DHH Talks Apple, Linux, and Running Servers  ## Metadata - Author: [[How About Tomorrow?]] - Full Title: DHH Talks Apple, Linux, and Running Servers - Category: #articles - Document Note: --- tags: - #linux - #open-source - #cloud-computing - #apple - #server-management Author: David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH) Source: Merlin's Interview with DHH on [YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEy9JhHk6lg) Reference: Detailed timestamps provided in the transcript from the video. date created: 2024-09-16 10:30 --- # Title: DHH on Linux, Apple, and Server Management ## Table of Contents: 1. [Introduction](#introduction) 2. [Switching from Apple to Linux](#switching-from-apple-to-linux) 3. [Challenges with Apple’s Control](#challenges-with-apples-control) 4. [Running Servers and Cloud Costs](#running-servers-and-cloud-costs) 5. [Future of Open Source and Cloud](#future-of-open-source-and-cloud) 6. [Learning Linux for Developers](#learning-linux-for-developers) 7. [References](#references) ## 📝 Summary: David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH) shares his journey from using Apple products to adopting Linux full-time, driven by frustrations with Apple’s ecosystem and business practices. He touches on the value of open-source software, the importance of Linux for developers, and his experience with running servers on the cloud. DHH advocates for developers to embrace Linux, open-source tools, and move away from proprietary systems that lock them into costly cloud services. ## 📖 Main Content: ### Switching from Apple to Linux - DHH transitioned from Apple to Linux after over 20 years due to increasing frustration with Apple’s control, specifically around PWAs. - His dissatisfaction stemmed from Apple's hardware dominance but saw Linux as an alternative where the deep customization fostered a stronger connection with technology. ### Challenges with Apple’s Control - Apple's antitrust issues in the US market limited alternatives for email services. - DHH highlights how Apple's app store guidelines hurt software distribution freedom. - He also mentioned the removal of PWA support from Safari as a tipping point for his switch. ### Running Servers and Cloud Costs - While cloud services have their conveniences, DHH emphasizes the financial cost and lock-in associated with proprietary APIs. - He argues that open-source solutions can offer more affordable and straightforward server management. - DHH highlights how cloud computing has failed to deliver on its promise of simplicity, leading to his advocacy for owning hardware instead of renting cloud services. ### Future of Open Source and Cloud - DHH points out the need to move towards open-source software and generic cloud services. - He warns against the creation of monopolies in cloud services and the dangers of vendor lock-in. - The interview touches on the uncertain future of running servers independently and maintaining the integrity of the internet as companies consolidate control. ### Learning Linux for Developers - DHH stresses the importance of developers learning Linux to better understand server operations and cloud computing. - He believes that exposure to Linux gives developers a more comprehensive perspective on managing servers and offers significant long-term benefits. ## 🗒️ Notes - **Apple’s Transition**: DHH's journey to Linux was prompted by frustrations with Apple, including antitrust issues and removing PWA support. - **Hardware and Linux**: While Linux was initially challenging, the deep customization allowed for a better connection to the technology. - **Server Management**: Open-source solutions like Linux can offer more affordable server management compared to proprietary cloud services. - **Developer Education**: DHH encourages developers to learn Linux to improve their server management skills. ## 📖 References: - Merlin Interview on [YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEy9JhHk6lg) (Detailed Timestamps) ## 🗣️ Paraphrase: 1. DHH discusses his frustrations with Apple, particularly their control over software distribution and antitrust issues in the US. This control, along with the removal of PWA support, led him to explore Linux as a credible alternative for software development and customization. 2. While cloud services like AWS provide convenience, DHH expresses disappointment at the costs and vendor lock-in associated with them. He advocates for developers to explore open-source solutions and consider owning hardware for greater flexibility and cost savings. ## 📰 Newsletter: In this week’s issue, we're diving into the transition from Apple to Linux, a journey shared by DHH. Learn why he ditched Apple after two decades, how he found satisfaction in Linux’s customization, and what developers can learn from embracing open-source solutions. Plus, we’ve got fresh insights into server management and why running your own hardware might just save you money. Stay tuned for more updates on the latest plugins and community projects! Check out the full interview [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEy9JhHk6lg). ## ✅ Action Items: - Outline how this interview reflects on my professional focus in open-source advocacy, including: - **Contributor engagement**: The promotion of Linux and open-source solutions aligns with my work onboarding new contributors to open-source communities. - **Educational efforts**: DHH’s emphasis on Linux as an educational tool for developers echoes my teaching background and the importance of technical learning. - **Sustainability in open-source**: DHH’s preference for open-source software and managing servers aligns with advocating for sustainable, long-term solutions in the WordPress ecosystem. ## 🧪 Hypotheses: - Developers using open-source tools like Linux will have a lower total cost of ownership compared to those locked into proprietary cloud services. - The transition to open-source hardware could foster innovation and reduce long-term operational costs for developers. ### 📊 Methodology: - Comparative studies on cloud service costs vs. owning hardware over five years. - Developer satisfaction surveys for Linux users vs. cloud-based solutions. ### ❓ Questions: - How can developers encourage wider adoption of Linux in tech? - What barriers still prevent developers from moving away from Apple or Windows? ### 🔮 Future Research: - Investigate the economic impact of using open-source software over proprietary cloud solutions in tech startups. ### 💡 Implications: - Future research could influence policy on open-source software adoption, encouraging governments and companies to invest in open-source tools for long-term savings. ### 🧠 Learning Styles Assessment: 1. **Visual Learners**: - Present: DHH's discussion lacks visual aids. - Improve: Add diagrams explaining Linux setups vs. Apple and cloud services. 2. **Aural Learners**: - Present: The interview itself provides auditory learning opportunities. - Improve: Consider linking to podcasts or providing an audio summary. 3. **Verbal Learners**: - Present: DHH uses rich, descriptive language to explain concepts. - Improve: Offer further readings or detailed blog posts for linguistic learners. 4. **Physical Learners**: - Improve: Include hands-on tasks, like setting up a Linux server as an exercise. 5. **Logical Learners**: - Present: DHH's argument about the cost-effectiveness of Linux is based on logical comparisons. - Improve: Use step-by-step tutorials for problem-solving. 6. **Social Learners**: - Improve: Encourage group discussions or community forums for Linux learners. 7. **Solitary Learners**: - Improve: Offer reflection prompts or individual assessments for intrapersonal learning. 8. **Naturalistic Learners**: - Present: Little connection to nature. - Improve: Explore the impact of tech on sustainability and environmental awareness. ### 📊 Accessibility Assessment: - **Screen Reader Compatibility**: No visual content requiring alt-text. Ensure interview transcript is navigable by screen readers. - **Keyboard Navigation**: Ensure all interactive elements in the linked pages support keyboard navigation. - **Contrast and Readability**: Ensure interview text and page formatting follow high-contrast and accessible font guidelines. ### 🌍 DEIB Assessment: - **Cultural Relevance**: The interview reflects a tech-centric persp - Document Tags: [[linux]] [[open source]] - Summary: DHH talks with us about his journey back to Linux, Apple's control over the App Store, setting up servers on the web, and tries out Terminal coffee. Want to carry on the conversation? Join us in Discord. Or send us an email at [email protected]. 00:00 Introduction and Calendar Link 02:36 DHH Joins the Conversation 03:03 Technical Setup and Office Tour 08:34 Transitioning from Apple to Linux on the Desktop 19:43 Frustrations with Apple's Control over the Ecosystem 25:46 Exploring Windows as an Alternative 27:13 Installing Linux on a Framework Laptop 28:41 The Challenges and Benefits of Using Linux as a Developer 28:43 The Advantages of Linux in Web Development 46:50 Understanding the Underlying Technology 50:39 Challenging the Dominance of Cloud Services 54:52 The Satisfaction of Knowing How Things Work 58:19 Open Source Tools and Cost-Effective Infrastructure 01:04:41 Going Generic: Advantages and Benefits 01:06:05 Open-Source Software and Preventing Monopolies 01:07:42 Challenges and Cos... - URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEy9JhHk6lg I just updated the calendar link. was gonna say did you give him the link to the thing? Yeah, I'm going send an email. That was scheduled a long time ago. Yeah. I gotta say I like backwards hat backs. It's nice. Yeah, I've got I cut my head shaving so I can't I just like don't want to shave for a little bit probably fine now, but Yeah Send them an email. You got your audio all sorted, I guess, to start. I guess I don't... You do, yeah. And I don't hear myself, so I think we're good. Mmm guess we could just do a normal episode if she doesn't arrive. I got a little bit of that like, don't know his work all that well. What are we gonna talk about? I just know him on Twitter. I missed the whole Rails era. So like, I didn't really look up to him in my early formative years. Like lot of people are in a generation. And then I only learned about him late in my career. Anyway. Yeah, for me it was really early on with all the remote work stuff that was... Like I didn't do any Rails or Ruby either, so that wasn't relevant to me. I just want to talk about the Linux stuff, because... Yeah. just fun to watch him, like, get excited about all this stuff. Yeah, I'm curious if this is like a new thing or what that trajectory was. Yeah, like if you dabbled in it in the past. So just set a time where we just start talking if he's not here. Hello. it's DHH. Yes. Sorry about the delay here. I hope my camera's gonna work. I have it plugged in, but it was plugged in in a port that didn't give it power before, so now I'm getting like a battery warning. But I think it's running off power now. But just in case it cuts out, I do have another backup. Are you guys using video? Okay, all right, so we do have to get it to work. mean, it looks good right now, so. Okay, yeah, no, I think it should be alright. If it's getting power, which I think it looks like it is, even if it's a flat battery, I guess that should be fine when it's getting power. So are you in that amazing office that we see pictures of all the time? This is the office, this is the office, this is the other picture out the back of it. How high, what's the elevation? Like you're above the clouds? think, What did I look it up? 2 ,000 feet or something? It's not that high. It just looks high because, I mean, I like to take a picture of it when the fog rolls in and the fog looks like it's a cloud. So it looks like I'm at like 7 ,000... 7 ,000 feet or something. It's funny because I think I saw... clouds, but I think not the kind of clouds most people would call clouds, I suppose, because it is sort of fog clouds. But yeah, no, looks great. And we've just had like a streak of it for whole week. I would walk into the office and it would look like that. And I was like, hot diggity damn, I've lived here for seven years. It still doesn't get old. Nature is amazing like that. it's funny because I saw some random account post it the other day with like some like meme caption. I'm like, I don't even no. It goes meme almost every time. mean, part of it is. No, no, a bunch of people are just like... I got a bunch of people saying like, this is AI. I was like, it could be, but like this one isn't. Yeah, Adam gets comments about that with his face like we get comments on our videos all the time where they're like that brown guy looks real, but the other guy looks AI hilarious. really monotone that we had a whole TikTok where like six people said I was clearly a skinwalker, which I learned what that is. I don't know. I gotta get more intonation. I don't think so. people look perfect, you know, so I think you should take it as a compliment. say, most AI people I see now, all the latest models, they all look great. There's not a lot of ugly people, AI models being pumped out. Anyway. What's your I've not heard you really talk about the AI stuff like the generative AI stuff. because I don't have any special insights there. I'm just a happy consumer. And not only am I a happy consumer, I'm even perhaps a slightly conservative consumer when it comes to that. mean, we haven't shoved AI into every crevice of the applications we make, because I have yet to see a lot of useful examples of that being done in, productivity or in email. Most of the... cases like hey summarize these boring emails I find actually vaguely dystopian that we're gonna have a bunch of AIs like writing each other because we just can't tell it straight like I'm gonna tell the AI to write some bullshit for me here's the five bullet points could you just send me the five bullet points like that's what I'm gonna have my AI turn it back into anyway and now we're playing a game of telephone through AI that's probably gonna get it wrong about 15 % of the time at least and that just seems a little silly to me and also doesn't seem that useful so I mean, for me, the thing that blows my mind is A, its ability to be a pair programmer, even though I almost want to chuck it in the bin when I see for the 500th time someone goes like, programmers are now already obsolete. I just hired my co -founder, Cursor AI. It's like, Jesus, have you tried to use it for anything real? Again, I'm. Impressed by what it does at the same time utterly annoyed by like the hype cycle that comes with it But maybe this is just how it goes with everything and then I think it's the general AI stuff that blows my mind as you said like How is this person not real like the the ones that just came out where they had a string of images of women given presentations at like TED talks or something you're like I? Zoomed in I was like what's to tell? I was like, I can't find the tell. I would have to spend, I think it was something like arm flap folds or something like that was supposed to be the tell. Now like, the flaps aren't exactly, I was like, wow, it's gotten good when we're down to flaps. We're not even counting fingers anymore. We're down to, the angle of the flap is a little off. Anyway, so that's why I don't talk about it that much because I don't feel like I have any unique input to offer beyond perhaps just the temperance. that comes with the fact of having seen more than a handful of hype cycles. Self -driving cars, I think, was a great example of that, right? We all got, I got quite excited about that. In 2017, when Elon was like, at the end of the year, your Model S is gonna be a taxi earning you money. It's actually financially irresponsible not to buy a Tesla right now because it's gonna be printing money, driving other people around. It's like, that didn't quite happen, did it? While at the same time, then, whatever, the FSD, 12 .5 is actually pretty impressive. It's not fucking a money printer driving around doing the things. And this is now where, whatever, eight years later, very hard to predict when these things tip. But anyway. Are we recording? we are recording. we've been, this is a very unstructured thing. We just kind of go and talk about whatever, whatever comes up. So, yeah. But I think the reason we wanted to have you on here was, you've been talking a lot more about Linux on the desktop, which I've been like a lifelong Linux on desktop person. It's been like 12 years, I think so far. but yeah, we just want to hear about, I guess like What got you into that? Is this a new thing for you? Like what is, what's the story behind all this? Sure, so it is a new thing for me to run Linux full -time on the desktop in anger as my primary operating system. And it came about also out of some anger. The final straw, the motivating sort of light to the fire here was Apple. I've been, I was gonna say a happy Apple fan. I think that's fair to say actually for 20 years. about 20 years, a little more than 20 years. Not only was I a happy Apple fan, I was an Apple evangelist. And that came about in part by very much a replay of what's just happened. In the mid to late 90s, I was a very reluctant Windows user. I was actually kind of a pissed off Windows user because I was using Windows because it felt like that was the only option, but I didn't like it. I didn't like anything about what Microsoft stood for in those days. I didn't like the leadership of Microsoft. I didn't like the choke off their air supply business tactics that they were applying to Netscape and the other competitors they had at the time. I didn't like the overly smug, I want to punch you in the face look of Bill Gates when he was sitting for the deposition at the antitrust cases. I just, didn't like any of it. And I thought like, I'm begrudgingly using this operating system because I simply feel like there is not a realistic choice. And maybe there will be a bunch of Linux people who go, well, Linux was already great in 95. Yeah, it wasn't for me. I had friends using Linux back then, and what I saw didn't win me over. Let's just put it like that. And then 2001, I believe it is, rolls around. Apple rolls out the new Mac OS. OS 10, I think it was, what was it, Puma 10 .1 or 2 or 3. forget whichever version was out in 2001 was the one I hopped on. And I hopped on to that because for the first time it felt like there was a credible alternative to Windows that I could use as the web developer and as a general computer user without being like this super nerd that was going to figure out Linux on the desktop. And I thought, you know what, isn't this the best of both worlds? I get to use like a BSD -based operating system. That's kind of like Linux, it's the same ethos. Underneath the technical underpinnings, this is why I don't have to install an antivirus system within the first five seconds of booting the computer, short of it getting taken over by some botnet. So there were all these advantages to it. There were all these advantages when working on open source software. I was already working with Apache and MySQL and... picking up Ruby a few years later, PHP, all that stuff was just better on a Unix based setup. Now, there were about a million trade -offs nonetheless. That original version of Mac OS I ran, ran on an 800 megahertz power PC with 256 megabytes of RAM and it sucked in terms of performance. It was so much slower than what Intel and Windows were able to put out, and I still didn't care. I was like, I'm just happy to have some alternative here that gets me out of Gates land. And I pushed on that for the next 20 years and didn't really realize that I was getting slowly boiled. Apple went from being the ultimate underdog in 2001 who saw an interest for them to be a good partner to developers, to be... emphasizing and assisting and doing all these things for people who wanted to build software, especially for the web. And then slowly but sure, well, actually not that slowly. Suddenly, they had a much bigger platform on their hands after the iPhone got released. And that platform introduced the concept of the App Store. And that to me, if I was going to pinpoint a moment when like we look back upon this history, everything started to go to shit. was when the App Store and native apps started taking off. that's perhaps a weird thing to say because in many other ways, this idea of having mobile super computers in our pocket that can run this incredible software, video games, I used to be a big gamer, you can run video games at 120 FPS with graphics that would shame even the wildest, craziest dedicated PCs of the 2000s, that's amazing, right? And that's true. but it really put the squeeze on developers, freedoms, and independence. And kind of that kept building to a crescendo. First, when we launched Hey .com, our email service back in 2000 and, what was that, 2020. When we put that out there and got that dreaded no from Apple. this, I had forgotten all about the hay and apple stuff. Yeah, I haven't, I'll tell you that. Because we had literally spent two years almost at that point developing this system, millions of dollars poured into it. I had slaved away for many hours developing this system. We were incredibly proud that we were gonna take on Gmail with a fresh new system based on thinking from 2020, not 2004. And we thought that was gonna be the big boss, right? We're gonna take on Google with And actually quite good email system. Gmail is good system. It's dated, it has issues, whatever. But it's a good system, and it's free. And we're going to come in and say, do you know what? You should pay for email. What? So already that had long odds, but we didn't even get to begin that fight before a bigger boss showed up and just like Apple sat down on our chest and said, you're going to give me your lunch money and 30 % of everything you own in perpetuity going forward. What? No, no. So that led to a big fight over multiple weeks where the future, the life of that new service hung in the balance. Because the reason Apple has all this power is that they have all the economic activity, at least in the US. What we eventually found was for our email system, hey .com, 85 % of the paying users we have, they use Apple products. Wow. if you were shut out of Apple's Garden of Eden, it was going to be dead. There wasn't going to be a business. There was going to be 15 % left, and you just can't build a competitive business in there. So that's where the whole antitrust thing comes in. But it was also, for me, just a wake up call. OK, the pot has been boiling for several years. I had already, well before we even introduced Hay .com, I testified in front of a congressional field hearing in Colorado where they were looking into all these inter -trust matters and going like, hey, here's my perspective on this. Things are not going in good direction. Developers are getting squeezed in all sorts of different directions. The guidelines of an app store is dictating the kind of businesses that can exist in the world because of this economic activity issue. That's not a good place to be. In fact, we should look at the internet as a far better alternative model for both application distribution but for Business formation for independence for freedom all these things and then I got my own kind of Fight with Apple and you know what even that wasn't enough. I fucking still bought three iPhones after that and like three or four more MacBooks so I mean I think that goes to tell you a how sticky platform choice really is and Be that Apple does make good stuff I hardware is so incredible. The hardware is really good. I have found since that, even though that point is true, I was a little myopic. There are actually other people making really good, interesting hardware. They don't make the same. If you want this sort of millimeter, unibody, aluminum case stuff that Apple does so well, Apple does that better than anyone else. But there are different things you can choose to focus on where you can actually end up with something better. Repairability and expandability, and there are other parts of the hardware experience. what are the laptops I'm blanking on the name I've seen you talk about these they've got like modular Yes. are you using our framework currently? Nice. my laptop. It has been my laptop. That was actually, I mean, I know it's a little long -winded here, but this is how we get to the story of how I ended up on Linux, because it was Framework's fault, essentially. And I use that currently. I also have a desktop PC. I the other thing I realized was Apple does their stuff really well, and they also charge proportionally, maybe they would say. I mean, I had a spec'd out MacBook. The last one I bought was an M3 Max something. I think it was $3 ,500 or $3 Whatever it was, it was more than the cost of my Dell Precision with the latest, fastest Intel chip, which by the way is quicker than that fucking M3 Max chip at the kind of work that I do, which is web work and running Ruby and whatever. It's actually quicker than that. And then I also could buy a framework machine and add that on top. Now, I fully understand there are a lot of people who are like, I don't want two computers, I just want a laptop, and I want to run everything on it. So there's still advantages there. But it was eye -opening to see what was actually going on, because I really have, for quite a long time, just thought, like, do you know what? I'm not in the market for anything not Apple, because I'm in the Apple world, I'm running Mac OS, I'm deep in the ecosystem. That's the other way they get you, right? Like the little bangs, little hooks. I was running the photo. Setup they have I was gonna call it I photo. I don't think it's called that anymore things are just called Apple photos and the sinking and the all the things right I was All the data was embedded with it before we introduced hey calendar I had my calendar and Apple calendar before we introduced a email I had I was using Apple's own email client So there was just a lot of hooks in it, but one by one those hooks were already coming out I mean hey email and hey calendar took out two or perhaps the biggest one I had been used to that sinking of things back and forth now we had hey clients on both email and or on mobile and desktop there were still some and I had to sort of pry them out like thongs right like you got to stick in there get it out there and It took a little while and for a while. That's the amazing thing when I look back upon this this just happened by the way, right? I just switched to Linux full -time in what February or March? Mm it already feels like it's been five years. But I still do remember those dark spring days trying to get out of the ecosystem and thinking, I don't even know if I can do it. I didn't even know if I want to do it. it just seems so impossible. There's so many things. Blah, blah, blah. And then I spent, well, first I got hooked. And the way I got hooked was I was like, all right, I don't want to use Apple stuff anymore. The final straw was when Apple in their sort of malicious compliance way, said we're going to pull PWAs, the standard for making web applications out of Europe, and we're going to rip it out of Safari, because that's the way we choose to interpret what the European Union is doing with their antitrust drive. And I thought, I just built another app that sort of depended on PWAs. We had built a app called Campfire under this once .com umbrella, where we will sell you a web chat system, kind of like a Slack in a box for a single fee. And part of that setup was we were not going to make native apps. We were going to lean on the web, and we were going to lean on PWAs, and we going lean on all this stuff. And then Apple, like literally two weeks later, went like, yoink. We're going to take the PWA support that we barely just introduced out of the whole thing, and we're going to screw over the entire ecosystem. And it just went like, I can't buy another iPhone after this. I can't buy another MacBook. Because if I, in this position of almost infinite privilege in terms of resources and whatever, if I can't even make it to Switch, then I should just roll over and accept that Apple owns all and I don't want to do that. all right, let me just go back to my native Danish roots and grow potatoes or something. Or pigs and bacon or whatever else. I don't even freaking know. I just don't want to do computers anymore. That's really actually the point it got to. That was the final motivating point, which is insane that that is the level of pressure it needs to bring that like, I don't know if I wanna do computers anymore as a profession, as a business, because I felt like the reason I got so, or have been so excited about computers and loved working with computers was the internet. And why was it the internet? Because it was a free. Platform of distribution. I didn't have it to ask anyone for permission to launch base camp back in 2004 we bought a domain name We pointed that at an IP address running a server and voila We're in business and anyone who shows up to base cam calm can buy our project management system And if no one shows up, that's no one's fault by my own right like my faith is in my own hands That's not true with native applications anymore your fate of your entire business is in the hands of Apple bureaucrats who every single time you submit an update go, me I don't like it. Like that color blue is a little too blue. Rejected. And then you submit again, yeah, yeah, sir, I brought you the right color blue. Me, I still don't like it. Like the sign up screen, like the font is too small. And you're just like, it's like begging some petty inconsistent tyrant. for the right to grow wheat. And I'm like, are we fucking back in 1506? What the hell is going on here? I don't want to be that kind of peasant. I want to own my own landstead here, right? And the internet allowed that. And I just thought, how are we going backwards? How do we go from this glorious age where developers and software businesses who had direct access to their customers And we got to enjoy that for what, seven fucking years from the dot com bust until the iPhone was introduced. And then another Dark Ages was introduced, where we basically went back to, no, you can't just distribute software. What are you talking about? You need a publisher, and that publisher needs to make a deal with the distributor who needs to have a deal with blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it's like, again, no, I don't want to do that. So anyway, very long story too. Now I have all this pressure going on me. It's either not using computers anymore, and fucking retiring with the potatoes and the pigs, or it's finding another platform. And the first step I went was like, let me see what my arch enemy is up to these days. So I went back to Microsoft with an open eyes and I thought like, you know what, people change. mean, it's been 20 years, 25 years actually at that point, well, 23 years, let's call it that, since I last ran Windows sorta proper. And there's a new boss in town and I hear, good things about what he's doing, and I like the investments they've done into VS Code. I like their stewardship of GitHub. I like a lot of things. Maybe this Microsoft is not the same thing anymore. And I showed up and I ran Windows for a couple weeks and even said, you know what, this is it. I'm switching to Windows. then I was running Windows on this Framework laptop. And I was like. I guess I could make this work, but it was kind of begrudgingly, right? Like I was like, shit, I still don't really love Windows. I found a new respect for it, I'd say. First, I used to think, you know what, there's no way I can enjoy doing what I do on a Windows machine. And that was in the days prior to WSL. Before the Windows subsystem for Linux, the Windows subsystem for Linux, especially WSL2, is really effing good. the amount of steps it takes from you to have, I have a Windows machine too, I'm running Ubuntu inside of it. And it actually mostly kind of works. There's a little bit of the file system barrier you have to finagle around, but it's actually quite good. That was really a revelation and I thought, this is why I can make it last. But then I installed Linux on this framework laptop. And the first thing I noticed was, holy shit, it runs faster. Like I just ran my Chrome speedometer 2 .1 test and I'm like, Jesus, why is it 15 % quicker? Why am I getting 15 % more juice out of this CPU that's inside of it? Huh. And then I thought like, that really is nagging at me. And I thought like, do you know what? Maybe I'll give Linux a try. First I ran into a bunch of issues. Like the original Framework 13 screen was of a dimension set where if you ran it at 100%, the font was too small and it didn't look right. And if you ran it at 200 % Everything was a little big and I was like, that's not quite right either. And I just went through all of these steps of finding, I like some thing about Linux. I don't like that thing about Linux. And I spent maybe five weeks just going like, all right, you know what? I'm gonna learn this. I'm gonna figure it out. I'm gonna get a desktop. I'm gonna get a framework. I'm gonna set it all up. And I spent like two of those weeks battling with Nvidia drivers, trying to get them to work with my Apple 6K XDR. display, which by the way, spoiler alert, it never will. It won't. I went through about 400 layers and wild goose chases trying to decompile things and kernel flags and whatever. Don't do that. Don't put yourself through that. Just buy an AMD graphics card. If you're not doing literally top tier gaming that requires a 490, then the AMD stuff is awesome. It works out of the box with a 6K XDR display. I could have saved myself two weeks. But I still like the journey. And I like the journey because Linux was a challenge. And I think Linux still is a bit of a challenge. I mean, it's funny, I just posted something yesterday about this where I said, like, hey, do you know what? I think more developers should run Linux because it's a challenge, because it's not as straightforward and paved as Windows is or Mac OS is. And then I get the normal stance, Linux stance. What are you talking about? Ubuntu is just as easy as Mac OS. I mean, come on, let's get real. It's not. It just isn't. It just isn't. I'm glad you got your grandma set up with Ubuntu when she's running Firefox and she doesn't need anything else. That is awesome and I'm not disputing that. But for a lot of normal software, like if I was gonna convince my wife to run Linux, yeah, I was not gonna do that. She just uses too many apps and they're too specific and I'm like, I'm not like, hey, babe, do you want an adventure in setting up like your webcam, she'd be like, no, I don't want that adventure. What are you talking about? Versus if you are a developer, I think there are actually legitimate benefits. And maybe some of it is just you kind of just acclimate to your environment. But I thought in just those six months that I've been using Linux full time, I've gotten far more comfortable with Linux in ways that are pushing me on like, what are we doing on the server? And this is what I see as one of those main benefits. Anyone who works in web development today, they may work on a Mac, but they deploy on Linux. No one is fucking deploying on a Mac box. They're not deploying on a Windows box either. Again, I know there are some people actually literally doing that, but like 95 % of the internet runs on Linux. And if you are developer working with the web, I think you owe it to yourself to understand what's going on. And I don't think that the cloud is able to pave over that experience to a degree that is helpful for you. And I also think it locks you into a bunch of overpriced premium AWS wrapper services that you'd be better off without. That's a mission I'm pursuing. regardless, Linux is a little bit more of an adventure, but holy shit, what an awesome adventure it is. And what an incredible oasis you're able to arrive at. That was what actually blew my mind. I didn't know legitimately if you spent the time to set it up, Linux could be not just good, but here I'm really gonna go out on a limb, better. And again, I am biased at this point. I accept it. But I like the Linux setup I have today better. I'm not like making do with scraps here. I like it better than what I had on Mac OS. That's pretty freaking incredible. I'm not saying, again, it's better for everyone. I'm not going to force my wife to convert to Linux tomorrow for the reasons we talked about. For me, as a developer, Linux is better. And that was quite the revelation. I mean, I literally, legitimately did not know. I thought that Linux, I still had an idea of Linux that was based in, 2009 or something? And... That wasn't that wasn't accurate. My mental model was out of date and I got a I got a nudge Thank you to explore modern day Linux looks like and not only was it better in terms of ergonomics Not only was it better in terms of sort of the infrastructure plumbing not only does the docker run about 400 million times better on Linux Hahaha but it could also look amazing. mean, discovering Linux porn was a subreddit, was actually kind of cool. I don't run a Linux porn setup, but I took a lot of inspiration from that when I finally compressed all of this journey, exploring all the Linux tools and whatever into sort of my take on what a great out of the box Linux experience should look like for developers, which is what ended up becoming Amacoop. which is what I want today, is Ubuntu 24 .04 underneath and then a layer on top that is aesthetic personalization, or not even personalization, it's customization, and a bunch of things installed just out of the box. Make the Linux experience feel like it's incredible without having to sign up for 140 hours of YouTube. Linux nerdery videos and tutorials and like, you have to compile this thing with 400 different flags, then it works with the other thing. Could someone just do that? And like, I ended up doing it and started like, let's share. And that's where am today. I am running Linux full time. I freaking love it. I'm doing it on a framework laptop on a Dell Precision desktop. And I even got into freaking mechanical keyboards because of it. And then I put all of it into Amacube and released it and now I'm on the evangelical trail trying to at least give other Mac users an invitation that there is life outside of Apple's garden. And it's quite pleasant in a lot of ways. It's not the same. And this is one of the actually hurdles I had to get over. When I first switched to Linux, I was like, okay, the text editor I have on my Mac is called Textmate. It has a certain theme. It looks a certain way. I run all hellos eve and like all the keywords are exactly like this. And it's been drilled into my brain that this is what code looks like. This is what code feels like. So the first thing I tried to do is replicate text mate in VS code on Linux. And you can get about like 96 % there. And I was ready to blow my brains out over the last 4 % because it was total uncanny valley. It was just like, yeah, everything is the same old, it's not. And then we just get frustrated and then we're just like, I should just go back to the Mac. Why am I making do with something that's only 96 % as good? I could just swallow my pride and come crawling back to St. Cook. But I was not gonna do that. I was going to stick with it and I realized the way to stick with it was to make a clean cut, do something else. So the first thing was like, all right, I'm not gonna. I'm not gonna run TextMate, I'm not gonna try to replicate TextMate. I'm gonna give VS Code a fair shake and I'm gonna run it with a different theme. And this was how I discovered Tokyo Nights, which is greatest theme of all time. And then I set that up and I worked with it for bit. was like, actually VS Code is not bad. It's not TextMate, I miss a few things, but now it looks different enough, it feels different enough, that it's something else. But the final kicker that really got me, like this is actually better. I was like, VS Code, was like, this is tolerable. I can see why people like it. It's not text -made, I missed a few things, but then I went to NeoVim. There we go, right? NeoVim, by the way, I think you're supposed to say. And with NeoVim, particularly through the distribution of the LayACVim setup, where everything comes pre -configured for you, I went like, what? This is, yeah, nice. I remember some of the Vim shortcuts from literally 20 years ago. think back in 2000, I was doing FreeBSD server setup for some stuff and I had to learn some Wim motions to do that on the server and I still fucking remembered how to quit the program. And I also remembered a couple of other things. And Neo Vim was basically like reactivating that ancient knowledge from the back of my brain. It's like. Vim motions never leave. They just take up space and maybe it gets moved to the attic at the back of your head, but they're still there and you can pull them out of the attic and you go like, yeah, actually I can see why this editor that is literally 50 years old still has purchase on people. And it was through that that led me to discover all these amazing tuis. mean, tui was even a word that, that's actually the nickname we use for one of my boys, like a tui bird. I was like, tui is also. Terminal User Interface and I discovered NeoVim, then I discovered Lazy Git and I was like, holy fuck, what even is this? It feels like I'm in a movie, like the Emanuels mainframe or something. And there's just something incredibly appealing about that Neo Vintage, Neo Nostalgia kind of look that isn't just about aesthetics, although it is also about that. And this is, let me just make a quick aside here. There's a... huge contingency of Linux super neck beards who are actually sort of in war with aesthetics, right? it's as though they take pride in making things as ugly as humanly possible with the worst color coordination you can imagine and about five pencils in their pocket protector. And I love that those people exist because that is why we have the links that we have, right? Like that's the sort of the cement that we can then build upon. And that's great. I really care about the aesthetics though. I want a beautiful workstation. I want a beautiful work environment. And NeoVim, together with all these twoies like LazyGit and whatever, offered me a more compelling aesthetic than the one I had on the Mac, while also leveling me up in terms of capabilities. That to me is sort of that match made in heaven, where it both looks incredible and it feels incredible and you're able to be productive with it. And now that I've been using NeoVim for for quite a while now. I mean, you feel like a god. Like I sometimes do a set of motions where I'm like, making or selecting text inside of like a quote with like two commands and then I do whatever, the thing where it's just like, I just gotta stop. I'm just like, did I just fucking do that? Did I just fucking do that? Where you're just like, this is incredible. Like I just benched a new record. it like created a mini game to text editing. It's amazing. I've loved it late in my career. Yeah. it's the best kind of game. It's one where the payoff is actually literal productivity that you can deposit towards goals that you have in life, like building businesses and so forth, right? It's not just sort of wankery for its own sake. So anyway, all that led to, first being a reluctant Linux user, almost like a Mac OS refugee. I just need to find a tent somewhere where the wind is not too harsh and whatever. I'll make do on this rock until realizing, do you know what, I could just walk five feet further. There's a fucking oasis down here and there's goddamn coconuts and pineapple and just everything is flowing. How did I not know this? This was actually the reaction I had. I knew about Neovim. I had never heard of Lazy Kit. And I was like, how the fuck did I go? 20 goddamn years not knowing that this entire universe existed just around the corner. Just around the corner! I could even have been running it on Mac OS. mean, a lot of these TUI tools, they run just fine on the Mac too. I just even didn't know. So that's where I just got more and more grateful for the entire expedition because it was taking me to foreign lands and foreign experiences and I liked a lot of it. And now I've ended up in a place where... I love my computer more than I have loved the computer in at least 15 years. The last time, and this is both on the software and hardware side. On the hardware side, the last computer I really loved, I mean, I don't know why. Why does love work the way it does? It was the MacBook Air 11 inch that ran the shittiest Intel chip I think you could buy at the time. So it was woefully underpowered, but it just. It felt right, like the size of it was right, the screen of it was right. I loved that computer for many years and I carried it for many years. It was my primary development tool for many years. Then the MacBook era came in and first we went through the awful five years in the desert with the butterfly keyboard where at our company, 30 % of all laptops we bought ended up broken. That's an incredible failure rate. Within two years, we did the math. Over 30 % of them had to go back for repairs, some of them multiple times. It never really got to work proper. And Apple was just like, you're typing it wrong. And it was like, I don't think that's the problem when 30 % of us are ending up with that. So you went through that, right? And then we got to actually the best place Apple has ever been in. They went back on that. They went back on ports. They introduced legitimate steps forward with the chips and efficiency. And you ended up with a product that was really good. and also really boring. And boring in the ways that something that is too perfect can be. I think this is one of the reasons why there's such a surge of interest in imperfection. Why do people like a manual stick sports car? Why do they like vinyl records? Why do we like mechanical watches? Why do we like these things that are objectively worse than their counterparts? you can get a... automatic transmission, it'll shift smoother than you, you'll get better gas mileage, you can get a quartz watch for $20 that'll beat the accuracy of any Rolex you can buy. Yeah, but also no. And that's what I found when I found with that Framework 13 laptop. I was like, do you know what, this has quirks. Weird, interesting quirks. It's not perfect. But the things it's good at, it's really good at. First, a reminder that keyboards really fucking matter. Holy shit. Again, I'd only been in Mac land and I was like, actually, this Mac Magic keyboard is fine. It's great. Great. I don't know if I'd say that. It's fine. Why do I need anything else? And then you try a framework laptop. It has 1 .5 millimeters of travel, which is basically like what the old Power Books, I think, used to have, the Apple laptops of the mid 2000s. And like, holy shit, this feels so much better. What? I didn't know that that matte, why does half a millimeter or 0 .7 millimeters of travel matter? yeah, yeah, it really does. Matte displays. I was like, shit, I remember the PowerBook that had the matte display. Matte displays are really nice for programmers. It just fits text rendering much better. Maybe it's not as good to watch a blockbuster movie on, but it's great for text rendering. Three by two aspect ratio. holy shit, what have I been doing in this 1610, 169 land? That is a weird, elongated, optimized for just consumption kind of display. That's not what I use my laptop for. I use it to make stuff. And when I make code, 3 .2 or 3 by 2 aspect ratio is much nicer. So there were all these advantages on top of the upgradability. Framework came out with a new freaking screen like whatever, month ago. Yeah, the 16 inch, right? the screen by itself and replace it on your freaking laptop. I was like, what? You mean I don't have to buy a whole new computer just because I want the newer display? as an Apple user, that's just insane. That sounds impossible. literally, and I'm not proud of this, I'm actually ashamed, I have four MacBooks sitting in my closet, and the reason why I have four of them was I wanted the fastest chip. Every time you wanted a newer chip, you had to buy a whole new goddamn computer. I wanted whatever, there was some upgrade to the screen that came out at one point, buy a damn new computer. It was like, this doesn't feel quite right. Now I have this, yes! And then now I have my framework. I've upgraded the RAM. I think it came, I think I bought it with like 32 gigabytes. It was like 200 and some dollars to buy 96 gigabytes of RAM, like off Amazon, and I could just plop it in. I bought obviously the new display for it. I upgraded the battery capacity in one of them too. It came with a 51 watt hour battery and they had a newer 61 that gave you another 10 % battery. Like, holy shit, I still keep, I still have the original one that I. That's really cool. So I fell in love with that framework laptop and to me then the pair of the two. Framework plus Amacube, that is the Linux version that I had tingled and optimized, really felt like this is incredible. So that's where I am right now. I mean really happy with the Linux setup and just, I don't know if I'm angry or disappointed. I'm just a little like, I kind of wish I knew this like. four years ago? Like I should have done this in 2020 when Apple was just like, we're gonna break your kneecaps here unless you pay us 30%. That should have been the signal where it's like, shit, why am I still here? Just like it was when the original iPod came out in 2001, was like, why am I still on Windows? If there is an alternative and it's good enough, I should switch. So, all right, that was, was, that was a long one. No, I mean that, yeah, the, that transition is painful, but like you said, it's, you can get to a better place in the other side. And I think there's a lot of technical details, but I think what it comes down to me is, you know, I sit at my desk and there's this thing sitting here and my whole life is coming through it. Like it's what helps me provide for my family. It connects me to the whole world, everything. And knowing how that thing works, like deep, having deep customization of it. and feeling that harmony with it. It's just good for your soul, beyond any of the technical details. And when you get there, it's hard to explain to other people, but you really feel a lot more connected with this really important thing that's sitting on your desk every day. It's funny, I'm reading, I don't know if I started it right at the same time, I don't even know if it was an accident or just a serendipitous, I'm reading the book The Sen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. And it speaks exactly to that point. It speaks exactly to the point of, do you just want to be a consumer? I mean, this is a story about riding motorcycles in the 70s and they needed a fair amount of tender loving care to keep them running. and you needed to know about timing chains and how to oil things and tighten things and whatever. And in the book, he makes a very compelling argument for exactly what you say, that there is just a satisfaction in the soul of knowing how the things you interact with on a daily basis even depend on work at least at a basic level. And I find that Linux just forces you down that path. because there is a few more timing belts you have to tighten yourself. And it is good to know where they are and what the commands are and so forth. But what you come out on the other side as is a more knowledgeable, experienced, comfortable, and confident technologist. And I think that is in great lack right now. And where I see it hugely is in this discussion about the cloud. So cloud technology and services and platforms as a service have convinced an entire generation of developers that connecting your own server to the internet is way too fucking scary. It's like running that motorcycle backwards, blindfolded on one hand. Like that's just fucking crazy. That's evil, Knievel shit to connect your own computer to the internet. And I was like, wait, what? how did that become to be the case? Why are we so afraid of connecting computers to the internet? And I think a lot of it is based on, first of all, outdated mental models. mean, anyone who's been around technology, as I said, there was a time where if you bought a new Windows machine and you connected to the internet and you hadn't already set up the antivirus stuff, you could give it five minutes and it would be infected. That's kind of a long time ago. And Linux was never like that. I think those mental models haven't fully updated and then the cloud providers have literally put in billions and billions of dollars to scare the living bejesus out of anyone from connecting computers to the internet. Because if someone realizes that they can do that, they will realize that a lot of the cloud machinery is insanely overpriced, that it's an economic model of renting versus owning, that they actually don't. appreciate that it's surrender of independence and whatever else that isn't very flattering. And Linux, I think, is the antidote to some extent. If you run Linux on the desktop yourself, you will be familiar enough with the basics of, UFW as a firewall, for example, it's actually super easy to use. It has one of the best user interfaces for any firewall I've ever seen. It's super quick just to say, like, hey, Lock the shit down so I can only access it on 22. this is a web server. Open up 80 and 443. That's it, done. yeah, okay. Turn off password authentication, only SSH keys. And now you have fucking Fort Knox. Good luck getting into that. If you could get into a box that is set up like that, it has UFW running, it locks down to just those three ports, and you switch from password authentication to SSH key authentication. If you get into one of those, if you can get into a box like that, I mean, you just won the fucking lottery. You have a zero day. I mean, you can sell that to North Korea or China or make them bid on it and boom, five million clean in the bank. So that's the sort of basics, right? Like, it's actually not that difficult to secure a box. It's not that complicated to run pseudo apt upgrade if you need to update something. You don't need to do it that often. And also, by the way, didn't you just set up a fucking JavaScript? interpolation deployment compiled pipeline that involved 700 megabytes of node modules across 5 ,000 dependencies and you were able to figure that shit out? You're telling me you can't add one line of configuration to the SSS SSD daemon and you can't run UFW allow 22? no, that's too hard man. Shit, just way beyond my capacity. What? Yeah. fuck up, or woman the fuck up. That's pathetic. That is pathetic, and we can beat that shit out of you. We can do some server phobia, reverse cognitive behavior with you. You're gonna, okay listen, listen, I know you're afraid of the server, it's not gonna bite you. is not gonna bite you. Hackers are not gonna get in there, but first let's expose you to Linux. See, here's a computer, it runs the Linux. You can touch it, it's okay. Just put one hand on the space bar and push it. Push it one time. See? Nothing bad happened. And I think that level of cognitive behavioral therapy, that's part of the reason why I'm excited about things like Omacube. Can we introduce that level to this generation of developers, such that they will realize that running computers on the internet is not some exotic, dangerous thing that's only for Linux wizards and neckbeards who've been doing it for 40 fucking years. You for you too. It's never been easier. It's never been cheaper. And the stand you're able to take for independence and pricing and all the other advantages that you get out of that is totally worth it. Totally freaking worth it. It's nowhere near as complicated as figuring out how to make a 1972 Yamaha motorcycle work or the timing belts. So we need to disabuse people of this nonsense, which includes sort of addressing head on the fact that the AWS reseller model is incredibly profitable. This is why all the VCs want to do it. There was just an announcement, I think, yesterday about another web framework who also wants to be an AWS reseller. And I totally get it. I totally get why VCs look at that. Wait, so you're telling me I don't even have to own computers? I can just rent those computers and then rent them again to someone else? that sounds like a fucking great business model. I have no inventory, have no staff, have no nothing. I just mainly have to convince developers that they're stupid and fragile, so that they need my shit, and then I can just run the money printer. Yeah, no, that's not the model of the internet that I'm interested in. And again, I'm putting things to a point. I appreciate the advantages in developer economics. Heroku, for example, really did amazing pioneering work in the AWS reseller space, and they taught The rest of us, do you know what? Deploying to a server could be a whole lot easier, and we should make it easier. But to me, that is essentially shining a light on a part of the infrastructure level of how we work with the internet that open source should then address. And it's not like, you've got to come up with Photoshop, right? That's the whole Photoshop versus GIMP debate that, yeah, do you know what? Even as a now converted Linux fan, I can look at that and go like, yeah, GIMP is not as good. Yeah. it's a bad piece of software. I'm just saying end user software like Photoshop is difficult to make on this model. What's not difficult to make on this model is goddamn infrastructure. All the best infrastructure in the world is open source, from Linux to MySQL to Nginx to whatever. The entire stack, even the entire stack that's being used in the cloud, it's all built on open source stuff. So this fact that we're gonna give up the last mile to a bunch of VCs and a bunch of closed source commercial passes. Fuck that. No, no, no. This is where we take up the mantle and go like, we can make this easy, we can make this better. I've been trying to push that envelope with Kamal, a deploy tool that we used to build on top of Docker to get out of the cloud. We used to be in the cloud, we used to be on AWS, we used to be on all this stuff for a bunch of hours, things with Basecamp. And hey, and we yanked all of it out because cost was just getting ridiculous. And we built a bit of tooling. And now I'm on a goddamn mission. to make open source as capable, as easy to use as all these AWS resellers we have against any box running basic Linux with an IP address you can connect to. Yeah, I think, I think beyond the fear that you described that people have, I actually think there's another dimension too. There's almost like a pride. I think there's like this, narrow definition of productivity where they're like, if I have to learn something like that's not productive. And they kind of have this literally narrow path of like, I'm someone that loves being productive. I'm all about business. That means I like, you know, value these things. But a lot of this stuff, like you said, like when you go and understand these under underlying things. that does make you more productive in ways that are really hard to explain. You get advantages in other places. So yeah, I think for me it's more like there's a weird pride with not knowing this stuff. I think that's like hard to shake people of. That's straight out of Senandiyara Motorcycle Maintenance. The guy he's riding with is riding a BMW motorcycle, and he explicitly takes pride in not knowing anything. It's part of a core identity. There's a whole philosophy in that book about why that is. Why does that develop sort of our struggle with modality and the hardness of knowing everything and then essentially becoming eluded, not wanting to know anything, and then developing an entire identity around that. And I think that's really interesting. I also think it is sad when it comes to developers because it is not internally consistent. It is not an internally consistent model of how do you become a capable developer. Because first of all, as we've discussed, you're figuring shit out all the time. To make a JavaScript project from four years ago compile requires a fucking PhD at this point, right? Like in archeology and whatever, you gotta dig out all these old tools. was using Webpack. What was Webpack? that was in the ancient times of... 2018 that we use tools like that to compile our stuff so if you're able to figure that shit out Don't tell me you can't set up a Linux machine. They come pre baked out of the box for most cases There's very little seasoning you have to apply to that dish for it to be delicious and good and nutritious so I Think it is it is it is weird and it's weird and fascinating ways of like why are humans weird And I also think it's fixable. I think it's fat driven and I think we can absolutely reverse course. The cloud, when that was first introduced, sounded nuts. Wait, I'm gonna rent computers the entire time even if I need them all the time from some other person who runs a everything store? What? That sounds nuts. Why would I do that? And then a few years happened and again, we realized that there were some real advantages to that but a lot of it was also just like a mental shift, right? experimental shift and you know what those things can shift back and and we can knock things straight and some of it is pendulum swinging right When it comes to setting up servers, I think the main Swift Swift shift for me is the difference between pets and cattle, right? Is this like your lovingly nurtured machine where you've tweaked out your little configs in a bespoke way and it lives just on this box and if you need another box You're like, you should it's gonna take me 20 hours to set that up Or do you live in a cattle world where you're deploying containers and that's where all the interesting configuration happens and it's repeatable and it's scalable and it's all these other things. Now, that pet versus cattle idea which really got pushed forward with the cloud can totally work on your own stuff too or work on dedicated machines or whatever. So some of it is relaying the fact that you don't have to give up on modernity to understand how things work. You don't have to give up on containerization to understand how a Linux box can be connected to the internet. These things are actually not in our position. And as we found, when we moved out of the cloud, we had a team of about 10 people on our ops team, and a bunch of them were cloud native specialists. That was their main thing. Then we moved out of cloud onto our own stuff, and they could retain like 90 % of their skills. 90 % of the system administration work was the same whether we owned the boxes or we rented them from Amazon, right? And I think that's the part. a lot of folks aren't appreciating. They're thinking, wait, computer? Does that mean like it's running in your basement? How do you secure that? Do you have a baseball bat down there in case someone tries to break in and get it? Like, what even is this? It's like, no, that's not how it works. There are professional data centers that you just rent a space for and then you put in your own computer. there's just a basic education here where I kind of feel like it's like we're discovering an agent. ancient civilization and people going how the fuck did they build those pyramids man I don't even understand how the stone could get up there and weighed like 400 tons like what kind of crazy technology is that and and then the people built the pyramids which is like hey man I'm like 45 we did it like nine years ago this isn't ancient technology that we need archaeologists to figure out it probably wasn't fucking aliens either like we knew and we know how to do that the people are still alive The people who set up the internet as you know it today, which was set up not on hyperscalers, but by individual companies owning computers and connecting them to the internet, they're still fucking alive. There's kind of a lot of them too. like, we can rediscover that. We can rediscover that and we'll be better off for it if we do. And a bunch of the advances we've had in technology since then have actually made it easier to do that. When I got started with the internet, Well, not even the Internet let's just say when I got served with base cam when we launched base cam We launched base cam on an Intel Celeron One core I think CPU with 2 .8 gigahertz. Is that right something like that, right? One fucking core one 2004 core by the way that shit was slow I mean by modern standards to order to magnitude faster I just bought a hobby box from Hetzner just to rent and play with an experiment right 48 cores Hyper -threading, 96 vCPUs for $220 a month. What? What? The amount of computing power that's in that machine could operate probably 95 % of all SaaS businesses that exist in the world. And a napkin math that I did yesterday on Twitter said, like, you know what? We probably only need like five of those boxes to run all of Basecamp, which is a SaaS company doing tens of millions in ARR. Computers have gotten insanely fast and capable and productive. And you wouldn't know half the time if you're dealing with a reseller of a reseller of perhaps a reseller of AWS because that shit is still expensive. mean, Heroku, again, I love Heroku and I'm just going to bang them a little bit. Like, we'll literally charge you like $200 for like half of a vCPU and two megabytes of RAM. That's a little over the top. Hardware is really good, really fast, and it's getting faster and cheaper like all the fucking time. Moore's law, once you look at multi -core setups, is very much alive. Should be getting twice as fast at half the cost in no time at all. And it is, except if you buy it from a reseller of a reseller. Yeah, the point about the tools working, like the cloud tools, also all those things being retained, that's a good one. So I work on infrastructure as code stuff and all of our tooling was developed for deploying cloud services. So there's good ideas there, like declaratively defining config, like applying that. And we realized the other day, we can just point all the same stuff to like a Docker daemon running on a machine and it all works exactly the same. So all the great benefits that we kind of invented in the cloud, you can just use that same model anywhere. So yeah, it's quite a different experience. And I was at a post the other day, I was remembering the first, my first company, I actually launched it off my laptop. it was, I even kind of it was like a, was wifi. It was like a wifi laptop, right? And this was like in 2010. Eventually we moved that to servers in my parents basement, like literally in my parents basement. And we sold the company at that point. And I remember like the first thing they did, they were like, yeah, we need you guys to move that off of there because probably not secure. But I was thinking like, you know, I actually did build and sell a company that we had a dog, you know. Yeah, it was dusty down there. Those servers are still there, too. I could probably still still use them. But but yeah, like, you know, I did build and sell a company that way. It's a lot better these days to do something like that, though. It is a lot better and I think that that's also where these things are not in opposition of it. I'm glad the cloud thing happened. really am. I think it moved the ball forward in a lot of ways of how to understand how to run things. Some of the conceptual models, the pets versus cattle, the declarative setups, all that stuff, we owe to the cloud. We owe to the billions and billions and billions of dollars that got pushed into it. We don't have to stay there, right? I like to think of it a little bit sometimes, Big Pharma. Someone puts in a billion dollars to develop a new drug. We should be thankful as humanity for that to happen. It is really expensive to do the R &D. Lots of the R &D doesn't work. Even when the R &D does work, it goes through all these clinical trials. cost absolutely astounding sums of money to do. requires investors to underwrite all of that. And those investors will only do it if they occasionally get a slam dunk, usempec, to pay it all off, right? Incredible. Equally incredible. The fact that patents expire after 19 years, 18 years, and then shit goes generic. And after it's gone generic, the price goes to essentially what it costs to produce the compounds, which is usually nothing, right? I mean, I guess I can get as riled up as anyone about the state of the American healthcare system, but I can't get that riled up about the idea that a pill costs more than the chemical compounds it takes to produce it, because that's not the expense, right? The expense is developing the drug that works and is safe. and could be rolled out. And America, just for whatever peculiar reasons, ends up bankrolling the whole world on this, right? Americans pay through the nose for their medication, and that's why we have all this medication. Anyway, so when all that happens, it's also amazing that we have the forcing function of the generic threat, right? First of all, it means that these pharmaceutical companies can't just develop a drug and then the next 200 years milk it like Mickey Mouse. Things will actually expire and they have to come up with new shit or they'll go out of business. And just as importantly, the advances for humanity accrue to all at zero cost once shit goes generic. That's the model we should think about with commercial software development and cloud development. The cloud was on a patent for quite a while and it developed a bunch of cool new shit and that's great and we should be grateful for it and I'm grateful for it. But also now it's time to go generic. Now it's time for these advantages in developer ergonomics and deployment and containerization and of the wazoo to go generic, we don't have to pay rental fees until the end of fucking time. The internet today exists the way it does because of open source software. wouldn't be an I owed as many businesses if every goddamn vendor wanted a per CPU license charge as though you were buying Oracle in 1998. That was just gonna seriously curve the dynamism of the entire economy. So we need to respect the fact that the capitalist forces are pushing these things forward at the frontier, and that's amazing, and I'm a capitalist in that regard very much so. And then I'm also a goddamn communist when it comes to open source software and like that it all should be free and we should be fighting to move more things generic and so forth. Those ideas, even if they sound contradictory, they fit inside someone's head. They can fit inside someone's head. You can wrestle with that paradox and be better off for it by embracing both at the same time. But it is well overdue that we go generic with the cloud nonsense. Yeah. I mean, that, that resonates a lot with, with me, like the work that we do is, like some of these resellers you're talking about, sometimes they do come up with cool ways to deploy stuff or, you know, they, they come with stuff that we wouldn't have thought of. And what we do is we take it and we just make it open source so that people can use it wherever, wherever they, they need to. So there's like a, it's a little antagonistic, but there's also like a, like a harmony to it as well. yeah, I think all capitalism. The idea of capitalism is there's no permanence. If you have permanence, it doesn't work. You need things to get destroyed occasionally. And you can't be a cocatalyst if you don't believe in that. Yes. And I think this is why I've been so vocal about the cloud issue in particular, because I've been seeing what looks like the formation of new monopolies. And then it's partly coming because these hyperscalers are not operating in a traditional free marketplace, because it is very difficult for companies to actually switch. And again, it's been the promise of the cloud almost since day one, we're gonna use all these declarative configs and so forth, and you're be able to just like, you don't like pricing in AWS? No problem, you just switch to GCP, you don't like that, you switch to Azure. Yeah, no one's doing that, no one's doing that. And in fact, much of the evangelism around the cloud is like, you're not doing cloud right unless you're using all these proprietary APIs. Unless you're fully taking advantage of the managed services and the serverless and the this and the that and the other thing that is usually just peculiar and particular enough to a single cloud vendor, you're not doing it right. And that's of course the maximum amount of lock -in you will ever get on the business if once you go down the path of using bespoke, slightly tailored, slightly different version of these open source tools that most of this stuff is built on at AWS or other places. We went through that. a fair amount of time to get out of the cloud. It was not about just changing the IP addresses of sort of the Kubernetes deployment target and then pushing the button and it all working. Maybe one day we will get there. I don't know. I think there's a very strong incentive from the hyperscalers for us not to get there. They don't want a competitive marketplace. They don't want ease of migration or ease of change because that's going to bring pricing pressure. In fact, I just saw, I think it was yesterday, that prices for the same amount of compute in total refutation of Moore's law is going up. Like cloud is getting more expensive for the same amount of compute. That's fucked up. Like that to me is an example of a captured market that's not responsive to the normal competitive pressures of a functional market, right? And I think we need open source for nothing else for that, right? Pricing power becomes extreme when you have full control of the market. Just ask Apple. We started out that discussion. How the fuck are they able to check 30 % of everyone's business on the App Store? Well, because they can, and there's no other alternative for you if you want to ship software to iPhones, right? So if you can control a toll booth like that. The cloud providers are not quite like that. They're a little more like a Roach Motel. You can check in, you just can't check out. And we need to make it like a regular hotel. You can check in, and then you can stay for a while, and then you can leave without it costing an arm and a leg in the first born. Yeah. So the one thing I will say, kind of disagree a little bit is, I think if you are going to use a cloud, if you're going to use one of the public clouds, if you try to use it in a way where you're just trying to rent servers, you're going have a horrible experience. Like it's way too expensive to do that. If your approach is, I'm renting servers, I'm going to run my own software. Just don't use a cloud at all. Just go to, like you said, that's stuff that you guys are using. go directly to data centers that offer renting the hardware directly. You can have a much better experience. If you are going to use a cloud, you might as well just commit to something, commit to using it properly. And then yeah, you can use the services, high level services. They're more expensive, but at least you get the benefit. I think it's this middle ground where you try to use a cloud in this agnostic way. That's just never going to work out at all. So whatever model clicks for you, if you like console servers, just go buy them directly. It's probably at least 10x cheaper, if not more. That was my mental model and we used a lot of the managed services. We used RDS and that whole setup. And unfortunately, I would say is that that's where you get reamed the worst. Like the managed services on RDS and with search was the other one we used, what was it called? Open search or something else AWS. Okay. those are just shitty repackaging of stuff that you can just run directly, right? Like, let's search. decent in terms of economics. They did save us some degree of some kinds of backups and whatever. It was a little bit there. But the upcharge was so freaking insane. were spending on RDS alone, we were spending more than half a million dollars a year in rental fees. It cost us, I think, to replace that, like the hardware and setup, we bought $125 ,000 worth of machine. And then we owned those machines. Now we still had to pay for power, and we still had to pay for some other. But holy shit. Like literally the payback on the machine purchase was like five minutes, right? Like five minutes to rent so we could buy all these huge hunky beasts of machines with amazing amounts of cores and RAMs and all the other stuff. And we just had to connect them to the internet again. There's something there. So yeah, I'm not. Disputing the fact that there are cases where the cloud makes sense and where I've usually said is especially have you if you have a huge dynamic range on like peak to 12 in terms of your usage like one day you're doing Whatever a hundred thousand requests a second and the next day you're doing Ten that is a huge range where you're have a bunch of idle servers sitting around if you're gonna build out your setup system, they can take it. So there is a tip of a point with that dynamic range I think makes sense. And then there's also a tip of a point where you can't, you're not even using a whole machine, right? Like, hey, I just need to rent like 18 % of a computer because that's all I need right now. So there's some granularity there. And then I'm also sure that there are other cases like access to specialized hardware is a good one. Good luck trying to buy a bunch of H1s or H100s, whatever. the hyperscalers did have access to that and they would rent it to you. I think there plenty of cases where it does make sense. I think my argument has been that the default case is not right. The default case being like, hey, you should run cloud on everything and running your own shit is like trying to produce your own power. That was one of the analogies that were used for a while. Well, are you in the power production business? No, then you should just buy power from the socket. Are you in the cloud data center business? No, therefore you should just. Yeah, that one doesn't hold. It doesn't actually work. You are much closer to the same dynamics, whether you rent it or you own it. A lot of the difference just lies in the finance model. At CapEx versus OpEx and whatever. And if you actually ran the numbers, you would be surprised. Now part of the irony here is it's actually very, very difficult to run the numbers in the cloud. We had like FinOps, that's a cottage industry. Your consultancy specializing in understanding your bill. If that is not a red flag of red flags, I don't know what is. Yeah, this is so complicated, I need specialists with PhD in statistical analysis to just understand what I'm paying for. What? I mean, and we saw this ourselves. We tried to, well, not just tried, we worked very hard to understand our bill, like how to proportion it and what is that application spending. That was tens of hours a month. yeah, it comes up. It comes up all the time. Every other month we're... Yeah. crazy. And after we bought our own servers, yeah, that went away. Like there was just a whole category of work that just disappeared. We did one big analysis when we bought all the servers we needed to get out of the cloud for whatever, and it was like, I don't know, $500, $600 ,000. Not an insignificant sum, but like our cloud budget was 3 .2 million, so like. Proportionally not that big of a deal. Anyway, we do that analysis once and then we're like, all right, see you in five years. That's the next time I'm gonna worry about whether I need an AMD Ipik 9454 or a 9754. Like, yeah, I don't need to do this every day, right? With the cloud, you kind of sort of do because if you don't, it is so easy for these things to run away from you. The 3 .2 million we had on our cloud budget really should have been twice that at least. It would have been if we hadn't been Nazis about chasing down the last penny and stopping all the right services and doing all the optimizations and entering long term contracts. This is other thing that blows my mind. People have this conception. the cloud is like just meter as you go. Yeah, no, no, it isn't. No one actually using the cloud at scale is paying like per the minute. They are entering into at least one year contracts on committed instances because that's the only way to get any pricing that makes any kind of sense on AWS's S3 service. We were in a four year fucking contract. Four years we committed to get any pricing that kinda sort of made sense. there's a lot of contradictions in all this stuff. Again, different businesses are different in different ways and I'm not saying there's one size that fits all here. I think there is an opening though for us to reconsider what the default should be, when you should start doing the calculations and also if you do know Linux a little bit, the alternatives won't seem as foreign. or as inconceivable as I think they do to some companies, right, who have grown up in a cloud first world and have a team that's familiar with instantiating new AWS services and then they go like, what do you mean, Ethernet? Where? Like that, that's fixable. Yeah, yeah. So I think where we can agree on is like, I'm still going to, like, I use the cloud heavily, like clicks for me. But what I don't like is the people that are like quote unquote on that side don't know how to do the other thing. So it's just like, I can't really trust your opinion, even though you're like on this side, because you're doing it out of not knowing the other side. Like I've always had a home lab that I managed would run whatever like I would use it to expand my old Kubernetes, with Nomad, all the different orchestration stuff. So I've seen how that stuff has progressed and I enjoy it. Like I said, just like with my desktop, it's really good when you curate that garden almost, running all the services that power my family stuff. So I have a sense of that. So when I'm choosing the cloud, I'm choosing it with awareness of what I'm trading off and what I'm balancing. Yeah, I agree with that. that's what most people are doing. Not what most businesses are doing. They're not doing it from, like, hey, I know how this works if we were going to run it ourselves. I know how it works in the cloud. I can make the math work, or I can make the economics work. That is not what I'm seeing broadly. And I think that's a shame. And I think, again, we can fix it. And I think part of the fix literally is exposure therapy, getting more developers exposed directly to Linux, such that they realize that the operating system they're gonna run their servers on is not this scary alternate universe where everything is upside down. It's actually, first of all, quite familiar in many ways. Like if you're a developer working on the Mac, the hop to Linux isn't like if you were a Windows PowerShell user and you didn't want to run WSL. Okay, that's gonna be a culture shock of some mention. when you hop into Linux land, right? If you've been running on the Mac and you run Homebrew and you're familiar with some of these tools, whatever, it's not like going to a different universe. It is like going to perhaps a different continent, but they kind of still speak a version of English, just kind of broken. guess like Americans going to Australia and like just going, hey mate! That's like the Linux version for Mac OS folks switching over. It's a dialect, right? But. if his mic is through his camera and his camera died. that this is literally the same stuff as you run on the server. That should make you far more comfortable in thinking you can run it too without needing a PhD in Linux hardening. Not any good jokes. No, I have one important question for him though. Not important, but like, it's... he's off. You can ask me. I'll pretend to be him. Chris, this is where you just play some like cool little music. Yeah, we'll just cut it out, I guess. Maybe not this whole delay, yeah. Let's not leave that in. boy, I said it. Said the thing. Hey, speaking of fucking Linux, I think my goddamn VPN just took over and the VPN went down. So all my routing, or I was on the VPN and the VPN went down. We reset it at work or something. So I hope you can switch things. That is amazing though. Yeah. So I have a quick question for you. So this is a thought I had the other day, because I feel a lot of the same things you're talking about, where I'm like, people these days don't even know how to X. And you remember when we were young, people would say that to us. So like, are we just doomed to repeat this? Is this actually gonna change? Is it actually different this time? It's always different when it's your generation. Then the young people are ungrateful and the older one is stupid, right? It's kind of like driving on the highway. Anyone who drives faster than you is a maniac. Anyone who drives slower than you is a grandma, right? Like, you're driving the perfect speed. How amazing, it worked out that way. I do think about that all the time. And exactly for the reasons that you say, I remember when I started working with the web and I had a bunch of programmer friends. And those programmer friends were used to writing applications in assembler in C and a lot of them had a very difficult time with something like PHP where they just go like that is literally 10 ,000 times as inefficient that for loop got there as if I wrote it in assembler and did a move and a whatever XOR I don't even fucking know I don't know assembler but They had a very difficult time adjusting to that right and I I do try to think about that often when I go like, well, back in our days when we had to set up servers and connect them to the internet, we walked barefoot in both directions and it snowed all the time. So you've got to be careful not to turn into the literal Simpsons episode of like the old man shaking at the sky or at the cloud. Let's make it specific, right? While at the same time also realizing that not everything new is better. And that we've seen that over and over again in all sorts of domains where I think it is a very healthy instinct that we should constantly be pushing forward. How can we make things simpler? How can make them faster? And we should be using those additional CPU cycles, for example, to make ourselves more productive. And this was actually why I am so passionately angry at the cloud is because I felt like they didn't hold up their end of the bargain. I did not feel like things got sufficiently easier, that I was paid back in additional productivity. we were never able to materially change the configuration of our operations team. When they worked in the cloud, there were some things that were slightly different. They weren't worrying perhaps about, hey, there's a warning here about the second PSU in this sled that needs to be changed. That was not a warning they would get. That would just go to the, I was about to call it cloud monkeys. We're all fucking cloud monkeys. And someone in that data center would run around and you would think, man, the computer is so sophisticated. No, that's fucking just George. and George is sprinting with your damn CPU over to that box and he's pulling it out. You just don't know George. George lives behind an API. two people that are there, like on call. Yeah, it's not even like a whole team or anything. there's some of that and that's why I think I would have, I mean that's why I was a cloud believer actually for many years. I was very passionate like this is the way the future is gonna work. We just need to get over this hump then it's gonna get easier and cheaper. And it never fucking did. Never fucking did. That's why I'm still mad. I tried for more than half a decade to find cheaper and to find easier. The only thing I ever consistently found was faster. And I mean faster in terms of procurement. It is still amazing, I will grant, that with one API call you can spin up like a thousand servers. It's gonna cost you probably a house and a condo, but you can do it. That's pretty fucking cool. You can't do that by going to dealt .com and ordering a bunch of power edges, right? Like that's gonna take like a week and a half at least, maybe two, before they arrive and before they're racked. So that was always there, but to me it was always about the three things. It was supposed to be cheaper. It was supposed to be easier, it was supposed to be faster. And it's only really the speed of procurement that I saw at our business. Again, as we've talked about, there's different considerations and different analysis you've got to make on your own business. But I was just so disappointed that the promised land never seemed to arrive. That when I look at setting up a new AWS installation, when I read through the like, hey, get started with AWS one on one, went like, this shit is off the scale complicated. Just even remembering how I do the IAM user management configuration in the cloud, I feel like I have to go back to school to study again. Some of it's just different things, and you learn different things, and you can say learning is also complicated. Okay, yes, but also no. There are different scales of complexity, I felt, or I feel like the cloud in many ways did not help up its end of the bargain, that it promised us simpler, and we didn't get it. All right, I got a question and this is kind of moving off of all the cloud stuff, but we are probably running short on time here and I want to be respectful of yours. You said earlier that the Apple stuff made you mad enough. You considered like hanging it up, retiring. I think in my generation, we're kind of the generation right below yours that looked up to you. I've definitely, no, no, no, no, no. And you might not even be that much older than us. Yeah, okay, yeah. So we're the same. That's funny. I guess I've always wondered like someone like you you get to that level of success or whatever you could not do this anymore, but you choose to and I wonder like are Do you have this idea in your head of what it would take for you to kind of stop programming? Yes, if Matt ever decides to introduce static typing into Ruby, I'm out. So that's one. The other one would be if somehow browsers would only accept TypeScript and not JavaScript anymore, I'm out. No, seriously, as long as I'm still having fun and I feel like I have my independence, that's really the two factors I gauge things on. I'm having a tremendous amount of fun. This is one of the reasons why I'm so passionate about the Linux thing. It's really been... Have fun. was about to say a journey of a lifetime. That's probably actually fair. I haven't had that many platform changing. I'm just gonna mix it all up. I'm gonna take 20 years of ingrained muscle memory about where the Apple key goes with copy and rewriting that to the control key. That has been a ton of fun. And building all this tooling we built to get out of the cloud has been an amazing amount of fun. So I actually don't think I'm gonna stop thinking computers are fun. Like, I just fundamentally really like computers. Like, they are just, I will, I will, on my days off, whatever, on the weekend, occasionally, when I just have, I was like, I just wanna go type on my little keyboard. Like, for a while. I just wanna, I'm gonna fix a bug. I'm not even hit by the bug, I don't even fucking care about the bug. I wanna hear, like, any clack from a mechanical keyboard. I wanna commit something, I wanna push it, I wanna do a release, because it's just freaking fun and I enjoy it. So I don't think that part is gonna go away. Again, Matt's, if you're listening, short of you fucking putting static typing into Ruby, not gonna happen, man. I'm gonna stay on Ruby 3 version, whatever, before that, until the end of time. The other one that's more likely is that it stops becoming possible to run things independently. That you have to run on, a hyperscaler and release through an app store. Then I'm out. Like, I don't want to do that. I don't want to go through multiple layers of permission. I don't want to have to beg fucking Cook about whether I can release a new idea into the wild, whether I can release software. So as long as we can keep the internet strong, and I think that's not as obvious of a premise as I would have assumed and advocated for it being in like 2008. Like, the internet is under pressure from a lot of different forces, and this idea, at the very least of a global internet, seems more or less over. Like we are fracturing the internet at an alarming rate. And okay, maybe that can happen and maybe we just have to accept that like at some point, like there's gonna be a European internet, just like there's a Chinese internet, just like there's halfway Brazilian internet and they're not kind of connected. Or at least they have very severe firewalls that prevent things from going back and forth. I hope that America's not getting there. I don't take it for granted though. and I don't think anyone should. If you care about the internet in its sort of original ethos and form, I think you're gonna have to get ready to fight for it to some extent. What does that mean? I don't fucking know. I don't wanna get political about that in any way. Just this idea of appreciating what we have and realizing how unique it is. The internet as a software distribution platform is truly one of the kind. If you had explained it to any VC today, they would have gone like, yeah, but where's the toll booth? Can we just install one around the whole thing, or do you have five at different corners? How do you do it? How do you capture all the economic activities that's coming out of this thing? And the fact that we ended up with such a powerful platform that wasn't owned by any individual company and backed by any individual VC is just mind -blowing. And I think you only... Realize how unique and rare it is when you look at the regression we've gone through with the app stores that to get software onto mobile phones It's not like that at all It's an absolutely dominated platform with a single gatekeeper who tells you whether you have a right to exist or not So if that's what the internet either becomes or the internet disappears or gets so kneecapped by all these Fencing in that it starts resembling that okay. I'm also out But it sounds like the computers thing. That's for life. I've always wondered like, yeah. This is actually one of the reasons I look at AI, right? We talked a little bit about that at beginning. And people are like, they're so excited that AI is gonna take all programming jobs. And to some degree, I can be excited for that in the same way that like, did we need, I don't know, two million people tending to horses for our economy to function? Maybe not, but I don't really like horses, but I know people who do, and they still ride them. I hope to be that. I'm still writing the manual code, I'm typing in the commands, I'm not just narrating to cursor 5x AI to build the shit for me, right? Like, exactly. And I do actually think that that is, there's still gonna be space for that, but I think it's very plausible and you should certainly consider that we've reached the high water mark. Like, that the number of people employed doing programming for a living has peaked. It's entirely possible. If you look at almost any other phase of the economy that has happened, the number of people who work in agriculture, the number of people who work on the assembly line, there are plenty of precedents for this idea that there were some glorious times for a certain industry and for the workers in that industry and that ended for one reason or another, usually economic or progress or otherwise, right? And I don't know what that's gonna look like and I think... I don't want to be a fear monger here, but I do accept the fact that there are people who make their living doing this stuff who are right to be a little bit nervous about it. I mean, if you worked in Detroit in like whatever, 1972, and you were putting together Buicks, and life was pretty fucking good, and you had a whatever, good setup, and two cars in the garage, and all this stuff, yet that doesn't exist in the same way anymore. Is that programmers future? I don't fuck no. I hope not. I hope not and I hope also, right? Isn't that weird? Like we think back on like, do we wanna go back to subsistence farming? Do we wanna go back to like 98 % of the population, like literally swinging a hoe? Probably not, right? We also don't wanna go back to the assembly line that that occupies everyone. But it's very hard in the moment to like, what comes after? What is the next? Where is it all going to cycle into? I don't know. And I think sometimes the cheerleading is like, yeah, we're all just going to become prompt engineers. Yeah, no, I don't think so. Yeah, I mean, it's just like your transition to Linux. It was painful. You didn't know that it could be better, but eventually you kind of got there. yeah. what I choose to hope. I choose to hope that our AI overlords are going to be benevolent and we can still prompt them, then they're not prompting us and all the other good stuff. So one last thing, I have to plug this because you mentioned you like 2Es. You're like blown away by like how crazy 2Es can get. Have you seen what we've done with our coffee shop? I have not. So we built a coffee shop that's served entirely over SSH. So if you do ssh terminal dot shop, you get like a full coffee buying. You can literally buy coffee and it shows up at your, at your house. But yeah, so it was, I mean, I don't drink coffee either, but I sell it. So, but it was fun because Adam worked on a lot of the, like the front end for it, but it was cool because it's a very constrained UI. can't have like different font sizes. You can only do like colors and stuff, but the constraints kind of breed. They're amazing. Constraints are the best. Yes. there's like amazing TUI tools. I've also been going deeper and I've built a bunch of other ones too for work. Yeah, it's wild. Like it's better UX than a lot of the more powerful, you know, environments that we have UI in. Yeah. dream of doing a TUI for hay all the time, and even a TUI for base camp. It's funny because I remember my first sort of exposure to TUIs was travel agents and flight attendants. Like they work in, I don't know if they still do, but they used to, right? And you just, they were all so you, they were ahead of the fucking curve, you could hear the clickety clack, they were on the mechanical keyboards, they were hipster nerds before that became a thing, right? They're like, I know all the fucking things, so. F12, F13, yeah you can get to Bangkok through Shanghai if you stop over in Oslo. And you're like, Jesus smokes, have you tried to use a travel website these days? I mean this is half the banner on my wife and I's direct chat is just like, how the fuck did airlines get so shitty? How did in shitification just devour the travel industry to the point now where I'm like, I pray for travel agents to make a comeback, right? Yeah. painful to book any kind of travel through a web -based interface, and I'm I'm a big fan of the Internet I'm big fan of the web I built like 20 years there But I also have to accept defeat that like a lot of shit on the Internet is just perpetually getting worse And if they had the 2e constraints it couldn't get that shitty right so maybe we should get back to both travel agents and 2e's for general point of view Yes two E's over SSH. That's a future. All right. Yeah, this is funny. Yeah, appreciate it. All right. Blend the recording. it together that the hop in connection here from my failing VPN isn't an issue. Awesome. All right, we're really bad at saying goodbye and like ending podcasts. So just, just a heads up. See ya. All right., DHH Talks Apple, Linux, and Running Servers, How About Tomorrow?, 01j7xm6myg5v97380pdnf125g7.