DHH Talks Apple, Linux, and Running Servers
Hello?
Speaker 2:Oh. There we go.
Speaker 3:It's DHH.
Speaker 1:Are we recording? Oh, we are recording. We are recording. Yeah.
Speaker 3:So are you in that amazing office that we see pictures of all the time?
Speaker 1:This is the office. This is the office. This is the the other, yeah, picture out the back of it.
Speaker 3:How what's the elevation? Like, you're above the clouds? Question.
Speaker 1:I think, what did I look it up? 2000 feet or something? It's not that high. Yeah. It just looks high because, I mean, I like to take a picture of it when the when the fog rolls in, and the fog looks like it's clouds.
Speaker 1:Like, 7000, 7000 feet or something.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I thought it was clouds. I didn't realize it was.
Speaker 1:I mean, it is clouds, but I think not the kind of clouds most people would call clouds, I suppose, because it is sort of fog clouds. But, yeah. No. It looks it looks great, and we've just had, like, a streak of it. For a whole week, I would walk into the office, and it would look like that.
Speaker 1:And it was hot diggity damn. I've lived here for seven years. It still doesn't get old. Nature is amazing like that.
Speaker 2:It's funny because I saw some random account post it the other day with, like, some, like, meme caption, and I'm like, I mean
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. No. No. It it goes meme almost every time.
Speaker 1:I mean, part of it is I
Speaker 2:don't even think they know where it came from. I think they just got a random picture
Speaker 1:they found.
Speaker 3:Bunch of
Speaker 1:people are just like, I got a bunch of people saying, like, this is AI. I was like, I could eat, but but this 1 isn't.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Adam gets comments about that with his face. Like, we get comments on our videos all the time where they're like, that brown guy looks real, but that other guy looks AI.
Speaker 3:Yeah. It's usually when I'm getting really monotone that that that we had a whole TikTok where, like, 6 people said I was clearly a skinwalker, which I learned what that is.
Speaker 2:I don't know.
Speaker 3:I gotta get more Alright. More intonation.
Speaker 1:I'm always like, is that a compliment? Like
Speaker 2:It should be because AI people look perfect. You know? So I think you should take it as a compliment.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I was gonna say, I mean, most AI people I see now, all the latest models, I mean, they all look great. There's not a lot of ugly people, AI models being pumped out.
Speaker 3:Yeah. What what what's your I I've not heard you really talk about the AI stuff, like, the just generative AI stuff.
Speaker 1:I mean, part of it is because, like, I don't have any special insights there. I'm just a happy consumer. Yeah. And not only am I a happy consumer, I'm even perhaps, like, a slightly conservative consumer when it comes to that. I mean, we haven't shoved AI into every crevice of the applications we make because I have yet to see a lot of useful examples of that being done in, say, productivity or in email.
Speaker 1:Most of the cases like, hey. Summarize these boring emails. I find actually vaguely dystopian that we're gonna have a bunch of AIs, like, writing each other because we just can't tell it straight. Like, I'm gonna tell the AI to write some bullshit for me. Here's the 5 bullet points.
Speaker 1:Could you just send me the 5 bullet points? Like, that's what I'm gonna have my AI turn it back into anyway, and now we're playing a game of telephone through AI. It's probably gonna get it wrong about 15% of the time at least. And that just seems a little silly to me, and, also, it doesn't seem that useful. So, I mean, for me, the thing that blows my mind is is, a, its ability to be a peer programmer.
Speaker 1:Even though I almost wanna chug it in the bin when I see for the five hundredth time someone goes like, programmers are now already obsolete. I just hired my cofounder, Cursor AI. It's like, Jesus. Have you tried to use it for anything real? Again, I'm impressed by what it does.
Speaker 1:At the same time, utterly annoyed by, like, the hype cycle that comes with it. But maybe this is just how it goes with everything. And then I think it's the gen AI stuff that blows my mind. As you said, like, how is this person not real? Like, the the ones that just came out where they had a string of images of women giving presentations at, like, TED talks or something.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I zoomed in. I was like, what's to tell? I I was like, I can't find the tell. I would have to spend I think it was something like arm flap folds or something like that was supposed to be the tell. Now, like, oh, the the flaps aren't exactly I was like, wow.
Speaker 1:It's gotten good when we're down to flaps. We're not even counting fingers anymore. We're down to like, oh, the angle of the flap is a little off. So that's why I don't talk about it that much because I I don't feel like I have any unique input to offer beyond perhaps just the temperance that comes with the fact of having seen more than a handful of hype cycles. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Self driving cars, I think, was a great example of that. Right? And we all got I got quite excited about that in 02/17 when Elon was like, at the end of the year, your model s is gonna get actually earning you money. It's actually financially irresponsible not to buy a Tesla right now. It's just gonna be printing money, driving other people around.
Speaker 1:It's like, that didn't quite happen, did it? While at the same time then, whatever, the FSD 12.5 is actually pretty impressive. It's not fucking a money printer driving around Right. Doing the things. And this is now where, whatever, eight years later.
Speaker 1:Very hard to predict when these things tip. But
Speaker 2:But I think the reason we wanted to have you on here was, you've been talking a lot more about Linux on the desktop, which, I've been, like, a lifelong Linux on desktop person. It's been, like, twelve years, I think so far. But, yeah, we just wanna hear about, I guess, like, what got you into that? Is this a new thing for you? Like, what is what's, like, the story behind all this?
Speaker 1:It is a new thing for me to run Linux full time on the desktop in anger as my primary operating system. And it came about also out of some anger. The final straw, the motivating sort of, light to the fire here was Apple. And I've been I was gonna say a happy Apple fan. I think that's fair to say, actually, for twenty years, about twenty years, a little more than twenty years, not only was I a happy Apple fan, I was an Apple evangelist.
Speaker 1:And that came about in part by very much a replay of what's just happened. In the I was a very reluctant Windows user. I was actually kind of a pissed off Windows user Mhmm. Because I was using Windows because it felt like that was the only option, but I didn't like it. I didn't like anything about what Microsoft stood for in those days.
Speaker 1:I didn't like the leadership of Microsoft. I didn't like to choke off their air supply business tactics that they were applying to Netscape and the other competitors they had at the time. I didn't like the overly smug, I wanna punch you in the face, look of Bill Gates when he was sitting for the deposition at the antitrust cases. I just I didn't like any of it. And I thought, like, I'm begrudgingly using this operating system because I simply feel like there is not a realistic choice.
Speaker 1:And maybe there will be a bunch of Linux people to well, Linux was already great in '95. Yeah. It wasn't for me. I had friends using Linux back then, and what I saw didn't win me over. Let's just put it like that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And then 02/1, I believe it is, rolls around. Apple rolls out the new Mac OS, OS 10. I think it was what was it? Puma 10.1 or 02/00 or 03/00.
Speaker 1:I forget. Whichever version was out in 02/1 was the 1 I hopped on. And I hopped on to that because for the first time, it felt like there was a credible alternative to Windows that I could use as the web developer and as a general computer user without being, like, this super nerd that was gonna figure out Linux on the desktop. Mhmm. And I thought, you know what?
Speaker 1:Isn't this the best of both worlds? I get to use, like, a BSD based operating system. That's kinda like Linux. It's the same ethos underneath the technical underpinnings. This is why I don't have to install an anti virus system within the first five seconds of booting the computer short of it getting taken over by some botnet.
Speaker 1:So there were all these advantages to it. There were all these advantages when working on open source software. I was already working with Apache and MySQL and, picking up Ruby a few years later, PHP. All that stuff was just better on a Unix based setup. Now there were about a million trade offs nonetheless.
Speaker 1:That original version of macOS I ran ran on an 800 megahertz PowerPC with 256 megabytes of RAM, and it sucked in terms of performance. Yeah. It was so much slower than what Intel and Windows were able to put out, and I still didn't care. I was like, I'm just happy to have some alternative here that gets me out of, Gateslan. And I pushed on that for the next twenty years and didn't really realize that I was getting slowly boiled.
Speaker 1:Apple went from being the ultimate underdog in 02/1 who saw an interest for them to be a good partner to developers, to be emphasizing and assisting and doing all these things for people who wanted to build software, especially for the web. And then slowly but sure well, actually, not that slowly. Suddenly, they had a much bigger platform on their hands after the iPhone got released, And that platform introduced the concept of the App Store. And that to me, if I was gonna pinpoint a moment when, like, we look back upon this history, everything started to go to shit, was when the App Store and native apps started taking off. Now that's a perhaps a weird thing to say because in many other ways, this idea of having mobile supercomputers in our pocket that can run this incredible software.
Speaker 1:Video games I mean, I used to be a big, gamer. They can run video games at a 20 FPS with graphics that would shame even the wildest, craziest dedicated PCs of, of the 2000. That's amazing. Right? And that's true, but it really put the squeeze on developers' freedoms and independence.
Speaker 1:And kind of that kept building to a crescendo. First, when we launched hey.com, our email service back in 02/ and what was that? 02/2020. When we put that out there and got that dreaded no.
Speaker 3:I'm just remembering this. I had forgotten all about the hey and Apple stuff.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I haven't. I'll tell you that. Because we had literally spent, two years almost at that point developing this system. Millions of dollars poured into it.
Speaker 1:I had slaved away for many hours developing the system. We were incredibly proud that we were gonna take on Gmail with a fresh new system based on thinking from 2020, not 02/4. And we thought that was gonna be the big boss. Right? We're gonna take on Google with an actually quite good email system.
Speaker 1:Gmail is a good system. It's dated. It has issues, whatever. But it's a good system, and it's free. And we're gonna come in and say, do you know what?
Speaker 1:You should pay for email. What? So already that had long odds, but we didn't even get to begin that fight because before a bigger boss showed up and just, like, Apple sat down on our chest and said, give you you're gonna give me your lunch money, and 30% of everything your own in perpetuity going forward. And we're like, what? No.
Speaker 1:No. So that led to a big, fight over multiple weeks where the future, the life of that new service hung in the balance. Because the reason Apple has all this power is that they have all the economic activity, at least in The US. What we eventually found was for our email system, hey.com, 80 5 percent of those of the paying users we have, they use Apple products.
Speaker 2:Wow.
Speaker 1:So if you were shut out of Apple's Garden of Eden, it was gonna be dead. There wasn't gonna be a business. There was gonna be 15% left, and you just can't build a competitive business in there. So that's where the whole antitrust thing comes in. But it was also for me just a wake up call.
Speaker 1:Okay. The pot has been boiling for several years. I'd already been I had already well, before we even introduced hey.com, I testified in front of a congressional field hearing in Colorado where they were looking into all these antitrust matters and going like, hey. Here's my perspective on this. Things are not going in a good direction.
Speaker 1:Developers are getting squeezed in all sorts of different directions. The the guidelines of an app store is dictating the kind of businesses that can exist in the world because of this economic activity issue. That's not a good place to be. In fact, we should look at the Internet as a far better alternative model for both application distribution, but for, business formation, for independence, for freedom, all these things. And then I got my own kind of, fight with Apple.
Speaker 1:And you know what? Even that wasn't enough. I fucking still bought
Speaker 2:I was gonna say 3
Speaker 1:iPhone tops a lot. Yeah. And, like, 3 or 4 more MacBooks. Yeah. So, I mean, I think that goes to tell you, a, how sticky platform choice really is.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And, b, that Apple does make good stuff.
Speaker 3:Oh, their hardware is so incredible.
Speaker 1:Their their hardware is really good. I have found since that even though that point is true, I was a little myopic. There are actually other people making really good interesting hardware. They don't make the same. If you want the sort of millimeter, unibody, aluminum case stuff that Apple does so well, Apple does that better than anyone else.
Speaker 1:But there are different things you can choose to focus on where you can actually end up with something better. Repairability and and expandability, and there are other parts of the hardware experience that can be better.
Speaker 3:What are the laptops? I'm blanking on the name. I've seen you talk about these. They've got, like, modular.
Speaker 2:Are you are you are you using a framework currently?
Speaker 1:I am. Framework is my, is my laptop. It has been my laptop. That was actually I mean, I know it's a little long winded here, but this is how we get to the story of how I ended up on Linux because it was framework's fault. And I use that currently.
Speaker 1:I also have a desktop PC. I mean, the other thing I realized was Apple does their stuff really well, and they also charge proportionally, maybe they would say. But, I mean, I had a spec'd out MacBook Pro. The last 1 I bought was an m 3 Max something. I think it was $3,500 or $3,700.
Speaker 1:Whatever it was, it was more than the cost of my Dell Precision with the latest fastest Intel chip, which either way is quicker than that fucking m 3 Max chip at the kind of work that I do, which is web work and, running Ruby and and whatever. It's actually quicker than that. And then I also could buy a framework machine and add that on top. Now I fully understand there are a lot of people who'd like, I don't want 2 computers. I just want a laptop, and I wanna run everything on it.
Speaker 1:So there's still advantages there, but it was eye opening to see what was actually going on because I really have, for quite a long time, just thought, like, do you know what? I'm not in the market for anything not Apple because I'm in the Apple world. I'm running macOS. I'm deep in the ecosystem. That's the other way they get you.
Speaker 1:Right? Like, the little bangs, little hooks. I was running the photo, setup they have. I was gonna put call it iPhoto. I don't think it's called that anymore.
Speaker 1:Things are just called after photos and the syncing and the all the things Yeah.
Speaker 2:And all the historical data you have, it's, like, impossible to
Speaker 1:All the data was embedded within before we introduced, hey, calendar, I had my calendar in Apple calendar. Before we introduced, hey, email, I had I was using Apple's, own email client. So there was just a lot of hooks in it. But 1 by 1, those hooks were already coming out. I mean, hey email and hey calendar took out 2 or perhaps the biggest ones I had been used to, that syncing of of things back and forth.
Speaker 1:Now we had hey clients on both email and or on mobile and desktop. There were still some, and I had to sort of pry them out like thongs. Right? Like, you just stick them there and just get it out there. And it took a little while.
Speaker 1:And for a while, that's the amazing thing when I look back upon this. This just happened, by the way. Right? I just switched to Linux full time in, what, Feb. 0 or March 0?
Speaker 1:Mhmm. And it already feels like it's been five years. But I still do remember those dark, spring days trying to get out of the ecosystem and thinking, I don't even know if I can do it. Yeah. I didn't even know if I wanna do it.
Speaker 1:Oh, it just seems so impossible. There's so many things. Blah blah blah. And then I spent, well, first, I got hooked. And the way I got hooked was I was like, alright.
Speaker 1:I don't wanna it's I don't wanna use Apple's stuff anymore. The the final straw was when Apple, in their sort of malicious compliance way
Speaker 3:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:Said, we're gonna pull PWAs, the standard for making web applications out of Europe, and we're we're gonna rip it out of Safari because that's the way we choose to interpret what the European Union is doing with their antitrust, drive. And I thought, I just built another app that sort of depended on PWAs. We had built a app called Campfire under this once.com umbrella where we will sell you a web chat system, kind of like a Slack in a box for a single fee. And part of that setup was we were not gonna make native apps. We were gonna lean on the web, and we were gonna lean on PWAs, and we're gonna lean on all this stuff.
Speaker 1:And then Apple, like, literally two weeks later went like, yoink. We're gonna take the PWA support that we barely just introduced out of the whole thing, and we're gonna screw over the entire ecosystem. And I just went like, I can't buy another iPhone after this. I can't buy another MacBook. Because if if I, in this position of almost infinite privilege in terms of resources and whatever, if I can't even make it to Switch, then I should just roll over and accept that Apple owns all, and I don't wanna do that.
Speaker 1:Then alright. Let me just go back to my native Danish roots and grow potatoes
Speaker 2:or something.
Speaker 1:Eggs and bacon or whatever else. I don't even freaking know. I just don't wanna do computers anymore. That's really actually the point it got to. That was the final motivating point, which is insane that that is the level of pressure it needs to bring that, like, I don't know if I wanna do computers anymore as a profession, as a business, because I felt like the reason I got so or have been so excited about computers and loved working with computers was the Internet.
Speaker 1:And why was it the Internet? Because it was a free platform of distribution. I didn't have it to ask anyone for permission to launch Basecamp back in 02/4. We bought a domain name. We pointed that at an IP address running a server, and voila.
Speaker 1:We're in business, and anyone who shows up to Basecamp.com can buy our project management system. And if no one shows up, that's no one's fault by my own. Right? Like, the my faith is in my own hands. That's not true with native applications anymore.
Speaker 1:Your fate of your entire business is in the hands of Apple bureaucrats who, every single time you submit an update, go, me, I don't like it. My glass color's blue. It's a little too blue. Rejected. And then you see when again, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Sir, I brought you the right color blue. Me, I still don't like it. Like, the sign up screen. Like, the font is too small.
Speaker 1:And you're just like it's like begging some petty inconsistent tyrant for the right to grow wheat. And I'm like, are we fucking back in What the hell is going on here? I don't wanna be that kind of peasant. I wanna own my own landstead here. Right?
Speaker 1:And the Internet allowed that, and I just saw, like, how are we going backwards? How do we go from this glorious age where developers and software businesses who have direct access to their customers. And we got to enjoy that for, what, seven fucking years from the .com bust until the iPhone was introduced. And then another dark ages was introduced where we basically went back to, oh, no. You can't just distribute software.
Speaker 1:What are you talking about? You need a publisher, and that publisher needs to make a deal with the distributor who needs to have a deal with blah blah blah blah blah. And I was like, again, no. I don't wanna do that. So, anyway, very long story to now I have all this pressure going on me.
Speaker 1:It's either not using computers anymore and fucking retiring with the potatoes and the pigs, or it's finding another platform. And the first step I went was like, oh, let me see what my old arch enemy was is up to these days. So I went back to Microsoft with an open eyes, and I thought, like, do you know what? People change. I mean, it's been twenty years, twenty five years, actually, at that point.
Speaker 1:Well, twenty three years. Let's call it that. Since I last ran Windows sorta proper. And there's a new boss in town, and I hear good things about, like, what he's doing, and I like the investments they've done into Versus Code. I like their stewardship of GitHub.
Speaker 1:I like a lot of things. Like, maybe this Microsoft is not the same thing anymore. And I showed up, and I ran Windows for a couple of weeks and even said, you know what? This is it. I'm switching to Windows.
Speaker 3:I know
Speaker 2:where this is going.
Speaker 1:And then, and then I was running Windows on this framework laptop. And I was like, I I guess I could make this work, but it was kind of begrudgingly. Right? Like, I was like, shit. I still don't really love Windows.
Speaker 1:I I found a new respect for it. I'd say, first, I used to think, you know what? There's no way I can enjoy doing what I do on a Windows machine, and that was in the day days prior to WSL. Yeah. Before the Windows subsystem for Linux, when the Windows subsystem for Linux, especially WSL two Two.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Is really effing good. Like, the amount of steps it takes from you to have, I have a Windows machine too. I'm running Ubuntu inside of it. And it actually mostly kind of works.
Speaker 1:There's a little bit of the file system barrier you have to finagle around, but it's actually quite good. That was really a revelation, and I thought, oh, this is why I can make it last. But then I installed Linux on this framework laptop. And the first thing I noticed was, holy shit. It runs faster.
Speaker 1:Like, I just ran my Chrome's speedometer 2.1 test, and I'm like, Jesus. Why is it 15% quicker? Why am I getting 15% more juice out of this CPU that's inside of it? And then I thought, like, that that really, is nagging at me. And I thought, like, you know what?
Speaker 1:Maybe I'll give Linux a try. First, I ran into a bunch of issues. Like, the original framework 13 screen was of a dimension set where if you ran it at a %, the font was too small and it didn't look great. And if you ran it at 200%, everything was a little big. And I was like, that's not quite right either.
Speaker 1:And I just went through all of these steps of finding, oh, I like something about Linux. Oh, I don't like that thing about Linux. And I spent maybe five weeks just going like, alright. You know what? I'm gonna I'm gonna learn this.
Speaker 1:I'm gonna figure it out. I'm gonna get a desktop. I'm gonna get a framework. I'm gonna set it all up. And I spent, like, 2 of those weeks battling with NVIDIA drivers trying to get them to work with my Apple six k XDR display, which by the way, spoiler alert, it never will.
Speaker 1:It won't. I went through about 400 layers and wild goose chases trying to decompile things and kernel flags and whatever. Don't do that. Don't put yourself through that. Just buy an AMD graphics card.
Speaker 1:If you're not doing literally top tier gaming that requires a four ninety, then the AMD stuff is awesome. It works out of the box with a 6 k XDR display. I could've saved myself 2, but I still like the journey. And I like the journey because Linux was a challenge. And I think Linux still is a bit of a challenge.
Speaker 1:I mean, it's funny. I just posted something yesterday about this where I said, like, hey. Do you know what? I think more developers should run Linux because it's a challenge.
Speaker 2:You learn a lot about how stuff works.
Speaker 1:It's not as straightforward and paved as Windows is or Mac OS is. And then I get the normal stands, Linux. What are you talking about? Ubuntu is just as easy as Mac OS. Like, I mean, come on.
Speaker 1:Let's get real.
Speaker 2:It's not.
Speaker 1:It just isn't. It just isn't. I'm glad you got your grandma set up with Ubuntu, and she's running Firefox, and she doesn't need anything else. That is awesome, and I'm not disputing that. But for a lot of normal software like, if I was gonna convince my wife to run Linux, yeah, I was not gonna do that.
Speaker 1:She just uses too many apps, and they're too specifics. And I'm like I'm not like, hey, babe. Do you want an adventure in setting up, like, your webcam? She'd be like, no. I don't want that adventure.
Speaker 1:What are you talking about? Versus if you are a developer, I think there are actually legitimate benefits, and maybe some of it is just you kind of just acclimate to your environment. But I thought in just those six months that I've been using Linux full time, I've gotten far more comfortable with Linux in ways that are pushing me on, like, what are we doing on the server? And this is what I see as 1 of those main benefits. Anyone who works in web development today, they may work on a Mac, but they deploy on Linux.
Speaker 1:Yeah. No one is fucking deploying on a Mac box. They're not deploying on a Windows box either. Again, I know there are some people actually literally doing that, but, like, 95% of the Internet runs on Linux.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And if you are a developer working with the web, I think you owe it to yourself to understand what's going on. And I don't think that the cloud is able to pave over that experience to a degree that is helpful for you, and I also think it locks you into a bunch of overpriced premium AWS wrapper services that you'd be better off without. That's a mission I'm pursuing. But, regardless, Linux is a little bit more of an adventure, but, holy shit, what an awesome adventure it is. And what an incredible oasis you're able to arrive at.
Speaker 1:That was what actually blew my mind. I didn't know, legitimately, if you spent the time to set it up, Linux could be not just good, but here I'm really gonna go out on a limb batter. Mhmm. And, again, I am biased at this point. I accept it, but I like the Linux setup I have today better.
Speaker 1:I'm not, like, making do with scraps here. I like it better than what I have on on Mac OS. That's pretty freaking incredible. I'm not saying, again, it's better for everyone. I'm not gonna force my wife to convert to Linux tomorrow for the reasons we talked about.
Speaker 1:For for me as a developer, Linux is better. And that was quite the revelation. I mean, I literally, legitimately did not know. I still had an idea of Linux that was based in, what, 02/9 or something. That wasn't, that wasn't accurate.
Speaker 1:My mental model was out of date, and I got a I got a nudge, thank you, Apple, to explore what modern day Linux looks like. And not only was it better in terms of ergonomics, not only was it better in terms of sort of the infrastructure plumbing, not only does Docker run about 400000000 times better on Linux, but it could also look amazing. I mean, discover Linux porn was, was actually kinda cool. I don't run a Linux, porn setup, but I took a lot of inspiration from that. When I finally compressed all of this journey exploring all the Linux tools and whatever into sort of my take on what a great out of the box Linux experience should look like for developers, which is what ended up becoming Amacoop.
Speaker 3:Amacoop.
Speaker 1:Which is what I want today, which is Ubuntu twenty four zero four underneath and then a layer on top that is aesthetic personalization or not even personalization, and a bunch of things installed just out of the box make the Linux experience feel like it's incredible without having to sign up for a hundred and forty hours of YouTube Linux nerdery, videos and tutorials and, like, oh, you have to compile this thing with 400 different flags, then it works with the other thing. Someone just do that? And, like, I ended up doing it, and so I'm like, let's share. And that's where I am today. I am running Linux full time.
Speaker 1:I freaking love it. I'm doing it on a framework laptop on a Dell Precision desktop, and I even got into freaking mechanical keyboards because of it. And then I put all of it into to Amocoop and released it, and and now I'm on the evangelical trail trying to at least give other Mac users an invitation that there is life outside of Apple's garden, and it's quite pleasant in a lot of ways. It's not the same, and this was 1 of the, actually, hurdles I had to get over. When I first switched to Linux, I was like, okay.
Speaker 1:The text editor I have on my Mac is called TextMate. It has a certain theme. It looks a certain way. I run all hallows eve and, like, all the keywords are exactly like this, and it's been drilled into my brain that this is what code looks like. This is what code feels like.
Speaker 1:So the first thing I tried to do is replicate TextMate in Versus Code on Linux. And you can get about, like, 96% there, and I was ready to blow my brains out over the last 4% because it was total uncanny valley. It was just like, yeah. Everything is the same old it's not. And then we just get frustrated, and then we're just like, I should just go back to the Mac.
Speaker 1:Why am I letting why am I making do with something that's only 96% as good? I could just swallow my pride and come crawling back to, Saint Cook, but I was not gonna do that. I was going to to stick with it, and I realized the way to stick with it was to make it clean-cut. Do something else. So the first thing was like, alright.
Speaker 1:I'm not gonna I'm not gonna run Text Man. I'm not gonna try to replicate Text Man. I'm gonna give Versus Code a fair shake, and I'm gonna run it with a different theme. And this was how I discovered Tokyo Nights, which
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's what I used to.
Speaker 1:Are just theme of all time. And then I set that up, and I worked with it for a bit. I was like, actually, Versus Code is not bad. Not text made. I miss a few things, but now it looks different enough.
Speaker 1:It feels different enough that it's something else. But the final kicker that really got me, like, this is actually better. I was like, v s code. I was like, this is tolerable. I can see why people like it.
Speaker 1:It's not text made. I miss a few things, but then I went to Neovim.
Speaker 3:There you go. Vim, by the
Speaker 2:way. There we go.
Speaker 1:Right? Neovim, by the way. I think that he's good to say. And with Neo VIM, particularly through the distribution of the latest VIM setup where everything comes preconfigured for you, I went like, oh, what? This is, yeah, nice.
Speaker 1:I remember some of the VIM shortcuts from literally twenty years ago. I think back in 02/, I was doing FreeBSD server setup for some stuff, and I had to learn some WIM motions to do that on the server. And I still fucking remember how to set the program. And I also remembered a couple of other things. And Neo VIM was basically, like, reactivating that ancient knowledge from the back of my brain.
Speaker 1:It's like VIM motions never leave. They just take off I
Speaker 3:don't know. Basically, if it gets
Speaker 1:moved to the attic at the back of your head, but they're still there, and you can pull them out of the attic. And you go like, oh, yeah. Actually, I can see why this editor that is literally 50 years old still has purchase on people. And it was through that that led me to discover all these amazing TUIs. I mean, TUI was even a word that, that's actually the nickname we use for for 1 of my boys, like a TUI bird.
Speaker 1:I was like, oh, TUI is also terminal user interface. And I discovered Neovim, then I discovered Lazy Git, and I was like, holy fuck. What even is this? It feels like I'm in a movie. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Like, the alien mainframe or something. And there's just something incredibly appealing about that neo vintage, neo nostalgia kind of look that isn't just about aesthetics, although it is also about that. And this is let me just make a quick aside here. There's a huge contingency of Linux super neckbeards who are
Speaker 2:Dax. What?
Speaker 1:Snow. Or with aesthetics. Right? Like, it's is is that snow they take pride in making things as ugly as humanly possible with the worst color coordination you can imagine and about 5 pencils in their pocket protector. And I love that those people exist because that is why we have the lens that we have.
Speaker 1:Right? Like, that's the sort of the cement that we can then build upon, and that's great. I really care about the aesthetics, though. I I want a beautiful workstation. I want a beautiful work environment.
Speaker 1:And Neovim, together with all these like lazy get in whatever, offered me a more compelling aesthetic than the 1 I had on the Mac while also leveling me up in terms of capabilities. That to me is sort of that match made in heaven where it both looks incredible and it feels incredible, and you're able to be productive with it. And now that I've been using Neovim for for quite a while now, I mean, you feel like a god.
Speaker 3:It's amazing.
Speaker 1:I sometimes do a set of motions where I'm, like, making, or or, selecting text inside of, like, a quote with, like, 2 commands, and then I do, whatever, the thing where it just, like, I just gotta stop. I was like, did I just fucking do that? Did I just fucking do that? Where you're just like, I think it's incredible. Like, I just benched a new record.
Speaker 3:Yeah. It, like, created a mini game to text editing. It's it's amazing. I've loved it late
Speaker 1:in my career. Yeah. And and it's it's the best kind of game. It's 1 where, like, the payoff is actually literal productivity Yeah. That you can deposit towards goals that you have in life like building businesses and so forth.
Speaker 1:Right? It's not just sort of wankery for its own sake. So, anyway, all that led to, like, first being a reluctant Linux user, almost like a Mac OS refugee. I just I just need to find a tent somewhere where the wind is not too harsh and whatever. I'll make do on this rock until realizing, do you know what?
Speaker 1:I could just walk 5 feet further. There's a fucking oasis down here, and there's goddamn coconuts and pineapple and just everything is flowing. How how did I not know this? This is actually the the reaction I have. I knew about Neovim.
Speaker 1:I had never heard of Lazy Kid. And I was like Okay. How the fuck did I go twenty goddamn years not knowing that, like, this entire universe existed just around the corner. Just around the corner. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I could even have been running it on macOS. I mean, a lot of these 2 e tools, they run just fine on the Mac 2. I just even didn't know. Yeah. So that's where I just got more and more grateful for the entire expedition because it was taking me to foreign lands and foreign experiences, and I liked a lot of it.
Speaker 1:And now I've ended up in a place where I love my computer more than I have loved a computer in at least fifteen years. The last time and and this is both on the software and hardware side. On the hardware side, the last computer I really loved I mean, I don't know why. This is why does love work the way it does? It was the MacBook Air 11 inch that ran the shittiest Intel chip I think you could buy at the time.
Speaker 1:So it was woefully underpowered, but it just it felt right. Like, the size of it was right. The screen of it was right. I loved that computer for many years, and I carried it for many years. It was my primary development tool for many years.
Speaker 1:Then the MacBook Air came in, and first, we went through the the awful five years in the desert with the butterfly keyboard Yeah. Yeah. Where at our company, 30% of all laptops we bought ended up broken. That's an incredible failure rate. Within two years, we did this the math.
Speaker 1:Over 30% of them had to go back for repairs, some of them multiple times. It never really got to work proper, and Apple was just like, you're typing it wrong. And I was like, I don't think that's the problem when 30% of us are ending up with that. So we went through that. Right?
Speaker 1:And then we got to to actually the best place Apple has ever been in. They went back on that. They went back on ports. They introduced legitimate steps forward with the m chips and efficiency, and you ended up with a product that was really good and also really boring. And boring in the ways that something that is too perfect can be.
Speaker 1:I think this is 1 of the reasons why there's such a surge or interest in imperfection. Why do people like a manual stick sports car? Why do they like vinyl, records? Why do we like mechanical watches? Why do we like these things that are objectively worse than their counterparts?
Speaker 1:Oh, you can get a automatic transition transmission. It'll shift smoother than you. You'll get better gas mileage. You can get a quartz watch for $20 that'll beat the accuracy of any Rolex you can buy. Yeah.
Speaker 1:But also no. And that's what I found when I found with that, Framework 13 laptop. I was like, do you know what? This has quirks. Weird, interesting quirks.
Speaker 1:It's not perfect. But the things it's good at, it's really good at. First, a reminder that keyboards really fucking matter. Holy shit. Again, I'd only been in Mac land, and I was like, actually, this Mac, Magic Keyboard is fine.
Speaker 1:It's great. Great. I don't know if I'd say that. It's fine. I don't why do I need anything else?
Speaker 1:Yeah. And then you you try a framework, laptop. It has 1.5 millimeters of travel, which is basically like what the old PowerBooks, I think, used to have, the the Apple, laptops of the And like, holy shit. This feels so much better. What?
Speaker 1:I didn't know that that matte why does half a millimeter or 0.7 millimeters of travel matter? Oh oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. It really does. Matte displays.
Speaker 2:I was
Speaker 1:like, oh, shit. I remember the PowerBook that had the matte display. Matte displays are really nice for programmers. It just fits text rendering much better. Maybe it's not as good to watch a blockbuster movie on, but it's great for text editing.
Speaker 1:3 by 2 aspect ratio. Holy shit. What have I been doing in the sixteen ten, 16 9 land? That is a weird, elongated, optimized for just consumption kind of display. That's not what I use my laptop for.
Speaker 1:I use it for to make stuff. And when I make code, 3.2 or a 3 by 2 aspect ratio is much nicer. So there were all these advantages on top of the upgradability. Framework came out with a new freaking screen, like, whatever, a month ago. Yeah.
Speaker 2:The 16 inch. Right?
Speaker 1:You could buy the screen by itself and replace it on your freaking laptop. I was like That's crazy. You mean I don't have to buy a whole new computer just because I want the newer display?
Speaker 3:As an Apple user, that's just insane. That sounds impossible.
Speaker 1:I have literally and I'm not proud of this. I'm actually ashamed. I have 4 MacBooks sitting in my closet, and the reason why I have more 4 of them was I wanted the fastest chip. Every time you wanted a newer chip, you had to buy a whole new goddamn computer.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I wanted whatever. There was some upgrade to the screen that came out at 1. Buy a damn new new computer. It's like, this doesn't feel quite quite Yeah. It starts
Speaker 2:to feel bad when you see all that stuff piling up in your in your closet.
Speaker 1:Yes. And then now I have my my framework. I've upgraded the RAM. I think it came I think I bought it with, like, 32 gigabytes. It was, like, 200 and some dollars to buy 96 gigabytes of RAM, like, off Amazon, and I could just plop it in.
Speaker 1:I bought, obviously, the the new display for it. I upgraded the battery capacity in 1 of them too. It came with a 51 watt hour battery, and and they had a newer 61 that gave you another 10% battery. It's like, holy shit. I'm still keep I still have the original 1 that I mutate.
Speaker 1:That's really cool. So I fell in love with that Framework laptop. And to me then, the pair of the 2, Framework plus Amacoupe, that is the the Linux version that I had Mhmm. Tingled and, optimized, really felt like this is this is incredible. So that's where I am right now.
Speaker 1:I mean, really happy with the Linux, setup and just, I don't know if I'm angry or disappointed. I'm just a little like I kinda wish I knew this, like Yeah. Four years ago. Yeah. Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Like, I should have done this in 2020 when Apple was just like, we're gonna break your kneecaps here unless you pay us 30%. That should have been the signal where it's like, oh, shit. Why am I still here? Just like it was when the original iBook came out in 02/1 and was like, why am I still on Windows? If there is an alternative and it's good enough, I should switch.
Speaker 1:So
Speaker 3:Yeah. Alright.
Speaker 1:That was that was that
Speaker 3:was That was a nice 1.
Speaker 1:No. I mean This
Speaker 3:is good to hear it all.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The that transition is painful, but like you said, it's you can get to a better place on the other side. And I think there's a lot of technical details, but I think what it comes down to me is, you know, I sit at my desk, and there's this thing sitting here, and my whole life is coming through it. Like, it's what helps me provide for my family. It connects me to the whole world, everything.
Speaker 2:And knowing how that thing works, like, deep having deep customization of it and, like, feeling that harmony with it, like, it's just good for your soul, like, beyond any of the technical details. And kinda when you get there, it's hard to explain to other people, but you really feel a lot more connected with this really important thing that's, you know, sitting on your desk every day.
Speaker 1:It's funny. I'm reading I don't know if I started it right at the same time. I don't even know if it was an accident or just serendipitous. I'm reading the book, The Seine and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
Speaker 2:I knew I knew that's what you're gonna say. And it speaks parallels to all this.
Speaker 1:That point. It speaks exactly to the point of, do you just wanna be a consumer? I mean, this is a story about riding motorcycles in the and they needed a fair amount of tender love and care to keep them running. And you needed to know about timing chains and how to oil things and tighten things and and whatever. And in the book, he makes a very compelling argument for exactly what you say, that there is just a satisfaction in the soul of knowing how the things you interact with on a daily basis even depend on work at least at a basic level.
Speaker 1:And I find that Linux just forces you down that path because there is a few more timing belts you have to tighten yourself. And it is good to know where they are and what the commands are and so forth. But what you come out on the other side as is is a more knowledgeable, experienced, comfortable, and confident technologist. And I think that is in great, lack right now. And where I see it hugely is in this discussion about the cloud.
Speaker 1:So cloud technology and services and platforms as a service have convinced an entire generation of developers that connecting your own server to the Internet is way too fucking scary. It's like running riding that motorcycle backwards blindfolded on 1 hand. Like, that's just fucking crazy. That's for evil Knievel shit to connect your own computer to the Internet. And I was like, wait.
Speaker 1:What? How did that become to be the case? Why are we so afraid of connecting computers to the Internet? And I think a lot of it is based on, first of all, outdated mental models. I mean, anyone who's been around technology, as I as I said, there was a time where if you bought a new Windows machine and you connected to the Internet and you hadn't already set up the antivirus stuff, you could give it five minutes and it would be infected.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Kind of a long time ago, and Linux was never like that. And I think those mental models haven't fully updated, and then the cloud providers have literally put in billions and billions of dollars to scare the the living bejesus out of anyone from connecting computers to the Internet. Because if someone realizes that they can do that, they will realize that a lot of the cloud machinery is insanely overpriced, that it's an economic model of renting versus owning that they actually don't appreciate, that it's a surrender of independence and whatever else that isn't very flattering. And Linux, I think, is the antidote to some extent.
Speaker 1:If you run Linux on the desktop yourself, you will be familiar enough with the basics of, oh, UFW as a firewall, for example, is actually super easy to use. It has 1 of the best user interfaces for any firewall I've ever seen. It's super quick just to say, like, hey. Lock this shit down so I can only access this on 22. Oh, this is a web server?
Speaker 1:Open up 80 and four four three. That's it. Done. Oh, yeah. Okay.
Speaker 1:Turn off password authentication. Only SSH keys. And now you have fucking Fort Knox. Good luck getting into that. If you could get into a box that is set up like that, it has UFW running, it locks down to just those 3 ports, and you switch from password authentication to SSH key authentication.
Speaker 1:If you get into 1 of those, if you can get into a box like that, I mean, you just won the fucking lottery. You you have a 0 day. I mean, you can sell that to North Korea or China or make them bid on it and boom, 5,000,000 cleaning the bases. So that's the sort of basics. Right?
Speaker 1:Like, it's actually not that difficult to secure a box. It's not that complicated to run sudo apt upgrade if you need to update something. You don't need to do it that often. And, also, by the way, didn't you just set up a fucking JavaScript, interpolation deployment compile pipeline that involved 700 megabytes of node modules across 5000 dependencies, and you were able to figure that shit out? You're telling me you can't add 1 line of configuration to the SSS SSD, daemon, and you can't run u f w allow 22?
Speaker 1:Oh, no. That's too hard, man. Shit. Just way beyond my capacity. What?
Speaker 1:Man the fuck up or man the fuck up. There's that's that's pathetic. That is pathetic, and we can beat that shit out of you. We can do some, server phobia reverse cognitive behavior with you. You're gonna you okay.
Speaker 1:Listen. Listen. I know you're afraid of the server. It's not gonna bite you. It is not gonna bite you.
Speaker 1:Hackers are not gonna get in there. But first, let's expose you to Linux. See, here's a computer. It runs the Linux. You can touch it.
Speaker 1:It's okay. Just put 1 hand on the space bar and push it. Push it 1 time. See? Nothing bad happened.
Speaker 1:And I think that level of cognitive behavioral therapy, that's part of the reason why I'm excited about things like Omakoop. Can we introduce that level to this generation of developers such that they will realize that running computers on the Internet is not some exotic, dangerous thing that's only for Linux wizards and neckbeards who've been doing it for forty fucking years. It's for you too. It's never been easier. It's never been cheaper.
Speaker 1:And the stand you're able to take for independence and, pricing and all the other advantages that you get out of that is totally worth it. Totally freaking worth it. It's nowhere near as complicated as figuring out how to make a 1972 motorcycle work or the timing belts. So we need to disabuse people of this nonsense, which includes sort of addressing head on the fact that the AWS reseller model is incredibly profitable. This is why all the VCs wanna do it.
Speaker 1:There was just an announcement, I think, yesterday about another web framework who also wants to be an AWS reseller.
Speaker 2:Layer of it.
Speaker 1:Totally get it. I totally get why VCs look at that. Wait. So you're telling me I don't even have to own computers? I can just rent those computers and then rent them again to someone else?
Speaker 1:Oh, that sounds like a fucking great business model. I have no inventory. I have no staff. I have no nothing. I just mainly have to convince developers that they're stupid and fragile so that they need my shit, and then I can just run the money printer.
Speaker 1:Yeah. No. That's not the model of the Internet that I'm interested in. And, again, I'm putting things to a point. I appreciate the advantages in developer economics.
Speaker 1:Her Roku, for example, really did amazing pioneering work in the AWS reseller space, and they taught the rest of us, do you know what? Deploying to a server could be a whole lot easier, and we should make it easier. But to me, that is essentially shining a light on a part of the infrastructure level of how we work with the Internet that open source should then address. And it's not like, oh, you gotta come up with Photoshop. Right?
Speaker 1:That's the whole Photoshop versus GIMP debate that, yeah, do you know what? Even as a now converted Linux fan, I can look at that and go like, yeah, GIMP is not as good. I'm not saying GIMP is a bad piece of software. I'm just saying end user software like Photoshop is difficult to make on this model. What's not difficult to make on this model is goddamn infrastructure.
Speaker 1:All the best infrastructure in the world is open source, from Linux to MySQL to NGINX to whatever. All the entire stack, even the entire stack that's being used in the cloud, it's all built on open source stuff. So this fact that we're gonna give up the last mile to a bunch of VCs and a bunch of closed source commercial passes, fuck that. No. No.
Speaker 1:No. This is where we take up the mantle and go like, we can make this easy. We can make this better. I've been trying to push that envelope with, Kamal, a deploy tool that we used to build on top of Docker to get out of the cloud. We used to be in the cloud.
Speaker 1:We used to be on AWS. We used to be on all this stuff for a bunch of hours, things with, with Basecamp and, hey. And we yanked all of it out because cost was just getting ridiculous, and we built a bit of tooling. And now I'm on a goddamn mission to make open source as capable, as easy to use as all these AWS resellers we have against any box running basic Linux with an IP address you can connect to.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I think I think beyond the fear that you described that people have, I think there's another dimension too. There's almost like a pride. I think there's, like, this narrow definition of productivity where they're like, if I have to learn something, like, that's not productive. And they kinda have this literally narrow path of, like, I'm someone that loves being productive.
Speaker 2:I'm all about business. That means I, like, you know, value these things. But a lot of this stuff, like you said, like, when you go and understand these under underlying things, that does make you more productive in ways that are really hard to explain. You get advantages in other places. So, yeah, I think for me, it's more like there's a weird pride with not knowing this stuff.
Speaker 2:And I think that's, like, hard to shake
Speaker 1:people up. Straight out of Sen and the art of motorcycle maintenance. The the guy he's riding with is riding a BMW motorcycle, and he explicitly takes pride in not knowing anything. Like, it's part of a core identity. There's a whole philosophy in that book about why that is, why does that develop, sort of our struggle with modernity and the hardness of knowing everything and then essentially becoming, alluded not wanting to know anything and then developing an entire identity around that.
Speaker 1:And I think that's really interesting. I also think it is sad when it comes to developers because it is not internally consistent. It is not an internally consistent model of how do you become a capable developer. Because first of all, as we've discussed, you're figuring shit out all the time. To make a JavaScript project from four years ago compiled requires a fucking PhD at this point.
Speaker 1:Right? Like, in arch archaeology and whatever, you gotta dig out all these old oh, we're using web
Speaker 2:Webpack. Politics. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Oh, that was in the ancient times of 2018 that we used tools like that to compile our stuff. So if you're able to figure that shit out, don't tell me you can't set up a Linux machine. They come pre baked out of the box for most cases. There's very little seasoning you have to apply to that dish for it to be delicious and good and nutritious. So I think it is it is it is weird, and it's weird in fascinating ways of, like, why are humans weird?
Speaker 1:And I also think it's fixable. I think it's fat driven, and I think we can absolutely reverse course. The cloud, when that was first introduced, sounded nuts. Right? Wait.
Speaker 1:I'm gonna rent computers the entire time even if I need them all the time from some other person who runs a everything store? What? That sounds nuts. Like, why why would I why would I do that? And then a few years happened, and, again, we realized that there were some real, advantages to that.
Speaker 1:But a lot of it was also just like a mental shift. Right? A mental shift. And do you know what? Those things can shift back, and and we can knock things straight.
Speaker 1:And some of it is pendulum swing. Right? When it comes to setting up servers, I think the main shift for me is the difference between pets and cattle. Right? Is this like your Right.
Speaker 1:Lovingly nurtured machine where you've tweaked out your little configs in a bespoke way and it lives just on this box? And if you need another box, you're like, holy shit. It's gonna take me twenty hours to set that up. Or do you live in a cattle world where you're deploying containers? And that's where all the interesting configuration happens, and it's repeatable, and it's scalable, and it's all these other things.
Speaker 1:Now that pet versus cattle idea, which really got pushed forward with the cloud, can totally work on your own stuff too or work on dedicated machines or or whatever. So some of it is is relaying the fact that you don't have to give up on modernity to understand how things work. You don't have to give up on containerization to understand how a Linux box can be connected to the Internet. Like, these things are actually not in our position. And as we found when we moved out of the cloud, we had a team of, about 10 people on our ops team, and a bunch of them were cloud native specialists.
Speaker 1:That was their main thing. Then we moved out of cloud onto our own stuff, and they could retain, like, 90% of their skills. 90% of the system administration work was the same whether we owned the boxes or we rented them from Amazon. Right? And I think that's the part a lot of folks aren't appreciating.
Speaker 1:They're thinking, wait. Computer? Does that mean, like, it's running in your basement? How do you secure that? Do you have a baseball bat down there in case someone tries to break in and get it?
Speaker 1:Like, what even is this? It's like, no. That's not how it works. There are professional data centers that you just rent a space for, and then you put in your own computer. And there's just some basic education here where I kinda feel like it's like we're discovering an agent a ancient civilization, and people going, how the fuck did they build those pyramids, man?
Speaker 1:I don't even snow would get up there and weigh, like, 400 tons. Like, what kind of crazy technology is done? And and then the people built the pyramids, which is like, hey, man. I'm, like, 45. We did it, like, nine years ago.
Speaker 1:This is ancient technology that we need archaeologists to figure out. It probably wasn't fucking aliens either. Like, we knew and we know how to do the people are still alive. The people who set up the Internet as you know it today, which was set up not on hyperscalers, but by individual companies owning computers and connecting them to the Internet, they're still fucking alive. There's kind of a lot of them too, and we can rediscover that.
Speaker 1:We can rediscover that, and we'll be better off for it if we do. And a bunch of the advance, advances we've had in technology since then have actually made it easier to do that. When I got started with the Internet, well, not even the Internet. Just to say when I got started with Basecamp when we launched Basecamp, we launched Basecamp on an Intel Celeron 1 core, I think, CPU with 2.8 gigahertz. Is that right?
Speaker 1:Something like that. Right? 1 fucking core. 1 2004 core, by the way. That shit was slow.
Speaker 1:I mean, by modern standards, 2 orders of magnitude faster. I just bought a hobby box from Hetzner just to run and play with an experiment. Right? 48 cores, hyperthreading, 96 vCPUs for $220 a month. What?
Speaker 1:What? Like, the amount of computing power that's in that machine could operate probably 95% of all SaaS businesses that exist in the world. And napkin math that I did yesterday on Twitter said, like, do you know what? We probably only need, like, 5 of those boxes to run all of Basecamp, which is a SaaS company doing tens of millions in ARR. Computers have gotten insanely fast and capable and productive, and you wouldn't know half the time if you're dealing with a reseller of a reseller of perhaps a reseller of AWS because that shit is still expensive.
Speaker 1:I mean, Heroku again, I love Heroku, and I'm just gonna bang them them a little bit. Like, we'll literally charge you, like, $200 for, like, half of a vCPU and and 2 megabytes of RAM. That's a little over the top. But hardware is really good, really fast, and it's getting faster and cheaper, like, all the fucking time. Moore's law, once you look at multi core setups, is very much alive.
Speaker 1:Should be should be getting twice as fast at half the cost in no time at all. And it is, except if you buy it from a reseller of a resell.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The, the the point about the tools working, like, the cloud tools, like, also all those things being retained, that's a good 1. So I I work on infrastructure as code stuff, and all of our tooling was developed for deploying cloud services. Right? So there's good ideas there, like declaratively defining config, like, you know, applying that.
Speaker 2:And we realized the other day, we we can just point all the same stuff to, like, a Docker daemon running on a machine, and it all works exactly the same. So all the great benefits that we we kind of invented in the cloud, you can just use that same model, anywhere. So, yeah, it's quite a different experience. And I also had a post the other day. I was remembering the first my first company, I actually launched it off my laptop.
Speaker 2:Like, it was I even kinda it was like a it was Wi Fi. It was, like, a Wi Fi laptop. Right? And this was, like, in 02/10. Eventually, we moved that to servers in my parents' basement, like, literally in my parents' basement.
Speaker 2:And we sold the company at that point. And I remember, like, the first thing they did, they were like, yeah. We need you guys to move that off of there because it's probably not secure. But I was thinking, like, you know, I actually did build and sell a company of that. We had a dog, you know.
Speaker 2:We have a dog.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Love it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It was dusty down there. Those servers are still there too. I could probably still still use them. But but, yeah, like, you know, I I did build and sell a company that way.
Speaker 2:It's a lot better these days to do something like that, though.
Speaker 1:It is a lot better. And I think that that's also where these things are I'm not in opposition of it. I'm I'm glad the cloud thing happened. I really am. I think it moved the ball forward in a lot of ways of how to understand how to run things.
Speaker 1:Some of the conceptual models, the pets versus cattle, the the clarity of setups, all that stuff, we owe to the cloud. We owe to the billions and billions and billions of dollars that got pushed into it. We don't have to stay there. Right? I like to think of it a little bit sometimes, Big Pharma.
Speaker 1:So someone puts in a billion dollars to develop a new drug. We should be thankful as humanity for that to happen. It is really expensive to do the r and d. Lots of the r and d doesn't work. Even when the r and d does work, it goes through all these, clinical trials.
Speaker 1:They cost absolutely astounding sums of money to do. Requires investors to underwrite all of that, and those investors will only do it if they occasionally get a slam dunk with Sempec to pay it all off. Right? Incredible. Equally incredible, the fact that patents expire after nineteen years, eighteen years, and then shit goes generic.
Speaker 1:And after it gone generic, the price goes to essentially what it cost to produce the compounds, which is usually nothing. Right? Like, I mean, I guess, I can get as riled up as anyone about the state of the American health care system, but I can't get that riled up about the idea that, like, a pill costs more than the chemical compounds it takes to produce it because that's not the expense. Right? Like, the expense is developing the drug that works and is safe and could be rolled out.
Speaker 1:And America, just for whatever peculiar reasons, ends up bankrolling the whole world on this. Right? Like, Americans pay through the nose for their medication, and that's why we have all this medication. Anyway, so when all that happens, it's also amazing that we have the forcing function of the generic threat. Right?
Speaker 1:Like, first of all, it means that these pharmaceutical companies can't just develop a drug and then the next two hundred years milk it like Mickey Mouse. Things will actually expire, and they have to come up with new shit or they'll go out of business. And just as importantly, the advances for humanity accrue to all at 0 cost once shit goes generic. That's the model we should think about with commercial software development and cloud development. The cloud was on a patent for quite a while, and it developed a bunch of cool new shit.
Speaker 1:And that's great, and we should be grateful for it, and I'm grateful for it. But, also, now it's time to go generic. Now it's time for these advantages in developer ergonomics and deployment and containerization and of the wazoo to go generics just so we don't have to pay rental fees until the end of fucking time. The Internet today exists the way it does because of open source software. There wouldn't be an I owed as many businesses if every goddamn vendor wanted a per CPU license charge as though you were buying Oracle in 1998.
Speaker 1:Right? Like, that was just gonna seriously curb the dynamism of the entire economy. So we need to respect the fact that the capitalist forces are pushing these things forward at the frontier, and that's amazing. And I'm a capitalist in that regard very much so. And then I'm also a goddamn communist when it comes to open source software and, like, that it all should be free and we should be fighting to move more things generic and so forth.
Speaker 1:Those ideas, even if they sound contradictory, they fit inside someone's head. They can fit inside someone's head. You can wrestle with that paradox and be better off for it by embracing both at the same time. But, it is well overdue that we go generic with the cloud nonsense.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, that that resonates a lot with with me. The the work that we do is, like, some of these resellers you're talking about, sometimes they do come up with cool ways to deploy stuff or, you know, they they come with stuff that we wouldn't have thought of. And what we do is we take it, and we just make it open source so that people can use it wherever wherever they they need to. So there's, like, a it's a little antagonistic, but there's also, like, a, like, a harmony to it as well.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I think all capitalism the idea of capitalism is there's no permanence. If you have permanence, it doesn't work. You need things to get destroyed occasionally.
Speaker 1:Yes. You need the pencil and sweep. And you
Speaker 2:can't be a catalyst if you don't believe in that.
Speaker 1:And and I think this is why I've been so vocal about the cloud issue in particular because I've been seeing what looks like the formation of new monopolies. And then it's partly coming because these hyperscalers are not operating in a traditional free marketplace because it is very difficult for companies to actually switch. And, again, it's been the promise of the cloud almost since day 1. Oh, we're gonna use all these declarative configs and so forth, and you're gonna be able to just, like, you don't like pricing in AWS? No problem.
Speaker 1:You just switch to GCP. You don't like that? You switch to Azure. Yeah. No one's doing that.
Speaker 1:No one's doing that. And in fact, much of the evangelism around the cloud is like, you're not doing cloud right unless you're using all these proprietary APIs. Unless you're fully taking advantage of the managed services and the serverless and the this and the that and the other thing that is usually just peculiar and particular enough to a single cloud vendor, you're not doing it right. And that's, of course, the maximum amount of lock in you will ever get on the business if once you go down the path of using bespoke, slightly tailored, slightly different version of these open source tools that most of this stuff is built on at AWS or or other places. We went through that.
Speaker 1:It took a fair amount of time to get out of the cloud. It was not about just changing the IP addresses of sort of the Kubernetes deployment target and then pushing the button and they're all working. Maybe 1 day we will get there. I don't know. I think there's a very strong incentive from the hyperscalers for us not to get there.
Speaker 1:They don't want a competitive marketplace. They don't want ease of migration or use of change because that's gonna bring pricing pressure. In fact, I just saw, I think it was yesterday, that prices for the same amount of compute in total refutation of Moore's Law is going up. Like, cloud is getting more expensive for the same amount of compute. That's fucked up.
Speaker 1:Like, that to me is is an example of a captured market that's not responsive to the normal competitive pressures of a functional market. Right? And I think we need open source if for nothing else for that. Right? Pricing power becomes extreme when you have full control of the market.
Speaker 1:Just ask Apple. We started out that discussion. How the fuck are they able to take 30% of everyone's business on the App Store? Well, because they can, and there's no other alternative for you if you wanna ship software to iPhones. Right?
Speaker 1:So if you can control a toll booth like that the cloud providers are not quite like that. They're a little more like a roach motel. That you can check-in, you just can't check out. And we need to make it like like a regular hotel. You can check-in, and then you can stay for a while, and you can leave without it costing an arm and a leg and the firstborn.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So the 1 thing I will say I kinda disagree a little bit is I think if you are going to use a cloud, if you're gonna use a 1 of public clouds, if you try to use it in a way where you're just trying to rent servers, you're gonna have a horrible experience. Like, it's way too expensive to do that. If your approach is, I'm renting servers, I'm gonna run my own software, Just don't use the cloud at all. Just go to like you said, that's stuff that you guys are using.
Speaker 2:Go directly to data centers that offer renting the hardware directly. You can have a much better experience. If you are gonna use a cloud, you might as well, like, just commit to something, like, commit to using it properly. And then, yeah, you can use the services, high level services. They're more expensive, but at least you get the benefit.
Speaker 2:I think it's this middle ground where you, like, try to use the cloud in this agnostic way. Like, that's just never gonna work out at all. So whatever model clicks for you, like, if if you like server console servers, just go buy them directly. It's probably get, like, at least 10 x cheaper, if not more.
Speaker 1:That that was my mental model, and we used a lot of the managed services. We used RDS and and that whole setup. And, unfortunately, I would say is that that's where you get reamed the worst. Like, the managed services on RDS and with search was the other 1 we used, what was it called? OpenSearch or something else AWS?
Speaker 1:Elasticsearch. I would
Speaker 2:actually I actually wouldn't count both of those, because look. I guess what I've so those are, like, just shitty repackaging of stuff that you can just run directly. Right? Like, like, like, server I
Speaker 1:actually thought they were decent in terms of economics. They did save us some degree of some kinds of backups and whatever. It was a little bit there, but the upcharge was so freaking insane. We were spending on, RDS alone, we're spending more than half a million dollars a year in rental fees. It cost us, I think, to replace that, like the hardware and setup.
Speaker 1:We bought a hundred and $25,000 worth of machine, and then we owned those machines. Now we still have to pay for power, and we still have to pay for some other but holy shit. Like, literally, the payback on the machine purchase was, like, five minutes. Right? Like, five minutes for to rent we could buy all these huge, hunky beasts of machines with amazing amounts of cores and RAMs and all the other stuff, and and we just have to connect them to the Internet again.
Speaker 1:There's something there. So, yeah, I I'm not disputing the fact that there are cases where the cloud makes sense. And if where I've usually said is, especially have you if you have a huge dynamic range on, like, peak to trough in terms of your usage. Like, 1 day, you're doing Yeah. Whatever, a hundred thousand requests a second, and the next day, you're doing 10.
Speaker 1:That is a huge range where you're gonna have a bunch of idle servers sitting around if you're gonna build out, your setup system, they can take it. So there is a tip of our point where that dynamic range, I think, makes sense. And then there's also a tip of a point where you can't you're not even using a whole machine. Right? Like, hey.
Speaker 1:I just need to rent, like, 18% of a computer because that's all I need right now.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The the granularity.
Speaker 1:So there's some granularity there, and then I'm also sure that there are other cases like access to specialized hardware is a good 1. Good luck trying to buy a bunch of h ones or h 1 hundreds, whatever. The hyperscalers did have access to that, and they would rent it to you. So I think there are plenty of cases where it does make sense. I think the the my argument has been that the default case is not right.
Speaker 1:The default case being like, hey. You should run cloud on everything, and running your own shit is like trying to produce your own power. That was 1 of the analogies that we used for a while. Well, are you in the power production business? No.
Speaker 1:Then you should just buy power from the socket. Are you in the cloud data center business? No. Therefore, you should just yeah. That 1 doesn't hold.
Speaker 1:It doesn't actually work. You are much closer to the same dynamics whether you you rent it or you own it. A lot of the difference just like is in the, finance model. And CapEx versus OpEx and and whatever. And if you actually ran the numbers, you would be surprised.
Speaker 1:Now part of the irony here is it's actually very, very difficult to run the numbers in the cloud. We had, like, FinOps. That's a cottage industry. You're consulting. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Specializing in understanding your bill. If that is not a red flag of red flags, I don't know what is. It's just so complicated. I need specialists with PhD in statistical analysis to just understand what I'm paying for. What?
Speaker 1:I mean and we saw this ourselves. We tried to well, not just tried. We worked very hard to understand our bill. Like, how do we proportionate it and what is that application spending? That was tens of hours a month just trying to understand the bill.
Speaker 3:It comes up it comes up all the time. We every other month, we're Right.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And after we bought our own servers, yeah, that went away. Like, there was just a whole category of work that just disappeared. We did 1 big analysis when we bought all the servers we needed to get out of the cloud for for whatever. And it was, like, don't know, $5.600,000 dollars.
Speaker 1:Not an insignificant sum, but, like, our cloud budget was 320,000,0.0. So, like, proportionally, not that big of a deal. Anyway, we do that analysis once, and then we're like, alright. See you in five years. That's the next time I'm gonna worry about whether I need an AMD EPYC ninety four fifty four or a ninety seven fifty four.
Speaker 1:Like, yeah, I don't need to do this every day. Right? With the cloud, you kinda sorta do. Because if you don't, it is so easy for these things to run away from you. The 320,000,0.0 we had on our cloud budget really should have been twice that at least.
Speaker 1:It would have been if we hadn't been Nazis about chasing down the last penny and stopping all the right services and doing all the optimizations and entering long term contracts. It's the other thing that blows my mind. People have this concept. Oh, the cloud is, like, just metered as you go. Yeah.
Speaker 1:No. No. It isn't. No 1 actually using the cloud at scale is paying, like, per the minute. They are entering into at least one year contracts on committed instances because that's the only way to get any pricing that makes any kind of sense.
Speaker 1:On AWS's s 3 service, we were in a 4 fucking contract. Four years we committed to get any pricing that kind of sort of made sense. So there's a lot of contradictions in all this stuff. Again, different businesses are different in different ways, and I'm not saying there's 1 size that fits all here. I think there is an opening, though, for us to reconsider what the default should be, when you should start doing the calculations.
Speaker 1:And and, also, if you do know Linux a little bit, the alternatives won't seem as foreign or as inconceivable as I think they do to some companies, right, who have grown up in a cloud first world and have a team that's familiar with instantiating new AWS services, and then they go like, what do you mean? Ethernet? Where? Like, that, that's fixable.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. So I I think where we can agree on is, like, I'm I'm still gonna I gotta use the cloud heavily, like, clicks for me. But what I don't like is the people that are, like, quote, unquote, on that side don't know how to do the other thing. So it's just like, I don't I can't really trust your opinion even though you're, like, on this side because you're doing it out of not knowing the other side.
Speaker 2:Like, I've always had a home lab that I manage, would run whatever, like, we used to experiment with, like, Kubernetes, with Nomad, like, all the different frustration stuff. So I've seen how that stuff's progressed, and I I enjoy it. Like I said, just like with my with my desktop, it's it's really good when you, like, curate that. It's a garden almost. Yes.
Speaker 2:I'm running all, like, all the services that power my family stuff. So, like, I have a sense of that. So when I choose stuff when I'm choosing the cloud, I'm choosing it with, like, awareness of what I'm trading off and what I what I what I'm balancing.
Speaker 1:And I don't think that's what most people are doing. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I agree with that. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I don't think that's what most people are doing. Know what most businesses are doing. They're not doing it from, like, hey. I know how this works if we were gonna run it ourselves. I know how it works in the cloud, and, like, I can make the math work or I can make the economics work.
Speaker 1:That is not what I'm seeing broadly, and I think that's a shame. And I think, again, we can fix it. And I think part of the fix literally is exposure therapy, getting more developers exposed directly to Linux. So it's that they realize that the operating system they're gonna run their servers on is not this scary alternate universe where everything is upside down. It's actually, first of all, quite familiar in many ways.
Speaker 1:Like, if you're a developer working on the Mac, the hop to Linux isn't like if you were a Windows PowerShell user and you didn't want run WSL. Okay. That's gonna be a culture shock of some dimension when you hop in some of the. Right? If you've been running on the Mac and you you run Homebrew and you're familiar with some of these tools, whatever, it's not like going to a different universe.
Speaker 1:It is like going to perhaps a different continent, but they kinda still speak a version of English just kinda broken. I guess, like, Americans going to Australia and, like, just going, hey, mate. That's like the Linux version for, for macOS folks switching over. It's a dialect. Right?
Speaker 1:But the difference is in the dialect, and the difference is realizing that this is literally the same stuff as you run on the server. That should make you far more comfortable in thinking you can run it too without needing a PhD in Linux hardening.
Speaker 2:So I have a quick question for you. So this is a thought I had the other day because I I feel a lot of the same things you're talking about where I'm like, people these days don't even know how to x. Yes. I am And you remember when we were young, people would say that to us. So, like, are we just doomed to repeat this?
Speaker 2:Is this actually gonna change? Is it actually different this time?
Speaker 1:It's always different when it's your generation. Then the young people are, ungrateful and the older 1 is stupid. Right? It's kinda like driving on the highway. Anyone who drives faster than you is a maniac, and anyone who drives slower than you is a grandma.
Speaker 1:Because I was like, you're driving the perfect speed. How amazing. It worked out that way.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I do I do think about that all the time. And exactly for the reasons that you say, I remember, when I started working with the web, and I had a bunch of programmer friends. And those programmer friends were used to writing applications in assembler k. In c. And a lot of them had a very difficult time with something like PHP, where they just go like, that is literally 10000 times as inefficient that for loop got there as if I wrote it in assembler and did a move and a whatever x or I don't even fucking know.
Speaker 1:I don't know. It's never. But the the they had a very difficult time adjusting to that. Right? I do try to to think about that often when I go like, well, back in our days when we had to set up servers and connect them to the Internet, like, we walked barefoot in both directions and it snowed all the time.
Speaker 1:So you gotta be careful not to turn into the literal Simpsons episode of, like, the old man shaking at the sky or the cloud.
Speaker 2:Of the cloud. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Pacific. Right? While at the same time, I'm also realizing that not everything new is better. And that we've seen that over and over again in all sorts of domains where I think it is a very healthy time or healthy instinct that we should constantly be pushing forward. How can we make things simpler?
Speaker 1:How can we make them faster? And we should be using those additional CPU cycles, for example, to make ourselves more productive.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And this was actually why I am so passionately angry at the cloud is because I felt like they didn't hold up their end of the bargain. I did not feel like things got sufficiently easier, that I was paid back in additional productivity. We were never able to materially change the configuration of our operations team. When they worked in the cloud, there were some things that were slightly different. They weren't worrying perhaps about, hey.
Speaker 1:There's a warning here about the second PSU in this sled that needs to be changed. That was not a warning they would get. That would just go to the I was about to call it cloud monkeys. We're all fucking cloud monkeys. And someone in that data center would run around, and you would think, oh, man.
Speaker 1:The computer is so sophisticated. No. That's fucking just George. And George is printing with your damn CPU over to that box, and he's pulling it out. You just don't know Joe George.
Speaker 1:George lives behind an API.
Speaker 2:Sometimes these big day centers, there there's only, like, there's only, like, 2 people that are there, like, on call. Yeah. It's not even, like, a whole team or anything.
Speaker 1:There's, there's some of that, and that's why I think I would've I mean, that's why I was a cloud believer actually for many years. I was very passionate. Like, this is the way the future is gonna work. We just need to get over this hump that it's gonna get easier and cheaper. And it never fucking did.
Speaker 1:Never fucking did. That's why I'm so mad. I tried for more than half a decade to find cheaper and to find easier. The only thing I ever consistently found was faster, and I mean faster in terms of procurement. It is still amazing.
Speaker 1:I will grant that with 1 API call, you can spin up, like, a thousand servers. It's gonna cost you probably a house and and a condo, but you can do it. That's pretty fucking cool. You can't do that by going to Dell.com and ordering a bunch of PowerEdge. Right?
Speaker 1:Like, that's gonna take, like, a week and a half at least, maybe two, before they arrive and before they're wrecked. So that was always there, but to me, it was always about the 3 things. It was supposed to be cheaper. It was supposed to be easier. It was supposed to be faster.
Speaker 1:And it's only really the the speed of procurement that I saw at our business. Again, as we've talked about, there's different considerations and different analysis you gotta make on your own business. But I was just so disappointed that the the promised land never seemed to arrive that when I look at setting up a new AWS installation, when I read through the, like, hey. Get started with AWS one zero one. I went like, this shit is off the scale complicated.
Speaker 1:Just even remembering, like, how I do the AM IAM user management configuration in the cloud, I'm like, I feel like I have to go back to school to study again Yeah. Again. Some of it is just different things, and you learn different things, and you could say Linux is also complicated. Okay. Yes.
Speaker 1:But also no. Like, there are different scales of complexity, and I felt or I feel like the cloud in many ways did not help up its end of the bargain, that it promised us simpler, and we didn't get it.
Speaker 3:Alright. I got a question, and this is kinda moving off of all the cloud stuff. You you said earlier that the Apple stuff made you mad enough. You considered, like, hanging it up, retiring. I think in my generation, we're kind of the generation right below yours that looked up to you.
Speaker 1:You called me old. Let me just No. No. No. No.
Speaker 1:I'm just
Speaker 3:I'm not even being that much older than that.
Speaker 2:You guys have equal amounts of gray in your beard. I'm the 1 that's so old. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Alright. That's funny.
Speaker 3:I I guess I've always wondered, like, someone like you, you get to that level of success or whatever. You could not do this anymore, but you choose to. And I wonder, like, are do do you have this idea in your head of what it would take for you to kinda stop programming?
Speaker 1:Yes. If Matt ever decides to introduce static typing into Ruby, I'm out. So that's 1. The other 1 would be if somehow, like, browsers would only accept TypeScript and not JavaScript anymore,
Speaker 3:I'm out. Interesting.
Speaker 1:No. Seriously. As long as I'm still having fun and I feel like I have my independence, that's really the 2 factors I gauge things on. I'm having a tremendous amount of fun. This is 1 of the reasons why I'm so passionate about the Linux thing.
Speaker 1:It's really been
Speaker 2:So fun.
Speaker 1:I was about to say journey of a lifetime. That's probably actually fair. I haven't had that many platform changing. I'm just gonna mix it all up. I'm gonna take twenty years of ingrained muscle memory about where the Apple key goes with copy and rewriting that to the control key.
Speaker 1:That has been a ton of fun. And building, all this tooling we built to get out of the cloud has been an amazing amount of fun. So I actually don't think I'm gonna stop thinking computers are fun. Like, I just fundamentally really like computers. Like, they are just on my days off, whatever, on a weekend occasionally, when I just have I was like, I just wanna go, like, type on my little keyboard, like, for a while.
Speaker 1:I just wanna I'm gonna fix a bug. I'm not even hit by the bug. I don't even fucking care about the bug. I wanna hear fliggity clack from a mechanical keyboard. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I wanna commit something. I wanna push it. I wanna do a release because it's just freaking fun, and I enjoy it. So I don't think that part is gonna go away.
Speaker 1:Again, Mats, if you're listening, short of just fucking putting static typing into Ruby, not gonna happen, man. I'm gonna stay on Ruby 3 version or whatever before that until the end of time. The other 1 that's more likely is that it stops becoming possible to run things independently, that you have to run on, say, a hyperscaler and release through an app store. Then I'm out. Like, I don't wanna do that.
Speaker 1:I don't wanna go through multiple layers of permission. I don't wanna have to beg, fucking cook about whether I can release a new idea into the wild, whether I can release software. So as long as we can keep the Internet strong, and I think that's not as obvious of a premise as I would have assumed and advocated for it being in, like, 02/8. Like, the Internet is under pressure from a lot of different forces, and this idea at the very least of a global Internet seems more or less over. Like, we are fracturing the Internet at an alarming rate.
Speaker 1:And, okay, maybe that can happen, and maybe we just have to accept that, like, at some point, like, there's gonna be a European Internet just like there's a Chinese Internet, just like there's halfway Brazilian Internet, and they're not kinda connected, or at least they have very severe firewalls that prevent things from going back and forth. I hope that America is not getting there. I don't take it for granted, though, and I don't think anyone should. If you care about the Internet in its sort of original ethos and form, I think you're gonna have to get ready to fight for it to some extent. What does that mean?
Speaker 1:I don't fucking know. I don't wanna get political about that in any way. Just this idea of appreciating what we have and realizing how unique it is. The Internet as a software distribution platform is truly 1 of a kind. If you had explained it to any VC today, they would have gone like, yeah, but where's where's the toll booth?
Speaker 1:Can we just install 1 around the whole thing, or do you have 5 at different corners? How do you do it? How do you capture all the economic activity that's coming out of this thing? And the fact that we ended up with such a powerful platform that wasn't owned by any individual company and backed by any individual VC is just mind blowing. And I think it you only realize how unique and rare it is when you look at the regression we've gone through with the app stores.
Speaker 1:That to get software onto mobile phones, it's not like that at all. It's an absolutely dominated platform with a single gatekeeper who tells you whether you have a right to exist or not. So if that's what the Internet either becomes or the Internet disappears or gets so kneecapped by all these, fencing in that it starts resembling that, okay. I'm also out.
Speaker 3:But it sounds like the computer's thing. It that's for life. I've I've always wondered, like
Speaker 1:I hope so. There I mean, this is actually 1 of the reasons I I look at AI. Right? Like, we talked a little bit about that at the beginning. And people are, like, they're so excited that, like, AI is gonna take all programming jobs.
Speaker 1:And to some degree, I can be excited for that in the same way that, like, did we need, I don't know, 2000000 people tending to horses for our economy to function? Maybe not, but I don't really like horses, but I know people who do, and they still ride them. I hope to beat that. Yeah. I am still writing the manual code.
Speaker 1:I'm typing in the commands. I'm not just narrating to Cursor 5 x AI to build the shit for me. Right?
Speaker 2:Like, in a museum.
Speaker 1:Exactly. And and and I do actually think that that is, there's still gonna be space for that, but I think it's very plausible, and you should certainly consider that we've reached the high watermark. Like, that the number of people employed doing programming for a living has peaked. It's entirely possible. If you look at almost any other phase of the economy that has happened, the number of people who work in agriculture, the number of people who work on the assembly line, there are plenty of precedents for this idea that there was some glorious times for a certain industry and for the workers in that industry, and that ended for 1 reason or another, usually economical progress or otherwise.
Speaker 1:Right? And I don't know what that's gonna look like, and I think I don't wanna be a fumonger here, but I I I do accept the fact that there are people who make their living doing this stuff who who are right to be a little bit nervous about it.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Right? I mean, if you worked in Detroit in, like, whatever, 1972, and you were putting together Buicks, and life was pretty fucking good, and you had a whatever, a good setup and 2 cars in the garage and all this stuff. Like, yeah, that doesn't exist in the same way anymore. Right? Is that programmer's future?
Speaker 1:I don't fucking know. I hope not. I hope not, and I hope also. Right? Isn't that weird?
Speaker 1:Like, we think back on, like, do we wanna go back to subsistence farming? Do we wanna go back to, like, 98% of the population, like, literally swinging a hoe? Probably not. Right? We also don't wanna go back to the assembly line that that occupies everyone.
Speaker 1:But it's very hard in the moment to, like, what comes after? What what is the next? Where is it all gonna cycle into? I don't know. And I think sometime the chilling, like, yeah.
Speaker 1:We're all just gonna become prompt engineers. Yeah. I no. I don't
Speaker 2:think so. Yeah. I mean, it's just like your transition to Linux. It was painful. You didn't know that it could be better, but eventually, you kinda you kinda got there.
Speaker 1:That's what I choose to hope. I choose to hope that, like, our AI overlords are gonna be benevolent, and we can still prompt them when they're not prompting us and all good stuff.
Speaker 2:So, so 1 last thing. I have to plug this because you mentioned you like TUI's. You're, like, blown away by, like, how crazy TUI's can get. Have you seen what we've done with our coffee shop?
Speaker 1:I have not.
Speaker 2:So we built a coffee shop that's served entirely over SSH. So if you do SSHterminal.shop Oh, that's awesome.
Speaker 1:You get, like,
Speaker 2:a full coffee buying. You can literally buy coffee and it shows up at your at your house. But Oh, you're good.
Speaker 1:I'm gonna try that. I don't drink coffee, but I will try
Speaker 2:I don't drink coffee audio, but I sell
Speaker 1:it. So,
Speaker 2:but it was fun because of so Love it. Adam worked on a lot of the, like, the front end for it, but it was cool because it's a very constrained UI. You can have, like, different font sizes. You can only do, like, colors and stuff. But the constraints kinda breed, like, a lot of cool stuff.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. Built
Speaker 1:yeah. Constraints are the best.
Speaker 2:There's, like, amazing TUI tools. I've also been going deeper, and I've built a bunch of other ones too for for work.
Speaker 1:I love it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's wild. Like, it's better UX than a lot of the more powerful, you know, environments that we have UI in.
Speaker 1:I I dream of doing a 2 way for Hey all the time and even a 2 way for Basecamp. It's funny because I remember my first sort of exposure to 2 ways was travel agents and flight attendants. Like, they work in I don't know if they still do. Yeah. You see.
Speaker 1:Too right.
Speaker 2:And they go fast. They go so fast.
Speaker 1:They were ahead of the fucking curve. Yeah. They were totally flat. They were on the mechanical keyboard. They were hit screw mirrors before that became a thing.
Speaker 1:Right? They're like, I know all the fucking things are f 12, f 13. Yeah. You can get to Bangkok through Shanghai if you stop over in Oslo. And you're like, jeez smokes.
Speaker 1:Have you tried to use a travel website these days? I mean, this is half the banner on my wife and I's, direct chat is just like, how the fuck did airlines get so shitty? How did in shitty vacation just devour the travel industry to the point now where I'm like, I pray for travel agents to make a comeback. Right? It is so goddamn painful to book any kind of travels through a web based interface.
Speaker 1:And I'm I'm a big fan of the Internet. I'm a big fan of the web. I've built, like, twenty years here. But I also have to accept defeat that, like, a lot of shit on the Internet is just Just worse. Naturally getting worse.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And if they had the TUI constraints, it couldn't get that shitting. Right? So maybe we should get back to both travel agents and and TUI's.
Speaker 2:There we go. Everyone's gonna be running their own servers, and we're only gonna be serving up TUI's over SSH. That's that's the future. Yeah. Oh, man.
Speaker 3:Alright. Thanks so much for coming, David. This has been so good. Yeah.
Speaker 1:That was really fun.
Speaker 2:It was funny. Appreciate it. Alright.
Speaker 1:Thank you.
Speaker 3:Alright. We're really bad at saying goodbye in, like, indie podcasts. So this is just a heads
Speaker 2:up. Hi. See
Speaker 1:you.
