Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For November 3rd, 2017

Hey, it's HighScalability time: 

Luscious visualization of a neural network as a large directed graph. It's a full layout of the ResNet-50 training graph, a neural network with ~3 million nodes, and ~10 million edges, using Gephi for the graph layout, to output a 25000x25000 pixel image. (mattfyles)

If you like this sort of Stuff then please support me on Patreon. And take a look at Explain the Cloud Like I'm 10, my new book for complete cloud newbies. Thanks for your support! It means a lot to me.

• 96.4%: adversarial algorithm fools Google's image recognition; 70%+: GOOG and FB influence over internet traffic; 99%: bird reduction on farms using tuned laser guns; 52.45%: people playing my indie game have pirated it; 371,642: open-source projects depend on React; 6: words needed to ID you in email: 2x: node.js speed increase with Turbofan; 3: students who discovered 'Dieselgate'; 215KWh: energy consumed per bitcoin xaction, enough for a car to travel 1,000 miles; 33%: increase in Alphabet's quarterly profits; $1 billion: Amazon's ad business; 1 pixel: all it takes to fool our AI overlords; 61%: increase in Alibaba revenue; 1 minute: time it takes a 1964 acoustic coupler modem to load a Wikipedia page; $30,000: bitcoin lost for want of a PIN; 40%: increased learning speed using direct current stimulation; 1 million: IoT devices owned by Reaper; $52.6 billion: Apple quarterly revenue; 


• Quotable Quotes: 
  • @pasiphae_goals: #33: go’s compiler is extremely fast, giving you ample time to debug data races and deadlocks.
  • Tim O'Reilly: we can choose instead to lift each other up, to build an economy where people matter, not just profit. We can dream big dreams and solve big problems. Instead of using technology to replace people, we can use it to augment them so they can do things that were previously impossible.
  • André Staltz: These are no longer the same companies as 4 years ago. GOOG is not anymore an internet company, it’s the knowledge internet company. FB is not an internet company, it’s the social internet company. They used to attempt to compete, and this competition kept the internet market diverse. Today, however, they seem mostly satisfied with their orthogonal dominance of parts of the Web, and we are losing diversity of choices. Which leads us to another part of the internet: e-commerce and AMZN...In the Trinet, we will have even more vivid exchange of information between people, but we will sacrifice freedom. Many of us will wake up to the tragedy of this tradeoff only once it is reality.
  • @math_rachel: Data is not neutral. Data will always bear the marks of its history. 
  • Jeff Bar: p3.16xlarge is 2.37 billion times faster, so the poor little PC would be barely halfway through a calculation that would run for 1 second today
  • @krishnan: I criticized Google calling their App Engine Serverless during their cloud conference Here @ben11kehoe says the same
  • F5: The obvious lesson is that the state of IoT security is still incredibly poor, and we need to do a better job of threat modeling6 the Internet7 of8 Things9.
  • Jakub Kasztalski: I just downloaded one of the pirated copies of my game. They asked me to remove my ad-blocker to keep their site running. Oh the sweet irony
  • Dart: The car would start drifting to side of the road and not know how to recover. The reason for the car’s instability was that no data was collected on the side of the road. During the data collection the supervisor always drove along the center of the road; however, if the robot began to drift from the demonstrations, it would not know how to recover because it saw no examples.
  • Tim O'Reilly: The company wanted to know how to get more developers for its platform. David asked a key question: “Do any of them play with it after work, on their own time?” The answer was no. David told them that until they fixed that problem, reaching out to external developers was wasted effort.
  • @swardley: X: Why do you think Amazon is so dangerous? Don't you think they will slow down?
    Me: No, they'll get faster.
  • @whispersystems: Signal is back after a brief service interruption. We appreciate your patience as we added more capacity to resolve connection errors.
  • lwansbrough: What the hell is taking up all that RAM? Slack is using over 800MB of RAM on my computer right now, and it's completely idle. I've got a C# process on my computer right now handling thousands of messages per second and consuming 1/20th the RAM. If you rebuild Slack in Xamarin you'd probably drop your RAM consumption to under 50MB, just a guess. JS fiends are gonna tell me C# ain't JS, and I agree. TypeScript ain't JS either, and it's a hell of a lot closer to C# than it is JS.
  • @vgill: Large-scale distributed systems are less about cool algorithms and more about the relentless hunting down of 6-sigma bugs.
  • Lots more genius quotes that can make you look even smarter. If that interests you, click through for enlightenment.

  Don't miss all that the Internet has to say on Scalability, click below and become eventually consistent with all scalability knowledge (which means this post has many more items to read so please keep on reading)...

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Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For October 27th, 2017

Hey, it's HighScalability time: 

How a mutex works pic.twitter.com/TwFLAVs2yd

— ☠️💀👻Cody👻💀☠️ (@valarauca1) October 21, 2017

Perfect! Now, imagine a little dog snuck under Big Dog's cone of shame and covered the food with its own cone of shame, and it won't leave. That's deadlock. Imagine a stream of little dogs sneaking under Big Dog's cone so Big Dog nevers gets a bite. That's livelock.

If you like this sort of Stuff then please support me on Patreon.

• $100 billion: projected 2021 combined app store spend; 11 TB: SSD; 16: billion dollar disasters in the US this year; 8: meter long 3D printed bridge; 43%: employees who worry about losing their job due to their age; 125 TFLOPS: new AWS EC2 P3 instances; 7%: global Internet traffic flowing over QUIC; 50%: improvement in new in-package DRAM cache-management scheme; 43%: CockroachDB speed improvement executing parallel SQL statements; 325 billion: hours spent in Android apps in Q3; 4.5 million: C++ programmers; 3 trillion: ops per second in Pixel's Image Processing Unit; 80%: drop in Facebook referrals; 1,300 years: longest running business in the world; 40: age when tech workers start worrying about age discrimination; 400GE: first test by China Telecom Guangzhou and Huawei; 


• Quotable Quotes:
  
  • @DynamicWebPaige: "One of our customers has 1 billion invocations daily; they told us their [Azure] bill was only $72 due to serverless computing." #RedShirtDevTour
  • Tim O'Reilly: “He realized then that history is a wave that moves through time slightly faster than we do.” If we are honest with ourselves, each of us has many such moments, when we realize that the world has moved on and we are stuck in the past.
  • @ehashdn: A primer: Site Reliability Engineers = sysadmins with Go / DevOps Engineers = sysadmins with Ruby / Systems Administrators = sysadmins with Perl
  • @ramez: Exponential gains in compute power produces only linear gains in AI accuracy. --> No runaway intelligence explosion 
  • @abnerg: $AMZN AWS reports YoY growth of 41.9% to $4.58B for the Q. $MSFT says Azure was up 90%. The ☁️ is on 🔥
  • @ryan_sb: Programming training doesn't need to start at birth. It's like plumbing: it's a skill, anyone can start anytime, it has hard and easy parts
  • Chuck Hollis: [Oracle] has re-implemented its entire business on a modern cloud platform – SaaS, PaaS and IaaS. Remember we’re talking a ~$200bn market cap company here – no easy trick.  The fun thing is that I’m part of a project to document the before and after around a whole raft of internal business metrics. The comparison is stunning, to say the least.
  • psyc: I can't be sure yet, but I'm starting to be concerned. I turned 40 recently. My current job search has lasted about 5x longer than any previous job search. I've been turned down for nonsensical reasons, such as not having enough experience in a specific language that I have a lot of experience in. (That was an assertion by the interviewer, not the result of technical questioning.) I've been interviewed several times by managers and directors 10 years younger than myself. I've noticed a distinct pattern where they'll ask very basic questions, I'll give a detailed answer than I know to be correct and insightful, and they'll say it's wrong - and I'm just dumbfounded, like what can I say? I'm not going to argue with them.
  • jquery: So even if there’s not explicit bias against older devs there is implicit bias by favoring quick whiteboard speed (memorization/practice) over the practiced thoughtfulness of older devs. And a one-off interview focused heavily on algos can sink anyone. It only takes one.

    This isn’t limited to FB. The $Elite companies I got offers from are the ones where I lucked through that one tricky interview by knowing it offhand. I worry as I get older, even as I become a stronger developer, I will become less and less able to marathon through these interviews. No wonder so many older devs switch to management.
  • Jonathan Solórzano-Hamilton: “You will never be able to understand any of what I’ve created. I am Albert F***ing Einstein and you are all monkeys scrabbling in the dirt.”
  • Franz Faerber: Hekaton achieves a roughly 15.7X performance improvement at 12 cores, while the scalability of the traditional engine is limited due to the overheads inherent in a disk-based architecture running a memory-bound workload.
  • @mhall119: I'm convinced that 90% of good software development in knowing what code not to write
  • Mohit Kumar: Coinhive has been hacked — a popular browser-based service that offers website owners to embed a JavaScript to utilise their site visitors' CPUs power to mine the Monero cryptocurrency for monetisation.
  • @timallenwagner: Couple updates: local execution is available via SAM Local. Lambda is also HIPAA eligible and PCI compliant.
  • @erictartanson: Amazon has 540K employees, nearly 7x that of Google and 4x that of Microsoft, 2nd largest US employer 
  • @NetflixUIE: Removing client-side React.js (but keeping it on the server) resulted in a 50% performance improvement on our landing page
  • Jonathan Lin Ern Sheong: Stack Overflow takes a hybrid approach, where links to questions are of the form https://stackoverflow.com/questions/42764046/ses-port-is-blocked-in-gcp with a perma ID and a vanity portion. It is friendly to both humans and computers. The URL remains valid even if the vanity portion changes when the Question is edited.
  • Vincent Lanaria: Alphabet says that deploying Project Loon in Puerto Rico is the first time it has used "machine learning powered algorithms" to ensure the balloons are over Puerto Rico. In other words, it hasn't found the optimal way of going at it just yet.
  • There are so many more quotes. Click through to read them all.

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One model at a time: Integrating and running Deep Learning models in production at EyeEm

This is a guest by Michele Palmia of @EyeEm.

We’ve now been running computer vision models in production at EyeEm for more than three years - on literally billions of images. As an engineer involved in building the infrastructure behind it from scratch, I both enjoyed and suffered the many technical challenges this task raised. This journey has also taught me a lot about managing processes and relationships with different teams, tasks of an especially challenging nature in a dynamic startup environment.

What follows is an attempt to consolidate the computer vision pipeline history at EyeEm, some of the challenges we had to face, some of the learning we’ve gained, and a glimpse into its future.

Index the world’s photos

Click to read more ...

New Book: Explain the Cloud Like I'm 10

What is the cloud? Why is it called a cloud? How does the cloud work? What does it mean when something is 'in the cloud'?

I wrote a new book: Explain the Cloud Like I'm 10, answering those questions for the complete beginner. It makes the perfect gift for Halloween. And Thanksgiving. And Christmas. Oh, and birthdays too!

The irony is, if you read HighScalability, you're not the target audience :-) Explain the Cloud Like I'm 10 is for people who hear about the cloud everyday and have wondered what it is.

Talking with people outside the tech bubble I've found the cloud is still a mystery. I think that's because almost every explanation of the cloud I could find was a rewording of the same unhelpful technobabble.

In Explain the Cloud Like I'm 10 I've used a lot of pictures and a lot of examples. I go slow and easy. I try really hard to build up an intuitive understanding of what the cloud is and how it works.

If you know of anyone who might benefit from a book like this, I'd appreciate it if you'd pass it on.

thanks! 

Explain the Cloud Like I'm 10

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For October 20th, 2017

Hey, it's HighScalability time: 

Cassini's last image of Saturn, stitched together from 11 color composites, each a stack of three images taken in red, green, and blue channels. (Jason Major)

If you like this sort of Stuff then please support me on Patreon.

• 21 million: max bitcoins ever; #2: Alibaba's cloud?; 1M MWh: Amazon Wind Farm Texas with 100 Turbines is live; $1000: cost to track someone with mobile ads; 20%: ebook sales of total; 17: qubit chip; 30%: Uber deep learning speedup using RDMA; 


• Quoteable Quotes:
  • Tim O'Reilly: So what makes a real unicorn of this amazing kind? 1.  It seems unbelievable at first. 2.  It changes the way the world works. 3.  It results in an ecosystem of new services, jobs, business models, and industries.
  • @rajivpant: AlphaGo has already beaten two of the world's best players. But the new AlphaGo Zero began with a blank Go board and no data apart from the rules, and then played itself. Within 72 hours it was good enough to beat the original AlphaGo by 100 games to zero!
  • @swardley: Containers aka winning battle but losing the war. AMZN joining CNCF is misdirection. Lambda is given a free pass to entire software industry
  • vlucas: Event-Driven architecture sounds like somewhat of a panacea with no worries about hard-coded or circular dependencies, more de-coupling with no hard contracts, etc. but in practice it ends up being your worst debugging nightmare. I would much rather have a hard dependency fail fast and loudly than trigger an event that goes off into the ether silently.
  • @xaprb: Monitoring tells you whether the system works. Observability lets you ask why it's not working.
  • Brenon Daly: Startups are increasingly stuck. The well-worn path to riches – selling to an established tech giant – isn’t providing nearly as many exits as it once did. In fact, based on 451 Research calculations, 2017 will see roughly 100 fewer exits for VC-backed companies than any year over the past half-decade. This current crimp in startup deal flow, which is costing billions of dollars in VC distributions, could have implications well beyond Silicon Valley.
  • @krishnan: The battle lines are IaaS+ with Kubernetes vs Platforms like OpenShift or Pivotal CF Vs Serverless. No one is a winner yet
  • @fredwilson: "We now have 30,000 data scientists .... 100x more than any other hedge fund ... we are not yet two years old"
  • Elon Musk: Our goal is get you there and ensure the basic infrastructure for propellant production and survival is in place. A rough analogy is that we are trying to build the equivalent of the transcontinental railway. A vast amount of industry will need to be built on Mars by many other companies and millions of people.
  • Samburaj Das: ‘Dubai Blockchain Strategy’, which aims to record and process 100% of all documents and transactions on a blockchain by the year 2020. The sweeping blockchain mandate was announced by Hamdan bin Mohammed, the crown prince of Dubai, in October 2016.
  • @danielbryantuk: "Defence in depth can add 15% to dev cost. Some think this is a lot, but does it compare to data being exposed?" @eoinwoodz #OReillySACon
  • @cmeik: It's solving the issues around gossip floods, it's providing a more reliable infrastructure, it's alleviating head of line blocking.  These are the problems that when solved *enable* large clusters.
  • Benedict Evans: the four leading tech companies of the current cycle (outside China), Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon, or ‘GAFA’, have together over three times the revenue of Microsoft and Intel combined (‘Wintel’, the dominant partnership of the previous cycle), and close to six times that of IBM. They have far more employees, and they invest far more.
  • Alan Andersen: At Canopy Tax we have been using dockerized micro-serviced Java containers using vertx with RxJava and have found it to be highly performant and memory efficient.
  • David Gerard: as of June 2017 the Bitcoin network was running 5,500,000,000,000,000,000 (5.5×1018, or 5.5 quintillion) hashes per second, or 3.3×1021 (3.3 sextillion) per ten minutes
  • @CodeWisdom: "One accurate measurement is worth a thousand expert opinions." - Grace Hopper
  • Hiten Shah: if you wan’t to build the next $1B+ SaaS app, you have to remember to constantly evolve on top of your product. Don’t build around any one single feature that the competition can rip out. Alternatively, make that one single feature so deeply integrated into everyone else’s product that it’s pointless for anyone else to copycat it.
  • @fmanjoo: Every number in Netflix’s earnings report is just extraordinary. $8 billion on content, 80 movies by next year!
  • Bloomberg: self-driving technology is a huge power drain. Some of today’s prototypes for fully autonomous systems consume two to four kilowatts of electricity -- the equivalent of having 50 to 100 laptops continuously running in the trunk
  • @swardley: I view that once again, Amazon has been given too long to freely invade a space .. and Lambda is gunning for the entire software industry.
  • Greg Ferro: First, Just about everything in this submission [from Oracle] sounds self serving and protecting their own revenue. Its hard to see this as a genuine attempt to add value to the process. Second, the author of the letter has adopted a tone that is approximately like a father berating a child for uppity behaviour.
  • Daniel Lemire: What I am really looking forward, as the next step, is not human-level intelligence but bee-level intelligence. We are not there yet, I think.
  • Richard Branson: People used to raid banks and trains for smaller amounts - it’s frightening to think how easy it is becoming to pull off these crimes for larger amounts.
  • tbarbugli: Disclaimer: CTO of Stream here. We experimented writing Cython code to remove bottlenecks, it worked for some (eg. make UUID generation and parsing faster) and think that’s indeed good advice to try that before moving to a different language. We still decided to drop Python and use Go for some parts of our infrastructure 
  • Paul Johnston: The Serverless conversation is shifting from Functions to Analytics and Monitoring.
  • Gui Cavalcanti: Eagle Prime has modular weapons systems. The chainsaw is absolutely my favorite. I had no idea it could do as much damage as it does
  • @sheeshee: I have a web app with a postgres database running in a kubernetes cluster. I am very hip now.
  • There are so many more good quotes. Click to read more.

Don't miss all that the Internet has to say on Scalability, click below and become eventually consistent with all scalability knowledge (which means this post has many more items to read so please keep on reading)...

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ButterCMS Architecture: a Mission-Critical API Serving Millions of Requests per Month

This is a guest post by Jake Lumetta, co-founder and CEO of ButterCMS.

ButterCMS lets developers add a content management system to any website in minutes. Our business requires us to deliver near-100% uptime for our API, but after multiple outages that nearly crippled our business, we became obsessed with eliminating single points of failure. In this post, I’ll discuss how we use Fastly’s edge cloud platform and other strategies to make sure we keep our customers’ websites up and running.

At its core, ButterCMS offers:

• A dashboard for content editors

• A JSON API for fetching content

• SDK’s for integrating ButterCMS into native code

ButterCMS Tech Stack

Click to read more ...

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For October 13th, 2017

Hey, it's HighScalability time: 

Tech is transforming how food is being grown. Lots of opportunity for local nerdy production. Greenhouses even look like dartacenters! (This Tiny Country Feeds the World)

If you like this sort of Stuff then please support me on Patreon.

• 320 trillion: ops/second in Nvidia driverless-car computer; .25%: Lambda invocations impacted by cold starts; $30,000: monthly take hijacking computers to mine cryptocurrency; 400 gbps: Ethernet standard to be ratified this year; 2.1 million: MySQL 8.0 query/second; 100,000: Kiva robots owned by Amazon; 50,000: greenhouses in Egypt's new farm city; 100 petabytes: new hard drives ordered by Backblaze; 20 million: max Bitcoin users per month; 662 million: unused vacation days in US; 92 billion: Pornhub views per year; 1,000: new Facebook hires to review ads; 12 milion: Tinder matches per day; $1 billion: Google training grants; 


• Quotable Quotes: 
  • @toddmotto: Space X sends a rocket up into space. Lands back on its feet back on earth 7minutes later. I can't even run an npm install in that time.
  • nappy-doo: Years ago, I started at Google, and was in Charlie's cafe, eating alone. I'm sitting there, and up walks Ken Thompson. He sits down, introduces himself as Ken, and asks me what I work on. We sat there for a good 40 minutes just chatting. One of my coolest memories of working at Google was that time. He was so down to earth, never bothered to talk up about who he was (even though I knew). I really appreciated that.
  • @asymco: The popularity of iPhone with US teens at all-time high. Android is at 13% and flat. Implies Apple taking share from non-consumption.
  • @brianleroux: “We have leapfrogged containers which are a disaster for security”—@marknca on serverless #ServerlessConf
  • batmansmk: In every way, [Tensorflow] reminds me of Angular.io project. A failed promise to be true multi-language, failing to use the expressiveness of python, with a super large API that tries to do things we didn't ask it to do and a lack of a general sounding architecture.
  • @bodil: Fun fact: the Erlang runtime is implemented in C, which is an untrue computer language.
  • @Werner: There is no compression algorithm for experience.
  • @jaksprats: Ramcloud: JS faster than C running untrusted code due to sand boxing overheads … ... Cloudflare workers nailed it :)
  • sig: It is amazing to think that only a few years ago you could take an old laptop, download a miner, stick it in a closet and it would spit out something now worth a quarter of a million dollars every few days. There are a lot of problems with Bitcoin. If you look at my comment history you will see I am pretty down on it for all sort of reasons I won't go into at the moment. However sometimes you just have to take a step back and admire how crazy impressive it is that Bitcoin has reached this point.
  • Linda Nichols~ How can you go serverless without vendor lock-in? Linda proposes two possibilities: containers multi-provider frameworks
  • @DivineOps: I don't think anyone can *afford* inventory. It's just that if everyone is moving slow, you can get away with moving slow
  • mrb: The bug behind BIP 50 caused a fork, however the bugfix wasn't a hard-fork. By definition a hard-fork is a fork that require all Bitcoin nodes to be updated. In the case of that bugfix only some nodes had to be updated (the ones run by miners making up a majority of the hash power) then the rest of the non-updated nodes automatically reorg'd to the right chain, the one with the most work.
  • @datawireio: 100+ Million members. 100s of #microservices. Hundreds of thousands of instances. <10 Core SREs.
  • @rbranson: ... but single-rack systems are an increasingly rare situation, won’t practically exist in 10 years.
  • @ryan_sb: Not that it's always right to follow Google/FB/Twitter, but note that *all* of them have kept monorepos through massive growth
  • Bob Frankston: I hate the word coding; it’s like calling writing, typing.
  • cletus: People also overestimate their needs. They rush to create Hadoop clusters and distributed NoSQL solutions because, you know, relational DBs can't keep up with their "Big Data" (which means, millions of rows) when in fact you can dump billions of rows into a single MySQL instance.
  • Bob Frankston: Algorithms are the new bureaucracy
  • Thomas Ryan: Coffeelake is a good chip and a clear improvement over both Skylake-X and Kabylake. It’s not a massive leap, but it’s a generation of products that appears to be solidly better than the last. It has extend Intel’s lead in the areas where they were beating AMD and largely closed the gaps in the areas that they weren’t.
  • @alexlovelltroy: Oooh. Describing serverless microservices as state machines simplifies defining microservice boundaries. #ServerlessConf
  • kevin42: I used a GCE to test some image processing software I wrote a while ago (it runs on a very large dataset). I configured a 64 core machine with 128gb of memory. It ran perfectly, although it cost about $200 to run the test for a day. Sure, it wasn't the highest performance per CPU, but I didn't have to buy the bare metal, I can scale up the number of cores if need be, and I can fire one up whenever I want one.
  • godzillabrennus: I’ve been a [Backblaze] customer for years and recently had a catastrophic failure of a computer and it’s direct attached backup drive. I have spent the last four days waiting for backblaze to create a restore a backup for a computer on and last I checked it was at 9%.
  • hashtagframework: I wonder if the author realizes that the Airbus A380 is itself an IT project with 120 million lines of code, and 330 miles worth of 100,000 individual wires that perform 1,150 different tasks. IT gets no credit... the wings are doing all the work.
  • @troyhunt: 23 hours and 42 minutes from initial private disclosure to @disqus to public notification and impacted accounts proactively protected
  • @bglick: 2 chained functions with 90% performance guarantees have an 81% performance guarantee. Chain 7 and you're < 50%. #Serverlessconf
  • @faunadb: We're moving from a product stack to more utility based architectures/practices (aka #serverless) whether you like it or not, so get on board. "It's not a question of if, but when." @swardley #serverlessconf 
  • @FrankPasquale: “Software problems accounted for nearly 15% of US car recalls in 2015, up from less than 5% in 2011"
  • @jessitron: Octopuses do distributed decisionmaking. a tentacle can see and decide what color to be, locally.
  • @faunadb: "When you're on the cutting edge of the cutting edge of a new technology, you have to realize there's a very long tail of adoption in a large organization" @marknca #serverlessconf
  • @Joab_Jackson: CQRS (Command/Query Responsibility Seperation): Fancy name for separating reads & writes into seperate channels @ben11kehoe #ServerlessConf
  • @EconCharlesRead: 40% of Europe’s domestic freight goes by sea, but just 2% does in America due to protectionist laws from 1920
  • There are many more quotes. Click through to read it all.

Don't miss all that the Internet has to say on Scalability, click below and become eventually consistent with all scalability knowledge (which means this post has many more items to read so please keep on reading)...

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What will programming look like in the future?

Update: Ólafur Arnalds built a robotic music system to accompany him on the piano. He calls his system of two semi generative, self playing pianos—STRATUS. You can hear his most recent song re:member. There's more explanation in The Player Pianos pt. II and a short Facebook live session. His software reacts to his playing in real-time. Then he has to react to the robots because he's not sure what they're going to do. He's improvising like a jazz band would do, but it's with robots. It's his own little orchestra. The result is beautiful. The result is also unexpected. Ólafur makes the fascinating point that usually your own improvisation is limited by your own muscle memory. But with the randomness of the robots you are forced to respond in different ways. He says you get a "pure unrestricted creativity." And it's fun he says with a big smile on his face.

Maybe programming will look something like the above video. Humans and AIs working together to produce software better than either can separately.

The computer as a creative agent, working in tandem with a human partner, to produce software, in a beautiful act of co-creation.

The alternative vision—The Coming Software Apocalypse—is a dead end.

Better requirements and better tools have already been tried and found wanting. Requirements are a trap. They don't work. Requirements are no less complex and undiscoverable than code.

Tools are another trap. Tools are just code that encode an inflexible solution to a problem that's already been solved.

Admittedly, I'm cheating. I have no idea how any of this will work, but here are the seeds of how it has already started:

• Jeff Dean On Large-Scale Deep Learning At Google 
• Machine Learning Driven Programming: A New Programming For A New World

Here's what we do know: neither tools or requirements are a silver bullet, they are a method of incrementally improving software quality. Software production quantity is not increased at all.

What we need is a manufacturing process that puts software production on an exponential curve. The only conceivable tool we have at the moment to put software on an exponential production curve is AI. That's the only way software can truly eat the world.

Right now, limited as we are by human programmers using methods that haven't changed much in 30 years, software is just nibbling at the world. And that won't scale. We need more software. A lot more software. And humans are the bottleneck.

Are humans and AIs working together to co-create software the solution? I don't know, but what else is there?

Related Articles

• On HackerNews
• More disussion on the general topic: Is Uncle Bob serious? (on HackerNews), Tools are not the Answer