It reads like lawyers and auditors took over RubyCentral.
7,747 karma · joined April 2, 2008
I could see Stripe doing something like this. They protect the consumer and come down hard on the merchants.
Imagine them, and maybe a few other processors, competing for this business. The fee would probably drop below 30%. To a large degree, this is the sort of arrangement credit card processors already have between their merchants and consumers and that rate is single digit percentages. Not hard to imagine Visa or MasterCard running a SaaS transaction service for a 5-10% cut.
That comes out to about 25 trillion stars and 40 trillion planets.
Give or take a few orders of magnitude, I’m confident humans will either figure out how to expand into that space or squabble over rationing our remaining resources on earth.
I'm not sure that matters though—if a technology can give humans what they want exactly when they want it, it doesn't matter if AGI, LLMs, humans, or some other technology is behind that.
TBH I wish they had their managed PG cluster running because it would have made it easier to downsize, but I’m happy with SQLite.
I used SQLite for another project that I knew was going to max out at 100 concurrent users and it worked great. The best moment was when a user reported a production error I couldn’t recreate locally, so I downloaded the database and recreated it with the latest production data on my laptop. You couldn’t do that with a high-compliance app, but that’s not most apps.
I’m hesitant to outright say “SQLite and Rails is great”because you have to know your app will run on one node. If you know that then it’s fantastic.
1. A built-in UI and CLI that manages SQLite from a volume. Getting the initial database on a Fly Machine requires more work than it should.
2. `fly console` doesn't work with SQLite because it spins up a separate machine, which isn't connected to the same volume where the SQLite data resides. Instead you have to know to run `fly ssh console —pty`, which effectively SSH's into the machine with the database.
The problem in general with SQLite web apps is they tend to be small apps, so you need a lot of them to make a decent amount of money hosting them.
Today I'm working on doing the unthinkable in an AI-world: putting together a video course that teaches developers how to use Phlex components in Rails projects and selling it for a few hundred bucks.
One way of thinking about AI is that it puts so much new information in front of people that they're going to need help from people known to have experience to navigate it all and curate it. Maybe that will become more valuable?
Who knows. That's the worst part at this moment in time—nobody really knows the depths or limits of it all. We'll see breakthroughs in some areas, and others not.
1. Lot's of great talent on the market. It's a great time to be owning a company right now in terms of hiring.
2. The reality and perception of AI making it possible to do "more with less". I can imagine conversations playing out today, "we need to hire more developers" with the rebuttal, "ok, what about AI? Let's see how far it will go without hiring more people"
3. Even without AI, software teams can do more with less because there's simply much better tooling and less investment is required to get software off the ground.
4. Interest rates and money is simply more expensive than it was 3-5 years ago, so projects need to show greater return for less money.
It does feel like the reality and perception of AI hasn't converged yet. There's a general sense of optimism that AI will solve a lot of huge problems, but we don't really know until it plays out. If you believe history rhymes, humans will figure out what AI does well and doesn't do so well. Once that's worked out, the gap between perception and reality will close and labor markets will tighten up around the new norm.
Does anybody have insight as to why it’s so bad?
That was the very moment Redis®* died for me—I’ve never encountered a tech company that was so aloof about how tech works.
Hopefully that damage is undone.
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*Redis is a registered trademark of Redis Ltd. Any rights therein are reserved to Redis Ltd. Any use by Brad Gessler is for referential purposes only and does not indicate any sponsorship, endorsement or affiliation between Redis and Brad Gessler.
I’m still tweaking the execution of the license, but in principle my thinking is, “if you’re using my software to make money, and you’re making a lot of money, you should probably be paying me to use my software”.
Instead they're failing to build a bunch of stuff that nobody asked for under the banner, "Apple Intelligence".
Please Apple, just make Siri better.
It’s similar to SSH in that it streams stdio from the server to a thin-client, but that’s where the similarities end. It has additional commands, like open a browser to a URL and set “cookies” on the client terminal from the sever.
When all of those commands are put together, you get something like https://github.com/terminalwire/demodx/blob/main/app/termina... that can open the users browser to an SSO, authorize the CLI, then set a token/nonce/whatever as a “cookie” in the users terminal so they can authenticate and run commands against the SaaS.
My intention isn’t to replace SSH—it’s still the best protocol for a lot of things, but I have found it cumbersome to use it to build CLIs for SaaS, which is why I built Terminalwire.
Checkout the async gem, including async-http, async-websockets, and the Falcon web server.
They should also setup a public bug tracker so people can follow issues they care about.
Over time, a community/network of people inside and outside of Apple would evolve that fix issues and improve areas of the operating system they care about. Some sort of reputation system would emerge where people who write quality bug reports or create quality patches would get more attention from Apple.
It wouldn’t be open source, but it would at least be better than the way it works today.