Yeah I have a ton of respect for the guy due to the things he's created but this post was devoid of meaning and the video was douchy
He complains about the direction a startup might be forced to take due to a need to satisfy investors or business needs. He mentions wanting to design and build things for the sake of innovation and not profits... Sounds like academia to me.
You can't just "build cool shit" for no reason. Ya gotta keep the lights on somehow.
I agree with you here. In my idealistic opinion, it is the responsibility of privileged individuals to respond to the demands of society. Not doing so seems very selfish.
Mm, quite. The demand for banal social media and micropayment-based games is the demand of the masses and as such, the highest calling of the elite. We cannot allow ivory-tower navel-gazing to take root in our society when the commoners cry out for new and innovative ways to share pictures or engage with brands. Denying this need is the highest form of self-indulgence.
Academia is totally divorced from building things and is far more about internal politics, pumping up your internal brand, and doing juuuuuuust enough to get published than it is about building things or even doing science. At least in computer science. You can look at the adoption of most CS academia (outside of machine learning, which is really a form of applied probability theory/math more than it is CS) in industry and get a very good idea of its relevance.
To get an idea of this, try to imagine how you would publish Docker. The OS/systems community is the closest fit, but containers have been around since 1998 as an academic concept, and they aren't novel. Getting them to actually work in a usable way on modern GNU/Linux distros is just engineering, and not academically interesting. There's no formalism, there's nothing trendy like sustainable computing, machine-assisted verification, or noSQL databases. Basically, all Docker really is is a thin layer of engineering around established OS concepts. It's been done. Strong reject.
I think wanting to build useful things for the common interest is a pretty worthwhile goal considering the entities that have historically done that, namely academia and governments, totally suck at it and are not going to get better anytime soon due to the entrenched misincentives that are totally pervasive in their respective areas.
We have conflicting views on this. I see academia as pretty much the only culture that actually builds interesting things in system software and CS research anymore, which I think should be quite an indictment on the industry, given how much academic software ends up abandonware quickly.
Docker is an awful example. You actually have your history of containers off. By 1998, they weren't just academic, but already an emerging industry standard in at least IBM i machines.
The only reason Docker exists is because an ex-Plan 9 developer (Al Viro) introduced namespaces into the Linux kernel to make the VFS model more tolerable, and some years later some Google developers lifted Solaris process contracts to make cgroups. The first and central part of Linux containers, then, is a direct result of half-assing an academic system software advance for its usefulness.
I'm not in systems so I can't really make claims to that. (Obviously you're right about my getting the containers history wrong.)
That said, spanner seems like it does what it needs to do far better than any academic system. For example. And there are many, many other academic pursuits that are totally ignored by industry.
This can't be just narrow mindedness -- if there was any utility in, say, most of the type theory that's directly pumped from academia into Haskell, startups would be using it. But they aren't. They're not using that, they're not using academic database concepts, they're not using anything from academia. And virtually everything academic is open sourced at some point, so it's not like that's an excuse.
(Are Plan 9 or Solaris academic systems? They're both the result of industrial R&D groups...)
Plan 9 is a mostly academic project. It was born out of the research lab and never really became a "product".
Solaris was a 30 year series of successive engineering projects focused on providing valuable concrete improvements to what was previously just an academic project, the early unix releases were definitely academic regardless of their future commercial impact.
There's a very, very large difference between corporate research and actual academia. The motivation of the people involved are totally different. I wouldn't consider either project "academic" even if they were primarily conducted in industrial research labs.
I assume he is going to find money for people who want to make great interesting things and not have to worry about business stuff or the interests of investors.
so I signed up for the mailing list based on that alone. I would've put out a bit more information up front myself, but I guess if you've got enough whuffie, you can be a tad handwavey for a while.
I'm really interested to see what Megalith turns out to be. The broad thread of his work seems to be in the same sort of space as Hashicorp: automating and improving development and production environments. I'm expecting it to be something around that.
Not to be presumptuous but I think I know what it is. Or at least what it might be. I think it's s vision. His vision for the future of computing. I think he has to be a bit vague for now since he has apparently only recently decided that he should "preach the vision" more and isn't yet sure how to describe all of it.
The most amazing thing for me is that I get it. I've wanted to build the next Xerox PARC or Bell Labs for at least a decade and much of my current work is in pursuit of that goal.
Someone above said you can't just build shit and keep the lights on. You can by building shit people care about. I've been working on a way to give some employees of a company 80% time the way Google gives 20% time. The 20% company time isn't even "do this" it's time for talking, sharing problems with them, asking for insight, etc. I have been thinking I'll be able to do this one day and I think so even more today after reading/watching this.
I'll definitely be in touch with him. And watching live.
21 comments
[ 5.9 ms ] story [ 50.2 ms ] threadHmmm. I guess I've been living under a rock.
I love to hear grand visions and so on, but I didn't get anything out of this. What is this thing?
The idea is a collaborative project without focus on money or enterprise. I don't know what it is exactly, but I like it.
He complains about the direction a startup might be forced to take due to a need to satisfy investors or business needs. He mentions wanting to design and build things for the sake of innovation and not profits... Sounds like academia to me.
You can't just "build cool shit" for no reason. Ya gotta keep the lights on somehow.
To get an idea of this, try to imagine how you would publish Docker. The OS/systems community is the closest fit, but containers have been around since 1998 as an academic concept, and they aren't novel. Getting them to actually work in a usable way on modern GNU/Linux distros is just engineering, and not academically interesting. There's no formalism, there's nothing trendy like sustainable computing, machine-assisted verification, or noSQL databases. Basically, all Docker really is is a thin layer of engineering around established OS concepts. It's been done. Strong reject.
I think wanting to build useful things for the common interest is a pretty worthwhile goal considering the entities that have historically done that, namely academia and governments, totally suck at it and are not going to get better anytime soon due to the entrenched misincentives that are totally pervasive in their respective areas.
Docker is an awful example. You actually have your history of containers off. By 1998, they weren't just academic, but already an emerging industry standard in at least IBM i machines.
The only reason Docker exists is because an ex-Plan 9 developer (Al Viro) introduced namespaces into the Linux kernel to make the VFS model more tolerable, and some years later some Google developers lifted Solaris process contracts to make cgroups. The first and central part of Linux containers, then, is a direct result of half-assing an academic system software advance for its usefulness.
That said, spanner seems like it does what it needs to do far better than any academic system. For example. And there are many, many other academic pursuits that are totally ignored by industry.
This can't be just narrow mindedness -- if there was any utility in, say, most of the type theory that's directly pumped from academia into Haskell, startups would be using it. But they aren't. They're not using that, they're not using academic database concepts, they're not using anything from academia. And virtually everything academic is open sourced at some point, so it's not like that's an excuse.
(Are Plan 9 or Solaris academic systems? They're both the result of industrial R&D groups...)
Solaris was a 30 year series of successive engineering projects focused on providing valuable concrete improvements to what was previously just an academic project, the early unix releases were definitely academic regardless of their future commercial impact.
https://github.com/progrium/dokku/
so I signed up for the mailing list based on that alone. I would've put out a bit more information up front myself, but I guess if you've got enough whuffie, you can be a tad handwavey for a while.
The most amazing thing for me is that I get it. I've wanted to build the next Xerox PARC or Bell Labs for at least a decade and much of my current work is in pursuit of that goal.
Someone above said you can't just build shit and keep the lights on. You can by building shit people care about. I've been working on a way to give some employees of a company 80% time the way Google gives 20% time. The 20% company time isn't even "do this" it's time for talking, sharing problems with them, asking for insight, etc. I have been thinking I'll be able to do this one day and I think so even more today after reading/watching this.
I'll definitely be in touch with him. And watching live.