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This looks really interesting, and bitcraft looks cute. I did hit a personal bias: when I saw "maincloud" as a phrase to do with pricing my heart sank because

by weego 2y ago

This looks really interesting, and bitcraft looks cute. I did hit a personal bias: when I saw "maincloud" as a phrase to do with pricing my heart sank because my brain went "they've wedged in some crypto shit!". Turns out no, it's just a naming thing for hosting credits.

pmx 2y ago
I feel like they've been inspired by crypto for the way they handle billing. They sell you "Energy" which you use by running on their infra. Seems like a needless abstraction to me.
- anentropic 2y ago
  Doesn't Snowflake do something similar though?
  - cloutiertyler 2y ago
    They do indeed.
  - Tomuus 2y ago
    And Vercel's "compute units"
cmrdporcupine 2y ago
There was a lot of crypto-adjacent talk in earlier versions of their marketing and product design. Without it actually being anything actually crypto-adjacent. Analogies drawn to ethereum etc concepts, I guess because they figured somehow there was an audience that would get those references and it would allow them to understand the product better? I have no idea why. I was hired to work on very early versions of it, and left very early on in part because I wanted nothing to do with that angle. IMO it's a liability.
- cloutiertyler 2y ago
  It had nothing to do with marketing, it was because conceptually stored procedures are similar to smart-contracts and share technical aspects. We thought engineers would find the similarities interesting. Instead they immediately assumed we were shilling tokens, so we pulled it down. Kind of sad that people can't see past that, but I also understand. It is what it is.
  - cmrdporcupine 2y ago
    Hey Tyler; looking back I think maybe a better language than "reducers" etc would have been to just something analogous to the ECS term "systems", which I understand to be "processes that operate on entities / components" and always seemed overly general and non-specific to me but at least is familiar to game programmers operating in data driven design. You may recall I was partial to the term "verb" :-)
    - cloutiertyler 2y ago
      I think that's very fair, we've got quite a lot of momentum behind reducers at this point though. That doesn't make it a good, name but it is a sticky one. "mutation" may also have been a good choice?
- cloutiertyler 2y ago
  Oh it's you! Sorry cmrdporcupine! I didn't see.

by weego 2y ago

pmx 2y ago

I feel like they've been inspired by crypto for the way they handle billing. They sell you "Energy" which you use by running on their infra. Seems like a needless abstraction to me.

anentropic 2y ago
Doesn't Snowflake do something similar though?
- cloutiertyler 2y ago
  They do indeed.
- Tomuus 2y ago
  And Vercel's "compute units"

cmrdporcupine 2y ago

There was a lot of crypto-adjacent talk in earlier versions of their marketing and product design. Without it actually being anything actually crypto-adjacent. Analogies drawn to ethereum etc concepts, I guess because they figured somehow there was an audience that would get those references and it would allow them to understand the product better? I have no idea why. I was hired to work on very early versions of it, and left very early on in part because I wanted nothing to do with that angle. IMO it's a liability.

cloutiertyler 2y ago
It had nothing to do with marketing, it was because conceptually stored procedures are similar to smart-contracts and share technical aspects. We thought engineers would find the similarities interesting. Instead they immediately assumed we were shilling tokens, so we pulled it down. Kind of sad that people can't see past that, but I also understand. It is what it is.
- cmrdporcupine 2y ago
  Hey Tyler; looking back I think maybe a better language than "reducers" etc would have been to just something analogous to the ECS term "systems", which I understand to be "processes that operate on entities / components" and always seemed overly general and non-specific to me but at least is familiar to game programmers operating in data driven design. You may recall I was partial to the term "verb" :-)
  - cloutiertyler 2y ago
    I think that's very fair, we've got quite a lot of momentum behind reducers at this point though. That doesn't make it a good, name but it is a sticky one. "mutation" may also have been a good choice?
cloutiertyler 2y ago
Oh it's you! Sorry cmrdporcupine! I didn't see.