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Ach. I don't know. I think that general purpose computing is simply changing. It's not going to be "A man and his Linux in a basement" anymore but rather "Let

by Garlef 4y ago

Ach. I don't know. I think that general purpose computing is simply changing. It's not going to be "A man and his Linux in a basement" anymore but rather "Let's run some code in a remote distributed serverless runtime". Cloud Excell for the masses. One part where we can already see this is how cloud environments like colab, hugging face, repl.it, etc remove some parts of maintaining a full installation of an OS. If you just want to write some python and run it on a GPU you don't have to buy a GPU, install drivers, etc anymore. We should be happy that we won't have to care about the bare metal (unless we want to).

matlin 4y ago
The downside to this future is that it, being the shift from applications to services, means instead of your data living on your computer it is instead fragmented across a bunch of other random places. While most consumers don't really care and actually prefer the switch to everything being cloud-first, the stagnation it can cause for other developers is substantial. E.g. If I want to make a cool email client, I don't have to ask the user's permission to send and receive emails, I have to have Google's permission to access their machine and to make this compelling as Gmail, I have to then store all of my user's data on my own servers. This compared to me just writing a client-side application that has no server requirements is a huge bust IMO. My preferred future is where every user has their own server that can run general purpose applications. It would have all the benefits of the cloud (data available across all of your devices) and would grant developers more freedoms to create compelling experiences. The future, I want is that some high schooler could create the next Google Docs without having to compete with Google on large scale data infrastructure and security but instead on user experience.
- Garlef 4y ago
  > every user has their own server I think we're on the same page. The only difference is that I think that the OS/Server/Filesystem is a big hinderance for many applications. I just want an environment where I can to execute arbitrary code. My version would be *> Every user has their own remote code execution environment. One good candidate for the near future would be serverless WASM runtimes backed by serverless databases. (But you'll still have to store your codebase in a file system.)

by Garlef 4y ago

matlin 4y ago

The downside to this future is that it, being the shift from applications to services, means instead of your data living on your computer it is instead fragmented across a bunch of other random places. While most consumers don't really care and actually prefer the switch to everything being cloud-first, the stagnation it can cause for other developers is substantial. E.g. If I want to make a cool email client, I don't have to ask the user's permission to send and receive emails, I have to have Google's permission to access their machine and to make this compelling as Gmail, I have to then store all of my user's data on my own servers. This compared to me just writing a client-side application that has no server requirements is a huge bust IMO. My preferred future is where every user has their own server that can run general purpose applications. It would have all the benefits of the cloud (data available across all of your devices) and would grant developers more freedoms to create compelling experiences. The future, I want is that some high schooler could create the next Google Docs without having to compete with Google on large scale data infrastructure and security but instead on user experience.

Garlef 4y ago
> every user has their own server I think we're on the same page. The only difference is that I think that the OS/Server/Filesystem is a big hinderance for many applications. I just want an environment where I can to execute arbitrary code. My version would be *> Every user has their own remote code execution environment. One good candidate for the near future would be serverless WASM runtimes backed by serverless databases. (But you'll still have to store your codebase in a file system.)