mattbillenstein

We had the Sun workstations in college (some with that crazy laser mouse) and I think towards the end of my tenure, most of the labs were switching to linux boxes, but at that same time Solaris x86 actually came out - so on commodity hardware you could run Solaris which was kinda fun.

I did this a little, but the things you could do with actual Linux started to get interesting for me at that time - building routers for our shared home network, hosting Quake servers, doing actual programming with gcc etc and the hardware support was a bit better as I recall.

I also interviewed at Sun in Boston - I think the small group servers group or something - I really liked the engineers I met there and I did consider working there for a minute, but ended up in Silicon Valley which I think was better fit for me.

I think this sorta forgets how slow the cpus were - I was running mostly ASIC design workloads on big Sun hardware in 2001 and we eventually got some x86 boxes that were only 32 bit but could run some of our jobs - and the single-threaded perf of these commodity machines was amazing compared to the Sparc boxes. When x86-64 came around, this was the death of all the Sun hardware in that group.

Also sometime in 2000 I had interviewed at Compaq - the old Alpha group who I think later worked on Itanium at Intel. They were constantly frustrated because they couldn't even get a build from Synopsys of the design tools they needed to run on Alpha and were forced to use Sun hardware they described as "gasping and wheezing" to design their crazy fast cpu.

Sun lost on a bunch of fronts, but I think the amazing thing is they let happen to them what they did to the other big UNIX vendors before - they were eaten from the bottom by faster cheaper hardware.

Ran duplicity - it's really a blunt hammer, lots of duplication, rotation, etc.

Then switched to Restic - so much better - highly recommend this.

This is interesting - what I've found with Ex-Googlers is they sorta can struggle not having access to Google infrastructure - these guys are much higher-level and I'm sure can hire the talent they need to build the lower-level stuff though.

I've mainly heard of successes of the networking stack in FreeBSD at Netflix and Whatsapp - but largely, I don't know anywhere else that uses it in production.

For a firewall/router I use Ubuntu - it's what I use for everything else, so it's comfy.

I do believe OpenBSD is very very good software, but I do wonder if just given it's small install base if there are vulnerabilities simply nobody knows about. I guess may it doesn't matter since Linux is so much more widely deployed, perhaps that's just a better platform for hackers to spend their time.

Founder culture definitely has fraternity vibes - people with no other discernable talent other than being above average looking and having connections with other similar people end up in positions they have no real idea how to do.

In other words, there are a lot of people "playing startup" in the valley - some of the VC money flows too easily and there is always going to be an ecosystem of people to try to put it to work.

Sorta amazes me how people in various levels of power will not say the obvious thing or actively discourage saying the obvious thing because it might offend Elon.

Recently all the big bank CEOs involved with the SpaceX IPO - a lot of money in that for them - but a company trading at 100x sales is clearly crazy.

Yeah, but he has a lot more money now - grifted literally billions - so I guess more is more, so idk.

It's probably as much about PR as it is about money - Puffy is a heavy lift on the PR side...

Spreadsheet + GOOGLEFINANCE("AAPL")

I tried using refurb'd Thinkpads as my travel machine for a long time - they're very brittle hard to fix laptops - kinda like Macbooks.

The Framework on the other hand is so easy to work on and get parts for - I know this isn't probably a main selling point for most users, but if you need this, Framework is like the only game in town.

My team is working in the character animation space which might complement this: https://uthana.com/

Example: https://uthana.com/app/preview/cXi2eAP19XwQ/mH7opbcqZE4P

The fuhrer will be disappointed.

I tend to use a few services on each cloud as possible so it's easy to switch between them; spinning up an Ubuntu VM that's identical on nearly every cloud is a superpower.

And, so if you keep it simple like this, it's not too complex and the costs are knowable - mostly VM hours and S3 for most of what I run.

But, the thing I've become increasingly disappointed with is simply the performance. The cpus are _slow_ - being forced to use EBS for a lot of things is _slow_ as hell; and starting/hydrating new VM volumes is super duper slow (have fun paying for fast launch).

So, for what you pay vs what you get, it's a huge difference, albeit very convenient.

Increasingly, I think about like racking stuff - like run most of your workload on dedicated hardware somewhere close to an AWS region and then burst into the cloud as needed and just use s3 in that region. Reduced cost, better performance for what matters, and you just pay for hands-on in the datacenter. Send them servers and just manage it all remotely.

Crypto was always sorta a casino - and there are just better casinos today - sports betting, prediction markets, etc.

I should try this myself, but I also rolled my own https://github.com/mattbillenstein/salty

In the spirit of Saltstack with full python throughout including Mako templating. It has a very simple set of operators mostly around idempotent file management and shell commands to do things like restart services.

This enables very fast deploys - small changes on a small number of machines in < 10 seconds.

Pretty interesting to see the drop off in impressions - Twitter/X really is just a megaphone for Musk to deliver his "probably next year" wrt various product releases for the Elon-gelicals who bid up Tesla stock to meme levels.

I really can't imagine the data is even good for training Grok anymore - like if it's such a small subset of neo-nazi supporting folks - how is it even useful?

Framework Laptop + some form of Linux - MacOS keeps getting worse and the hardware exceeding hard and expensive to repair.

If I could play GTA6 on Ubuntu at release, I'd probably switch, but as-is, I'll probably stay on Windows 10 indefinitely for gaming.

I've used Kubuntu as a daily driver at work several times - imo it's superior to a mac for development; Apple is so actively hostile to actually running open-source or custom software.

I don't have it at hand, but if you look at all the products and apis they cut - and then all the users who abandoned it in the first few months, I think that's how this was derived.

He also cut 80% of the traffic... And the fact that it kept running with him willy nilly pulling network cables is a credit to the work they did to make it resilient to failure.

This is becoming the problem with all of his businesses - Tesla has a crazy valuation and it really seems like they're having huge trouble getting Robotaxi going in Austin given the very slow progress there.

Worked in this space briefly - the footguns in defi are crazy - nobody should use or trust any of this stuff ever.

Extends to the extreme levels of SaaS-ification of fairly basic app functionality as well.

It's often simpler to build something you know than to integrate a 3rd party service, but it's highly frowned upon by a lot of devs and management.

Auth and analytics are things I'm thinking of - we have good tools to build these in-house. Also just running a database - never seen so many people afraid of installing postgres and a cronjob to back it up.

Even if the AI piece isn't really true - smaller flatter teams will move faster anyway. I always wonder having worked in a lot of startups with 10-50ppl, what on earth a business does with 10000.

Wow, these are large increases - 38%.

Maybe, but you're paying through the nose continually for something you could learn to do once - or someone on your team could easily learn with a little time and practice. Like, if this is a tradeoff you want to make, it's fine, but at some point learning that 10% more can halve your hosting costs so it's well worth it.

If you have a database, you still have work to do - optimizing, understanding indexes, etc. Managed services don't solve these problems for you magically and once you do them, just running the db itself isn't such a big deal and it's probably easier to tune for what you want to do.

Depends on how data-heavy the work is. We run a bunch of gpu training jobs on other clouds with the data ending up in S3 - the extra transfer costs wrt what we save on getting the gpus from the cheapest cloud available, it makes a lot of sense.

Also, just availability of these things on AWS has been a real pain - I think every startup got a lot of credits there, so flood of people trying to then use them.