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kentonv

20,211 karma · joined December 12, 2011

Tech lead for Cloudflare Workers: workers.dev

Also created: capnproto.org, sandstorm.io, lanparty.house

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kentonv··on Nitter and XCancel resume service after legal advice
If you keep your feed on "following" instead of "for you", then the algorithm is irrelevant.

TBH I'm pretty confused why anyone uses "for you". For me at least, any time I accidentally wander over to that feed, the stuff it shows me is just dumb... not even political necessarily, just dumb clickbaity shit that insults my intelligence.

The only time I ever see hyper-political stuff is if I peek into the replies to a prominent politician. Highly recommend never doing that.

kentonv··on Nitter and XCancel resume service after legal advice
AFAIK Jack Dorsey has not been affiliated with Bluesky for quite some time. I was thinking of Jay Graber, but actually she's not CEO anymore either. I don't know anything about the new guy TBH.

EDIT: Oops, I think I misinterpreted, you meant to compare Jack vs. Elon as CEOs of Twitter itself.

kentonv··on Nitter and XCancel resume service after legal advice
The CEO's antics, no matter how disturbing, simply aren't most people's top concern when making a product choice. This may seem crazy to the hyper-political crowd but most people really do not see themselves as being part of this war where every single decision they make in their lives has to prioritize their side.

When choosing a social network, probably the top priority for most people is where the people they want to talk to are.

If CEO antics were the thing that mattered, I would certainly choose Bluesky over X. But the reality is the tech community -- at least, the part of it I want to interact with -- is mostly on X. Many of us tried to switch to Bluesky for a bit but ironically got pushed back to X due to Bluesky culture being hostile to tech and especially hostile to AI. I'd post the same non-political tech thing on X and Bluesky and get lots of interesting feedback on X while getting screamed at on Bluesky, so I stopped posting on Bluesky.

Would love for this to change but it's a hard problem.

kentonv··on Cloud in a Bottle: making self-hosting accessible to everyone
"Long abandoned" is a fair characterization of Sandstorm.

There is a loyal community of enthusiasts trying to keep it alive, but realistically not a lot of progress has been made. (Though, AI has helped them make more progress lately.)

But the original creator of Sandstorm (me) did indeed abandon it long ago (sorry).

More here: https://sandstorm.io/news/2024-01-14-move-to-sandstorm-org

kentonv··on Cloud in a Bottle: making self-hosting accessible to everyone
Current status explained here:

https://sandstorm.io/news/2024-01-14-move-to-sandstorm-org

kentonv··on Authorization terminology is a mess: Let's fix it
Also: https://capnweb.com/

(shameless plug)

kentonv··on Extensible Software in the age of LLMs
Thanks!
kentonv··on Extensible Software in the age of LLMs
The AI-authored apps aspect is obviously something that Sandstorm didn't have.

But Cloudflare OS also supports a concept of "blueprints", where, once you've built your app, you create a "blueprint" (a copy of the code) and share it with others, from which they can create their own instances of the app. So it is still very much about sharing apps and running other people's apps, and the sandbox makes this safe and compliant even if you're not sure the app developer knows what they're doing.

kentonv··on Extensible Software in the age of LLMs
We (Cloudflare OS) run an app's client-side code in a null-origin iframe sandbox that is denied access to everything that we can possibly deny access to. Its only communication line to the outside world is via a Cap'n Web RPC session over postMessage() to the parent frame, which in turn forwards the session on to the app's own server, which runs in a Dynamic Worker sandbox on its end. So the app client can only talk to the app server and nothing else.

Or at least, ideally. Unfortunately, content-security-policy today has a few exotic holes. WebRTC, for instance, cannot be blocked; the standard simply doesn't cover it.

So it's not suitable as a sandbox against malicious code trying to leak data by any means possible. Instead it's protection against the AI doing something stupid, perhaps prompted by a user who doesn't know better.

(We would love to get those CSP holes plugged, though...)

kentonv··on Extensible Software in the age of LLMs
FWIW none of Cloudflare's marketing material mentions the Sandstorm connection, it was something I said in personal tweets:

https://x.com/KentonVarda/status/2084990137180590572

kentonv··on Extensible Software in the age of LLMs
For the record.

I am the lead engineer on Cloudflare OS (and Cloudflare Workers).

I am also the creator of Sandstorm.io.

And I'm the one calling it a successor. Wasn't some marketing decision -- that's directly from me.

Honestly really interested to know why you feel this isn't accurate.

FWIW, I didn't choose the name Cloudflare OS -- but I did frequently describe Sandstorm as being an OS, back in the day. Sure, it layers on top of Linux, but it's an environment where you install apps and run them, with the platform managing the execution environment, permissions, resource management, etc. That's sort of what an OS does. Cloudflare OS does all that as well.

kentonv··on Extensible Software in the age of LLMs
Eh? Why do you feel it's inaccurate to call it a successor to sandstorm.io?
kentonv··on Models Are Getting Dumber on Purpose
> Scientists, perhaps less so.

I disagree. In fact, I find people who think of themselves as highly rational seem to be particularly prone to rationalization. Because being rational is integral to their whole identity, they are much more eager to accept their own rationalizations as sound and resist admitting that they are guided by instinct.

kentonv··on Models Are Getting Dumber on Purpose
> It's a statistical model with useful emergent properties. It doesn't think, it doesn't reason, it isn't aware of facts or the rules of logic.

What makes you so sure your own brain doesn't work the same way?

kentonv··on Models Are Getting Dumber on Purpose
Tangent: This is often true of humans as well.

We often make a decision based on a gut feeling, and then backfill a logical reason supporting our feeling, without even realizing we're doing it -- rationalization.

kentonv··on Self-hosted web push Cloudflare Worker, works on iOS
It means you can deploy it in your own Cloudflare account, as opposed to it being a service provided by the developer.

But also, the Cloudflare Workers Runtime is open source, so you could deploy it or your own machines, too, if you want:

https://github.com/cloudflare/workerd

kentonv··on Nvidia Nemotron 3.5 Lightning and NeMo Switchyard
Only if you know what it means. To many people these suffixes are gibberish. Also ollama doesn't actually show that suffix in its model index. Don't say "don't use ollama", you sound like a Linux user telling people not to use Mac. (I say this as a Linux user who despises Apple products myself.)
kentonv··on Nvidia Nemotron 3.5 Lightning and NeMo Switchyard
Oh!

I think I missed that and assumed it wasn't because it performed similarly to the dense models. Interesting!

kentonv··on Nvidia Nemotron 3.5 Lightning and NeMo Switchyard
Coincidentally I've been playing with small (~30B) self-hostable models for coding tasks today -- specifically plugging them into Cloudflare OS (which I work on) and asking each to build a collaborative whiteboard.

I'm finding that the Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models (Qwen 3.6-35B, and Nemotron 3.5 Lightning) are, well, terrible at this. They just couldn't get the job done at all. Went way off the rails. They are really fast though!

Whereas ~30B dense models (not MoE) are pretty decent. I tried Muse Glimmer, Gemma 4-31B, Qwen 3.6-27B, and Laguna XS[0]. They were all able to build a working collaborative whiteboard app, without any guidance (other than feeding back error logs to the model). I also asked each to then draw a monkey by calling the API of the whiteboard it has just built. Laguna drew random scribbles but the rest all managed to produce something monkey-like.

(Frontier models in comparison will write the app in one shot with no errors at all.)

Note that both Qwen 3.6 and Gemma 4 each have both MoE and dense variants. I find this very confusing, because e.g. ollama's model index typically only distinguishes variants by their size, but MoE vs. dense makes a huge difference in how they actually perform. IMO they should use a suffix, like Qwen 3.6-moe vs. Qwen 3.6-dense, or maybe Qwen 3.6-fast vs. Qwen 3.6-smart...

[0] EDIT: Turns out Laguna XS is MoE, I misunderstood. It performed similarly to the dense models. But maybe this explains why it couldn't write code and think about monkey shapes at the same time!

kentonv··on Cloudflare OS: an open platform for agents, apps, and work
Thought experiment: Let's imagine that we actually just want to build a product that provides value to customers. No tricks up our sleeves.

What would we have done differently in that case?

kentonv··on Cloudflare OS: an open platform for agents, apps, and work
To be fair the readme is pretty clear that this is "early access" and still in a state of rapid development.
kentonv··on Cloudflare OS: an open platform for agents, apps, and work
It does not cost $2m of compute to run an instance of Cloudflare OS. I am running it on a random server in my basement.
kentonv··on Cloudflare OS: an open platform for agents, apps, and work
We're adding an update function.

Didn't need it yet on day one. :)

kentonv··on Cloudflare OS: an open platform for agents, apps, and work
You are reading WAY too much into it.

We aren't that clever about naming at Cloudflare.

Do you know how we named Wrangler, our local dev tool for Workers?

Literally, the person that created it said: "I named this Wrangler because I wanted to give it a name so dumb that we definitely won't release it under that name and will come up with something better."

We didn't come up with something better later.

Honestly Cloudflare OS is kinda same thing. We brainstormed names last week trying to come up with something better but nobody could agree on anything so it just went out as Cloudflare OS, which is what we'd been calling it internally for no particularly good reason.

kentonv··on Cloudflare OS: an open platform for agents, apps, and work
You can self-host using workerd.

But I'm certainly not claiming that this alone is sufficient to comply with regulations. I have no idea.

kentonv··on Cloudflare OS: an open platform for agents, apps, and work
Yeah sorry, only the providers I listed are supported right now. We'll be widening support soon.
kentonv··on Cloudflare OS: an open platform for agents, apps, and work
Always!

https://www.cloudflare.com/careers/jobs/?department=Emerging...

kentonv··on Cloudflare OS: an open platform for agents, apps, and work
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmS5s6Wbin4 -- Talk / demo I gave at AI Engineer World's Fair last month. (Final branding was still in flux at the time so it is presented as "Gadgets".)
kentonv··on Celld: Self-hosted, distributed Durable Objects
Honestly, you wouldn't want to run our internal implementation -- it's far too complicated. Unless you have 100+ datacenters around the world -- then maybe.

The goal of this new design is to scale to a cluster while being operationally very easy to set up. Ideal for self-hosting.

NFSv4 is an easy first step, convenient because it's broadly understood, has many implementations, and requires no client libraries. I could imagine a follow-up to support LiteFS instead of NFS could make a lot of sense, though it'll get more complicated.

But yes, celld is definitely ahead of us here. No doubt about that.

kentonv··on Cloudflare OS: an open platform for agents, apps, and work
workerd stand-alone is designed to work well at small-medium scale.

If we open sourced Cloudflare's production scheduler, nobody would be able to use it because it is explicitly designed for HUGE, globe-spanning scale. Well, nobody except our direct competitors.

But the goal with workerd is actually that it should be pretty easy to run, about as easy as Node. Stateless workloads should scale trivially (just add more instances and load balance). For Durable Objects (statefull), currently it doesn't scale well at all, but I'm working on changes[0] so that it scales nicely across a cluster. I intentionally chose a design here that is operationally easy to set up. (Basically: just connect all the nodes to NFSv4.)

[0] https://github.com/cloudflare/workerd/pull/6780

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