control wherever their citizens travel online, the difficulty in figuring out regulatory compliance keeps skyrocketing. It gets harder and harder to figure out how to meet each nation's requirements. And one nation's requirements for police access might conflict with another nation's requirements for data privacy. There's no international order, and 195 nations and countless provinces each get their say in making everyone trying to have a point of presence on the internet's life difficult.

I'm sympathetic & way more agree than disagree. But DNS doesn't fill me with joy. It's quite centralized, quite a huge organizational vulnerability.

If we had some alternate addressing schemes in the browser that could do trust, I'd be much happier. Like, can dat protocol be a secure origin? Or like, if the goal really is just to secure users, maybe we need to let opportunistic encryption be something users can opt in as secure (even though it can be mitm'ed at the start).

Let's Encrypt has changed the game. It's great that https has so very very suddenly gone from frustrating & business class only to something even the casuals can easily do. But still, I'd love some less centralized systems for trust to be available, some visible known alternative paths demonstrating that there are diverse options at these lower transport/security layers of the network stack.

Far less offensive but the DC metro got screen ads & it just so cheapens the experience. Used to be a kind of impressive semi-brutalist feeling, which isn't super fancy or anything. But now just tacky.

It's been pretty amazing how stagnant the monitor space is. I too am really craving an 8k@120 monitor, although there's a decent chance I'll balk at the price.

To me it comes down to which Apple can more reliably deliver, that will see regular use. I have a hard time knowing what unique VR experience would keep people coming back day after day. But we know for a fact people use screens for desktop-like concerns for many hours a day. And we have lots of experience developing those experiences.

Intel is such a hero of this world. They make so many amazing things happen. And they do the job well.

There's obvious/huge ecosystem examples: there was a whole industry around ultra-proprietary SSDs, and Intel rolled up their sleeves & developed & standardized NVMe to commoditize the technology, and then dropped absolutely killer products at a much more competitive rate.

But Intel's work pushing the Linux kernel forward is just amazing. They have so many teams doing so much, optimizing, & adding support. And so many of their products have great & readily available documentation, which is something very few other companies have.

Excited to see another very cross platform terminal!

I've been using Alacrity but copying to clipboard has been a nightmare time and time again, in all kinds of circumstance, and I switched out in despair just this weekend, but after two hours of debugging.

I first went to cmder (Windows only) but after an hour trying to figure out why astrovim rendering is a fucked up & getting nowhere, I gave up & tried Windows Terminal, which has been acceptable. Would love to be back on something more cross platform though.

Apple has been smart to present it as a desktop replacement (as opposed to some ar/vr/metaverse device), which is something they can deliver that will let users bring their existing apps to the new medium without adaption.

Ideally yes apps should update themselves, tailor the experience. But the main focus so far has been pretty conventional app like experiences, which happen to be hovering in space. Where-as most headsets have tried to create entirely new ecosystems from nothing, and that would have been a huge mountain to climb.

A major thread through the talk is that there are powers that be that think they have the answers & want to shape & mold us. Not super clearly stated, but implicitly said, it rarely works & the hubris almost always causes huge problems, is a projection rather than what the world wants or needs.

If AI is judging us, it's either based on data encoding our existing behaviors. Or it's crudely manipulated data by biased hubris filled megalomaniacs. The rest of humanity doesn't really have/isn't permitted much of a say in the matter.

I'm exhausted by single-process programming languages. I think it's totally not worth our time to care at all about this problem any more. We need to figure out how to build systems more broadly. We're stealing useful energy pretending like such a small subproblem still has actual distinction & interest.

There's a lot of different ways to make code. But at this point there's just so little evidence that languages engender interesting new capabilities. There's some flourishistic differences, but most code reads fairly the same, if you squint. Rust is by far one of the most interesting languages, and it's only interesting adds are... constraints. We need some new frontiers of possibility, not just constraint. Languages are not leading us to new potentials, these days.

The brother doest protest too much.

To me, it is exceedingly clear almost every other industry of this planet has far far better developed industrial practices and standards. They can go to school & learn how to do the thing.

There's simply no common accepted curiculum for how to actually build good software. There's too many possibilities, too many ways to success, and so few common threads that actually winnow down succes or failure. Software has a couple cobbled together Christopher Alexander style Design Patterns that can kind of inform some repeatedly usable ideas. And we have millions upon millions of libraries, each of which probably could become a library that is in the top 10% of usage, if conditions were right. But there's just so little rhyme or reason to it all. Software is all happenstance.

You can try to snark your way out of this & shade the difference out, but it should just be so obvious & clear. Software is not as mature. It's practitioners have infinitely more possibilities & exponentially less constraints. Most of it ends up working fair, in such a degree that it's near impossible to judge how far from optimal or how much better it could be working. Almost nothing else is so adrift, so unable to measure & understand how sucessful it is. This should just be clear & obvious. Your protests don't move me. It should be obvious.