Wake up! It's HighScalability time:

We've come a long way in 50 years. Or have we?

Alan Kay: I believe ARPA spent $ 175,000 of 1968 money for that one demo. That’s probably like a million bucks today.

Bill English: What we did was lease two video circuits from the phone company. They set up a microwave link: two transmitters on the top of the building at SRI, receiver/ transmitters up on Skyline Boulevard on a truck, and two receivers at the Civic Center. Cables of course going down into the room at both ends. That was our video link. Going back we had two dedicated 1,200-baud lines: high-speed lines at the time. Homemade modems.

Doug Engelbart: It was the very first time the world had ever seen a mouse, seen outline processing, seen hypertext, seen mixed text and graphics, seen real-time videoconferencing.

Alan Kay: We could actually see that ideas could be organized in a different way, that they could be filtered in a different way, that what we were looking at was not something that was trying to automate current modes of thought, but that there should be an amplification relationship between us and this new technology.

Do you like this sort of Stuff? Please support me on Patreon. I'd really appreciate it. Know anyone looking for a simple book explaining the cloud? Then please recommend my well reviewed (32 reviews on Amazon and 77 on Goodreads!) book: Explain the Cloud Like I'm 10. They'll love it and you'll be their hero forever. And if you know someone with hearing problems they might find Live CC very useful.

• 50,000: images in a National Geographic shoot; 11 billion: Voyager 2 miles traveled; 83%: AI papers originate outside the US; 80%: network partitions lead to catastrophic failures; 97%: large AWS customers use auto scaling; 82%: startup failures due to cashflow problems; $115.7 billion: robot and drone spending in 2019; 


• Quotable Quotes:
  • @jmarhee: "I went to Kubecon and all I got were these 300 service meshes built by companies that went under by time I got home"
  • @ReformedBroker: “Retention is the new growth.” - CEO of Adobe ($ADBE), which has gained 793% since moving Photoshop etc to a subscription-based service from a one-time software sale in 2011.
  • @mattray: OH: "Cloud native is pretty simple. You just need to know Kubernetes, Prometheus, Fluentd, Jaeger, Envoy, Core DNS, Linkerd, Rook, Vitess, Etcd and Raft."
  • @davidfrum: In order to lose 80% of its value, the bitcoin network expended more electricity than 150 of the world's 195 countries
  • @ChappellTracker: So here's something. Users are testing the limits of Tumblr's new algorithm that flags adult content (aka "censorbot"). This one found that a man's chest was flagged, but a man's chest next a 50% scale owl went unnoticed. 
  • Jimmy Chin: Great editors are brutal.
  • @danbri: intro slide: "Main message is that biology has been computing long before brains evolved. Somatic decision-making and memory are mediated by ancient pre-neural bioelectric networks across all cells. Exploring non-neural Cognition is [an untapped frontier for AI...]"
  • @swardley: X : Large companies are leaving cloud and building internally. If they use it, then it will be hybrid. Serverless is for startups who can't afford their own. 
    Me : Hmmm. The only words of comfort I have are ... if you don't like change, you're going to hate irrelevance.
  • Quotes, get'em while they're hot...