4 ms·
Beautifully put. We bootstrapped a global inter-network pretty far on the basis of the "Personal Computer" paradigm, but are running into the limits of that at
by pwang 8y ago
Beautifully put. We bootstrapped a global inter-network pretty far on the basis of the "Personal Computer" paradigm, but are running into the limits of that at every level.
Servers and server farms comprised of PCs are horribly complex to scale in a reliable way, and the programming models force programmers to have to either reason about complex "distributed computing" problems, or externalize state into a scalable "database" that has already thought about the problem.
End-user PCs act as Frankenstein contraptions, both containing private data for some applications, and containing no data for others. In the former case, the OS ABIs and application paradigms do not treat data security and privacy as a first-class concern, so ransomware and malware abounds. In the latter case, our PCs are brain-dead for most daily productivity without being tethered to a "cloud" (aka Mainframe) run by companies whose sole investor remit is to monetize our data and/or our interactions with other people via their free applications.
A revolution in computing is in the offing: one that is centered around users, their data, and their interactions with each other. Information is the privileged and important asset; not the APIs of the hardware that runs the compute. The topology of human interaction and human groups around that information system is far, far more important than the hardware network topology, which should be an irrelevant detail of routing.
Every output an input.
- m_mueller 8y agoI like how you put it. Isn't this quite close to what Alan Kay's group is doing? I'm a bit sad that he doesn't embrace open development more, I feel we only ever get to see some side products like a parser / DSL framework, instead of seeing the whole picture, which is what I'm actually after.
- walterbell 8y ago> A revolution in computing is in the offing: one that is centered around users, their data, and their interactions with each other. Information is the privileged and important asset; not the APIs of the hardware that runs the compute. The topology of human interaction and human groups around that information system is far, far more important than the hardware network topology, which should be an irrelevant detail of routing. Which researchers or companies are working on this architecture, other than the negative examples of socialmedia/adtech, WeChat and China’s social credit system?
- jchrisa 8y agoIt feels like the work we do at database companies. My earlier work on the Couch ecosystem was inspired by the goal of creating a universal data mesh, so user-driven applications could share data. Now with FaunaDB we are closer to the goal of one cluster for all applications, but with relational constraints and ACID transactions.
- jbpetersen 8y agoTlon's Urbit is probably the best all-fronts attack on the problem I've seen. Honorable mentions for tackling part of the problem go to IPFS and Scuttlebutt. There's a lot of people who understand the larger vision around the decentralization crowd if you can find them in the haystack of hypesters.