Founders Resign at Mycroft.ai
mycroft.ai
mycroft.ai
People tend to say this when the founders leave but things almost always changes anyway.
Michael Lewis has been running the company for two years, so this resignation is more symbolic than anything.
Sigh, this seems to be a simple blog post. What are people doing to not even be able to deliver such a trivial thing?
Same with Wordpress. Wordpress itself cannot handle that amount of load, which is why you put caching in front of it. Users won't care, I give you that. But if you're talking about how much load a specific software can manage, including putting caching in front of it kind of defeats the point of the conversation.
Actually, with caching - they are. The database is there so that the person writing the blog post doesn't need to be very technical, or maybe so that they don't need to make a special effort just to update some post.
In the end everything is about convenience.
For cases like this at least having a nginx/varnish cache with a use use-stale-on-error policy would have been helpful. Even a very short cache-time like 1 second would probably have given a decent hitrate.
I replaced WP long ago, first with hugo (bad decision), then that with ghost (better decision). Not because of traffic, but because of the sheer number of hacks against the code base of WP appearing as zero days, and the rather extreme upgrading pain (the zero-touch upgrades failed on me a number of times, and I had daily DB backups). I had caching turned up to 11, and that system could easily handle the load (at the peak I was getting a hit every few seconds).
Hugo is/was spectacularly terrible from the perspective of authoring rich content. I could do as well creating a directory tree and writing html by hand. Or markdown.
I guess as I get older, I'm less inclined to spend time on things that don't just work, and don't get in your way with (often bad) opinions on how you should work. WP felt like too great a risk to work with. It was getting expensive to buy plugins to secure the site, when it wasn't generating revenue to offset the costs. Hugo was simply painful to work with. Ghost seems about right. Though grafting in the commenting bits took a little bit of work, which violated my concern about just working.
There are no great blogging solutions. There are a bunch of options of various capability. WP needs caching/php-fpm to work at an acceptable level for reasonable traffic. Hugo (as static pages) wound up not needing much caching. Ghost doesn't need much caching either.
As has already been mentioned as well below, it is trivial to set up caching on a WordPress site. Most of the WordPress sites that I run are entirely served from cache by nginx. Some are just CMS APIs that I use for a next.js build, and others have the simply static plugin which will rebuild the assets whenever something changes. It's really quite an amazing system, and as much as I do not enjoy PHP or WordPress, there is a reason why it is so ubiquitous now.
WordPress does have a serious problem of underqualified people writing plugins for it and such, but again that is not WordPress's fault, unless you want to blame WordPress for being successful enough to attract those people.
Personally I like this. It means that I was able to pick a caching engine that integrates directly into nginx, so that when I write a new post or edit an existing one the extension invalidates it directly in nginx. This means for the vast majority of my site the content is being served directly from nginx's memory cache. My performance is awesome. If they didn't go with an extension approach that would not have been nearly as easy to accomplish.
It's usually what they're not doing: caching.
Also, because the site is overloaded, the non-archive link opened up with the browser tab title "We've had some trouble," which puts a different spin on the whole thing.
It's called the HN 'Hug of Death' :)
AKA just "hugged".
Not sure if this is related.
What do these things even mean anymore?
Happens when one launches more than one venture one after another. Longevity of venture is not typically a concern to unlock this moniker.
Dude makes a startup, gets some VC money, gets paid and leaves in a couple of years when their contract is up. Repeat.
*) Or bring a positive net result, but this is a bit more difficult.
It usually takes at three generations of highly-successful individuals:
Gen 1: Manual labor, kid goes to college and gets a professional job
Gen 2: Professional has a decent home, can provide a basic safety net, and can push / encourage / raise kid to be academically competitive at an elite level.
Gen 3: Starts a business which reaches millions of dollars / enough to be independently wealthy.
You can add one more generation if you also want to break into the monied power class. That's on the very, very fast end. It's usually much more than that, since it's rare each generation will have a highly-successful individual.
It's better than no mobility. We had no mobility just a few hundred years ago.
It takes many forms afterwards. I think many here/on this topic view this as a happily ever after scenario where then there is a family tree full of successful people doing interesting things at low personal risks.
My grandpa was a Gen 4 in your lineup. He was essentially a trust fund kid that never worked and just squandered the significant savings and assets of his depression era parents. My dad got some rather minor assets. Or so I heard growing up. In reality he got a free house, the one I grew up in, and several debt free rental units/cash flow. Not luxury apartments but growing college town type market. He was essentially a minor league trust fund kid who was bitter about having to work to afford everything he wanted (something he never saw his dad do). He kept a mediocre job and never strived for much. He was more interested in exotic cars, fashion, women, etc. He ultimately blew through all his inheritance in by my young adult years. I got nothing but a stable home environment growing up. Paid for my own college, cars, and everything else. I know many others in similar situations where gen 4-6 seems to be highly correlated to addiction, crime, etc. and just never strive for more.
I feel like I’m just starting over with no real advantage. Similar to maybe what gen 2 had.
This is my translation from "富不过三代”, an old Chinese saying about the impossibility of sustaining wealth.
In some similar way, the power and wealth of a nation also is unsustainable. Every powerful nation falls eventually.
And even the whole earth undergo patterns of up and down. 20th century seems a peak of human civilization, and 21 century seems a slow match to the inevitable crash...
Thats what I was tought as a kid... although oop north in the UK they say "clogs to clogs in three generations".
https://rhasspy.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
I'm using it at home and it's working pretty well, I've written a few python extensions to cover all my use cases. Lmk if you have questions!
I remember with the Mark II Kickstarter in 2017 they were kind of the Messiah of privacy-conscious voice control. I really wanted to back them but I didn't have the cash at time. Though that turned out to be great luck.
Because then they screwed that up and nothing happened for years. Now they continue but the project is more like a smart screen than a smart speaker now.
And all this time it's still not possible to run the core locally for true privacy. As it is it's just the same as Google, Amazon and Apple just with better promises on privacy.
Maybe I'm overlooking something because they have long fallen off my radar. But I'm still disappointed about the Kickstarter fail. They have a lot of trust to rebuild, at least with me.
> The expectation that you get anything in return from backing a kickstarter needs to be reset.
This is why Kickstarter repeats time and time again that it's not a marketplace. If you go into it thinking you're buying a product, you're gonna have a bad time. That's not at all what it is.
I'd still love for an open source voice assistant to exist - especially since Sonos bought Snips a few years ago and doesn't seem to have done much with it, but not as excited about this project I was a few years ago
I wish it got more attention. I never understood why Mozilla built this half-assed search plugin feature on the addons site instead of integrating with Mycroft when it had already existed for years.
I'm not sure what niche I could use it for. As it is it's not quite a replacement for Google assistant. For custom stuff rhasspy does a better job...
Give me the ability to store a bit of data accessable to app my nodes and an Android client and it becomes a lot more reasonable.
Their goal is to become the platform for embedding voice assistants in things like cars.
Sounds like they were trying to make their company name sound/look extremely close to Microsoft...