As a cynical, seasoned pro, I loved it and I love the ideas behind it. The only note I have is that I don't think it's really accurate to say this approach was

As a cynical, seasoned pro, I loved it and I love the ideas behind it. The only note I have is that I don't think it's really accurate to say this approach wasn't possible in 2004. I was a working web dev in 2004, and from that perspective, what we did was pretty close to what the talk describes. Intermediated by commerce, certainly; as I recall having put it one day in that same job after hanging up a call wherein had occasioned a request that $400 a month of backhaul be provided free of charge, it's nice there's folks out there trying to save the world, but some of us have to earn a living. ("You said you were a web dev. Why were you talking to anyone about backhaul?" I pulled cable too sometimes, in those days. The mid-00s were a different time.) And of course there were no LLMs involved, that technology then still being much the stuff of science fiction and allied fields like futurism. Even so, though: none of us had any real idea what we were doing, but we knew how to figure out what worked and what didn't, and that was usually enough even if the level of trial and error, and the lack of rigor, were shocking by today's standards. (I wrote my first SPA, a triathlon registration system for an org that lots of folks in the DMV might recall if I mentioned a name, in 2011. Imagine my surprise when two years later, on leaving my local backwater of web dev for the mainstream, I discovered that was what I had done, when I thought I'd just been trying a wild idea I was sure would fail, because it was that or lose the contract that was keeping the business afloat...) Honestly, the vision described in this talk is a lot more like the kind of life I thought I'd live, when I got into this line around the turn of the millennium. It'd be easy to take an overly rosy view, and maybe I am. But then too, it'd be good if not every quarter-square-mile neighborhoodlet in my city had an intimate dependency on Amazon in order to function, too.