beachy

We're building an esp-32 based hardware golf product.

Esp32 emulation in the browser is an incredible superpower for hardware manufacturers.

You can put your hardware product, with a pixel perfect display and sound, directly into users (virtual) hands so they can try before they buy.

There's no real cost to you, since their web browser and computer provide all the horse power, you just serve it up as a static web page.

In the age of AI, a moat for hardware companies can be network effects through providing an AI friendly base that your users/players can build on.

For us that takes the form of an open source app store where players can extend their device using AI ("Hey Claude, make me a game like this one, except that a giant bowling ball with our company logo embossed on it should drop and roll down an Indiana Jones styled marble run").

It's hard to overstate how powerful it is to have users trying your device, navigating the menus, extending it's functionality themselves with AI, all on their own computer, creating games for others, all without even buying your device.

With a minimum quantity of 50.

The really sad thing is that the natural instinct for many will be to screenshot the page and upload it with "please create me a home assistant dashboard in this style".

Sounds sensible. In my country (and probably many others), if you and your neighbour own identical houses or apartments and have identical mortgages, and instead of living in your own one you rent the neighbours one and live in that and vice versa, then you can both offset your mortgage interest against the rental income and both be better off than if you lived in your own house.

I have the same memories from many years of working with stored procedures - although you should certainly have been using source control.

But nothing quite matches the satisfaction of someone in a far off engineering group reporting a problem that prevented them from committing data that would have corrupted the database - because your referential integrity constraints protected the database.

In the age of AI and a massive explosion of code touching the database, maybe it makes even more sense to embed logic and constraints inside the database where there's no way to get around them.

You are probably right, but I feel like a gigantic dashboard like that could well use 700W in just its own lighting.

Tesla never turned out to be Apple in this comparison though.

Reminiscent of tank warfare in WW2. The soviet T-34 was not remarkable in any particular way, but the sheer volumes it was produced in made it a very serious enemy to German tanks. As Stalin said "quantity has a quality all of its own".

I'm old enough to remember the arrival of RDBMS, once IBM primed the space with DB2.

There was a pitched battle over features like row-level locking as competitors like Sybase, Ingress and Oracle scrapped it out. New features arrived on a monthly cadence, with immense engineering effort behind them. The winners (Oracle mostly) won a great moat which led to them to where they are today.

The fact that so many AI companies can produce amazing coding tools so quickly shows there is no moat, supporting your theory.

I feel that abandoning your car at an intersection and fleeing the scene in front of armed officers as a presidential drive by was about to arrive - in Dallas of all places - could have had far worse consequences.

Wonderful name. You may know this, but Kai means food in Maori. Many words and many, many place names also embed it, e.g Moana == sea, so Kaimoana is seafood.

In the classic "the mythical man month", Brooks describes 5000 man years effort in delivering OS/360.

I think by any measure that OS/360 would be "high craft".

Not denying that, but if its a full time job for that person to monitor the keycloak machines for a typical SaaS vendor then something's wrong at mill cobber (may have used that wrongly as not English)

I do but $200K per year actual cost is taking the piss.

Yes, I'd like to see the "cheap shade" that could span as far as shown in the pics as well as survive strong gales. It wouldn't be like a cheap shade in your back yard.

You do know about Keycloak right?

What I love most about AI development is the lack of pushback when you see a completed new feature, realise it was a dumb idea and just pivot hard to something different.

A human would (rightfully) call you out for wasting time and resources. AI slurps up your feedback and dives in again with the same vigour.

It seems fair to me.

As a SaaS vendor, interacting with our customers about SAML usually involves:

a) them knowing what they want because they already have SAML-based SSO and it works for them; and

b) our contact on their side being some unfortunate support dude who got given SAML as their subject area for whatever reason, and who knows very little about it, and who is 4 levels in the org away from anyone empowered to make decisions as significant as moving away from SAML.

It's worth looking at similar industries with enormous electricity requirements such as aluminium smelting, where the plant can be located in a friendly country but the product is owned and controlled back in the US.

Aluminium is often described as "congealed electricity". Ship bauxite to wherever power is cheap and stranded, turn it into metal, and ship the metal out. Here in NZ, Tiwai Point is the textbook case, with London-based Rio Tinto running a smelter on the other side of the world that exists mainly because Manapōuri hydro had nowhere else to go.

AI data centres can be just the same - even more so, since the plant's assets (its chips) are virtually perishables, so there is less concern about assets becoming stranded if the host goes rogue. All the US needs is friendly and stable allied countries with cheap power.

I doubt that (depending on what "senior" means).

The skills to drive AI are much the same as they were for business analysts in the old days. Domain knowledge, insight into user requirements, knowledge of modern UI paradigms, ability to write detailed, consistent requirements docs/ design docs.

There is a deep bench in the industry of these senior-ish people. Many have left to become baristas, dive instructors or hobby farmers, scarred by the pain of building large complex software systems using human labour and absurd Agile rituals. But they could slot straight back in, it's like riding a bike.

AI development is the new waterfall. Its just that the lower level that the BA hands off to, which used to be roomfuls of devs, is now a superhuman who can implement those designs at lighting speed and come back hungrily for more.

But if by senior you mean someone who is just a junior with more experience, someone who's not really in touch with the business's needs and who just works off stuff fed to them by PMs or the like - then yeah, agreed.

Sat in many meetings talking about CORBA and COM. And XML is the gift that just keeps giving. Thank god that stuff is in the rear view mirror.

However in the age of AI I don't know if it matters too much that SOAP is the interchange. It is easy enough to build clients against it. It works. It's probably quite secure. Who cares?

I just got some kind of cyber alert from Claude and was forced back down to Opus while I was trying to connect to a battery I own via bluetooth.

So I can certainly understand why someone would want the guardrails gone.

> Respondents preferred the traditional design by 74 percent to 26 percent. There was almost no variation by social class, and only modest variation by political party. Older people were, as in most studies, more traditional than younger people, but even 18–24s still preferred the traditional design by 61 to 39 percent.

I might be missing something but isn't this all a bit of a no-brainer?

In the old days, buildings were made to impress, to project wealth, to show the generosity of wealthy benefactors to their town or city. Take a look around somewhere like historic Bruges, which benefited from the wealth of local merchants. Incredibly impressive. Not remotely cost effective.

Today, buildings are typically functional, or at least financial considerations are top of mind. And cheaper tends to be uglier. Why would someone invest in an elaborate and expensive design when they could simply throw up a slab of brutalist concrete and punch some windows into it? It's all the same to the workers inside.

And of course for older folks, older buildings are closer to what they grew up with. Even if only a bit. Seems a natural effect for older people to enjoy older architecture.

When I watch medical professionals at work, a lot of the time they are writing or typing, reading or shuffling through notes, talking to others or waiting for results from some lab down the hall. Or any number of things that to me look like crappy admin tasks.

I'm sure they aren't all, but friends who work in the hospital tell tales of woeful inefficiencies and pointless beauracracy. Of course YMMV and this is a public health system.

We did a deal with IBM back in the day to adapt our tech as the code generation for enterprise java beans.

The commercial guy I dealt with made it very clear that a primary concern was IBM not being humiliated and shafted like their MS dealings. It colored our commercial arrangements, which had to include "break glass" arrangements for them to gain full access to our source code.

The Trash 80 was the first computer I could afford. A great little machine and Z80 assembly has a certain simple elegance.

If you have an enormous addressable market then it can pay to build awareness as quickly as possible. Having lots of enthusiastic users will do that. Having a useful free tier is a pretty uncontroversial way to get those users.

Plenty of apps do this - looking at the first browser tab I have open I see gmail which does exactly this.

For a pure client app like an iphone app, you don't have any real "per user" costs, so there are no concerns about going under from the costs of attempting this. It would be very different if you had to pay for server capacity.

Make it permissive enough that 80% of potential users don't need to pay for subscription. 20% of a heck of a lot of people is still a lot.

That job was often called a "business analyst" in "the old days".

When I started at IBM back in the 80s in NZ, there were plenty of 1403 printers still in operation, though no 1401 CPUs.

Since they were old even then, and NZ was something of a computing backwater (on a training course I met a guy who's territory of 3 or 4 floors of the world trade center had more machines than my territory of half of the North Island) there were no formal training courses on them, and I was on my own with the manuals and the insights of the gray beards in the company lunch room.

It wasn't until I found Ken Shirrif's magnificent animated explainer https://ibm-1401.info/KenShirriff-1403Animation.html many decades later that I really understood how the machines I had been fixing worked.