The older I get, the less I buy into "too big to fail" arguments. I now view it as "can't fail soon enough". The sooner it breaks down, the sooner something better will supplant it.
This last sentiment holds true generally since organizations no longer subject to meaningful competition inevitably squat on their laurels and stop excelling at the things they used to be good at. We've seen it everywhere - Boeing, Google, Microsoft (with OS's), etc.
There was never much of an argument behind "too big to fail", it is generally a euphemism for upper-class welfare. In a more realist world, "too big to fail" is a mis-statement of "too risky to keep". Everything fails eventually and keeping incentives aligned relies on having a mechanism - failure - to flush out incompetents.
> The sooner it breaks down, the sooner something better will supplant it.
That's not always possible, because the counterparty - aka threat actors - is always growing bigger, and you practically need to be the size of Cloudflare, Akamai or the Big 3 cloud providers to be able to weather attacks. You need to have big enough pipes to data centers and exchange points worldwide, otherwise any sufficiently motivated attacker can just go and swamp them, but big pipes are helluvalot expensive so you need to have enough large and financially capable customers.
That's also why Cloudflare has expanded their offerings so much (e.g. Zero Trust), they need to have their infrastructure at some base load to economically justify it.
And that's also why Cloudflare will not be kicked off the throne any time soon. First of all, the initial costs to set up a competitor are absurdly high, second, how is a competitor supposed to lure large long term customers away from CF?
Any case, the real "fix" to Cloudflare being too-big-to-fail isn't building up competitors, it's getting the bad actors off of the Internet. Obviously that means holding both enemy (NK, Russia, China) and frenemy (India, Turkey) nations accountable, but it also means cleaning up shop at home - the aforementioned nation states and their botnet operators rely on an armada of hacked servers, ordinary computers and IoT devices in Western countries to carry out the actual work. And we clearly don't do anywhere near enough to get rid of these. I 'member a time when writing an abuse@ mail report that this would be taken seriously and the offender being disconnected by their ISP. These days, no one gives a fuck.
"Threat actor" is a relative definition, because for Italy the Cloudflare CEO was a "threat actor" who openly threatened availability of their systems.
Cloudflare knows they are just a glorified firewall + CDN that's why they desperately push into edge computing and getting these dozens of features.
If you want to try something totally different, check if you have a local volunteer fire department looking for new recruits. I know a few people who eventually transitioned from tech and made it into their full-time career. I think part of the draw is you show up, solve a problem, leave and feel good about it.
My coarse understanding is monolithic kernels historically gained favor over microkernels for practical performance reasons bound to the cost of context switching.
I always felt there was opportunity to address that in order to have your cake and eat it too (eg. reserve registers for the kernel to avoid pop/push, maybe even dedicate a whole core and its state).
How fast / lightweight is context switching between userspace and kernel code in Xous?
Can you compile in such a way to avoid context switching altogether? What are the most significant overheads message-passing between services and where are is the lowest-hanging fruit for improving?
Thanks, of all the discussion on this HN comment page, your link (without even having to watch the video) finally answered my question of what the intended purpose is of this OS.
It's also possible people finally become SICK of seeing ads and there's a cultural shift boycotting products incorporating them. I would love to see this.
There's a difference between advertising - which tends to be offensive, stealing your attention from the task you're trying to accomplish - and an agent that actually helps you with the intended task (as in travel agent, real estate agent, etc). In my opinion the future of revenue for the richest companies is the latter, we just have yet to see anyone unlock it at true scale.
My non-tech spouse is excited about AI because she wants what amounts to a personal, universal EA that can help her with anything. If your executive assistant just kept squawking ads at you all day long you'd fire them.
We allowed people to install arbitrary computer programs on their computers decades ago and, sure we got a lot of virus but, this was the best thing ever for computing
This analogy makes no sense. Years ago you gave them the ability to do something. Today you're conditioning them to not use that ability and instead depend on a blackbox.
This last sentiment holds true generally since organizations no longer subject to meaningful competition inevitably squat on their laurels and stop excelling at the things they used to be good at. We've seen it everywhere - Boeing, Google, Microsoft (with OS's), etc.
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