dek

Building @ (@substructureone) | Open source maximalist | Creating new avenues for open source adoption:

[dek @SubstructureDek]

Kestrel preview-mode website launch is now live. Kestrel is built on three pillars: User Pay-Go Pricing, Fair Compensation, and a Self-Managed Database. 1/

[dek @SubstructureDek]

@mazeincoding People logging into the disinfo app and finding disinfo:

😮

[dek @SubstructureDek]

I'm fascinated by stories of movies getting their endings completely changed at the last minute due to a bad screening from a test audience. How often does such a fundamental last minute change happen with other products? Was there ever a software app that 3 months before launch a studio said "uhh instead of a word processor let's just make this a typing tutor!"

[dek @SubstructureDek]

@fjzeit Corel made a wild play back in like 99 to try to do essentially this with a customized Debian distro that could run WordPerfect and CorelDraw. It didn't last long.

[Abe Murray @abemurray]

@hpierrejacques Love this, tell my kids this all the time.

They are competing against themselves, competing alongside humanity against nature, competing in how much they can grow the pie not to capture more pie.

Also tell them comparison to others is thief of joy. Jealousy is just the worst.

[dek @SubstructureDek]

Asahi Linux on M1 is so close to being an amazing experience, but the power management issues are rough. Finding your laptop battery dead after a couple days because you didn't think to plug it in or shut it off is a major downer.

But it's so close.

[dek @SubstructureDek]

There is a weird disconnect, even on the mundane things. Like, in most parts of the world someone who has not already "made it" effectively can't afford decent housing in the areas that would provide them with access to upward economic mobility. How can it be 2024 and we haven't figured that one out yet?

[dek @SubstructureDek]

@_msw_ Winner - "After you confirm our findings, you should advise your clients to ensure that the required attributions and notices for Apache licensed code are reinstated."

[dek @SubstructureDek]

Diving in to update the kestrel documentation and noticing the last commit is from 10 months ago... that's embarrassing.

[dek @SubstructureDek]

A 5 MHz 286 PC with 640kb of RAM could've stored the database of friend lists in ~a hundred k of memory and looked up all friends-of-friends for a given user at least a couple hundred times per second.

What have we done.

[Nikita Bier @nikitabier]

When I tested the first prototype of the Gas app at a single school, it cost $600 in server costs per day—with a userbase of only 800 people.

This was mainly due to the friends-of-friends feature, a necessary piece to create social graph density. We knew with certainty that we could bring the costs down—but it would take 1-2 months to build it with the right database architecture and the school year was almost over.

For us, the bigger unknowns were (a) if an anonymous polling app would resonate 5 years later, (b) if people would pay for it, and (c) if it would grow—so we paid the upfront cost to answer these questions quickly before summer started.

This proved to be invaluable: it gave us sufficient signal to embark on a longer development cycle and it provided benchmarks on key funnels so we knew where to allocate our time for the next few months.

[dek @SubstructureDek]

It appears not to so it tries to create it, but the creation step fails because the (rewritten name) database actually does already exist. Hm.

[dek @SubstructureDek]

Prew, Kestrel's reverse rewrite Postgres proxy, allows shared Postgres cluster usage by rewriting database names in connection strings and create/drop queries with a user suffix.

[dek @SubstructureDek]

I tried to get nocodb up and running against it expecting it to break but I didn't expect it to break so early as the database migration step, where it's explicitly checking the pg_database catalog to see if the configuration database already exists.

[dek @SubstructureDek]

@swardley Great analysis. A lot of these are currently in the "backlash against the inevitable" phase.

[dek @SubstructureDek]

@gdb > get a job at OpenAI
> post "Hey can someone explain monads to me?" to the #general channel
> resign immediately

[dek @SubstructureDek]

@JosephJacks_ I don't doubt it, but "technology optimism" is also definitely not something I associate with MAGA.

[John Carmack @ID_AA_Carmack]

Be an Open Source Absolutist!

It is hard to overstate how much value Open Source Software has added to the world, and how broadly empowering it is.

Operating systems, development tools, core libraries, and critical applications – a great many of the software tools used by the most powerful companies in the world are the exact same ones available to hospitals, students, and everyone else. For free. And not just to use, but to inspect, modify, extend, and redistribute.

Back in the 90s, there were legal battles in the US over software capable of strong encryption. There were scare stories about how terrorists and child pornographers would use the technology to evade justice, but people were also wearing T-shirts printed with forbidden code to mock the idea of algorithms too dangerous to share.

It was stupid, and I was ashamed of the regulatory state, but we got better.

Open Source AI is in many people’s crosshairs today. They believe that giving free access to state of the art algorithms and models without any guardrails constitutes a danger to society, that the public can’t be entrusted with a research model that wasn’t hammered into a box of their designated dimensions. “As a large language model, I cannot…”

Unfortunately, this is actually inside the Overton Window of possibilities right now.

Let’s push it out.

In the spirit of the first amendment, congress should make no law abridging the freedom to release open source software.

[dek @SubstructureDek]

@natmiletic I'm no vegan but factory farming of livestock is wild, it's gotten more expensive and it's going to keep getting more expensive. I'm more concerned about housing costing $2000+++ than steaks costing $26.

[dek @SubstructureDek]

My oddly phone call specific social anxiety exemplified - always bringing up the phonetic alphabet in a browser window before calling any customer service line just in case I need to spell something out.

[dek @SubstructureDek]

@adamhjk This is the double-edged sword of contributing to the commons - if you fail to provide effective integrations up and down the stack, others will fill in for you.

There is a valid concern about the role of cloud vendors though. We need a better OSS-native cloud provider model.