Entries tagged with thoughts
Redis and the Cost of Ambition
And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.
What happened to dear old Redis, I wondered. And the more I thought about it, a satisfying explanation started to coalesce which explains all the above phenomena. To me, the picture that emerges is that of a solution that lost its identity through ambition.
Tokens and Dreams
The one great principle of the English law is, to make business for itself.
The map is not the territory.
This is why I'm stuck. I'm stuck between competing narratives, each of which is exerting real business pressure. To push-back when people's daily experience of AI is of the magical variety is seen as almost perverse. I find myself constantly wanting to say "No! I embrace these tools! This is not thinly-veiled self-preservation! Just hear me out..."
Slopification and Its Discontents
O sovran, virtuous, precious of all trees
In Paradise! of operation blest
To sapience, hitherto obscured, infamed.
A couple weeks back Anthropic announced a promotion offering six free months of their maximum Claude plan to open-source developers. I submitted an application, and a few days later an invitation arrived in my inbox and I was up-and-running on the latest Opus 4.6 model.
The fruit was plucked and in my hand.
Ghost in the Shell: my AI Experiment
A man's at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with. He can know his heart, but he dont want to. Rightly so. Best not to look in there. It aint the heart of a creature that is bound in the way that God has set for it. You can find meanness in the least of creatures, but when God made man the devil was at his elbow. A creature that can do anything. Make a machine. And a machine to make the machine. An evil that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it.
This isn't a post about the machines, though. It is always the human builder that comes first and last.
"For Humans" makes me cringe
When Kenneth Reitz created the requests library, the Python community rushed to embrace the project, as it provided (finally) a clean, sane API for making HTTP requests. He subtitled his project "Python HTTP Requests for Humans", referring, I suppose, to the fact that his API provided developer-friendly APIs. If naming things "for humans" had stopped there, that would have been fine with me, but instead there's been a steady stream of new projects describing themselves as being "For Humans" and I have issues with that.
Why I won't be switching to Disque
Disque's alpha release announcement generated some buzz on HackerNews. If you missed it, Disque is a distributed message broker from Salvatore Sanfilippo, the author of Redis.
In the Limitations section of the README, Salvatore has written:
Disque was designed a bit in astronaut mode, not triggered by an actual use case of mine, but more in response to what I was seeing people doing with Redis as a message queue and with other message queues.
This admission makes me wary of using Disque, even if it reaches a stable release, because of my own experience with similar projects I've created but never actually used. These projects are usually fun opportunities for learning, but when it comes to maintenance, my experience has shown me that they quickly become a burden. Usually the problem is masked by the fact that if I'm not using it usually nobody else is either, but in the rare case I do end up with users, then eventually those users are going to submit bug reports and feature requests.
For a problem as complex as a distribute message broker, I imagine that there are going to be a lot of bug reports, strange edge-cases, and feature requests to support exotic use-cases. I hope that, in addition to his work on Redis, Salvatore can find the time to support Disque!
The other reason I don't foresee using Disque is alluded to in the author's own comments. He observes that many people are using Redis as a message broker, and decides that maybe there is a need for a "Redis of messaging". I would say the opposite is true, and that instead of another message server, people want to use Redis!
Redis integrates very nicely into the stack for web-based projects. It can be used as a cache, for locking, as a primary data store, for write-heavy portions of the application, and yes, as a message broker.
Perhaps the reason people are using Redis as a message broker is because they don't want to use something else?
Lawrence, KS
I am proud to live in Lawrence, KS, a college town of about 100,000 which has been my home for the majority of my life. Perhaps the most striking feature about my home is the amazing sky here -- nowhere else I've lived comes close:
Being in the tech industry, I'm often asked if I have plans to move away to a place with more jobs. I always answer simply and somewhat apologetically that I intend to stay in Kansas. Answering that way is so much less embarassing than explaining why I love Kansas. My home is very much a part of me, though, and I'd like to write just once about why I am so happy to live here.