That's a pretty uncharitable take. It literally only exists because of him, he pushed hard for it for years, and now he's decided not to anymore it leaves a bitter taste? What do you want him to do?
Why couldn't this be a public service though? Governments spend so much money on producing and managing cash as a public good. Why can't we do the same for digital payment infrastructure?
> Governments spend so much money on producing and managing cash as a public good.
No, governments do not spend money on producing cash. They make money by printing it. The net value to the government of printing money is positive, not negative. (And in our current financial system, they distribute much of that value to financial institutions and the rich people who own them--which was the original reason the Federal Reserve system was put in place, due to intensive lobbying by the rich people at the time.)
It sounds like you're maybe in a bit of analysis paralysis, trying to find the optimal way to move forward. If you stay in that frame of mind, you'll spin your wheels for hours trying to find the best way to approach it, and then never actually approach anything.
My advice would be, as hard as it might seem, let yourself go slow and just do things. Spend a few weeks on webdev, or learning aseembly, or playing with AI. As long as you are engaged with whatever you're doing, that is enough. You will, via repeated exposure to smart people doing hard things, learn how to navigate and overcome all kinds of problems.
I actually disagree a little with the previous commenter about learning how to use AI. While that is useful, AI becomes second nature once you have been exposed to all these other things.
Hard disagree. They’re on a generational run atm. While the hyperscalers focused on big enterprise customers over the last 10 years, Cloudflare has built a product that lets a single developer run crazy projects for insanely cheap and with almost no maintenance. Now that basically everyone is writing and deploying software this is fast becoming the de facto deployment platform of vibe coders everywhere. Even ChatGPT sites runs on Workers.
Yeah, they seem well placed with their cheap-but-grear offerings.
I'm a cheapskate so am sometimes motivated by this cheapness, but each time I realise it's easier to just stick with what I know (Linux daemons) than cloud offerings.
Do you have any suggestions for something in the homelab/self-hosted space where CloudFlare has great offerings? (Other than the boring stuff like cache/DNS).
It depends what you’re doing for sure. If you’re into homelab type stuff Cloudflare is probably not going to offer much. But if you want to run things on the public web, workers and D1 are insanely good offerings, with R2 (their object store) close behind. You can run a public site or app with a proper SQL database, logging, TLS, authentication, with great performance - and never have to touch a thing. No certs, no setting up containers or services, no logging, no patching, and uptime is basically 100% and it’ll either be free or $5 a month. It’s absurd.
The main benefit is that it's very easy to have type safety and consistency between your client and your server. NextJS and the like make it feel almost like you're just calling a native JS function in your client, but it's actually doing lots of magic to make that work. The end result is your client is never out of date with your backend API, everything is type safe, you get full type hinting, and of course all of that helps LLMs write better code for you as well.
As long as you can get an accurate OpenAPI schema out of your API, it’s not much of a value add to have the same language throughout. Stuff like Orval and OpenAPI TS make this easy.
You can enforce keeping them in sync at CI time. This is more effective in a monorepo.
OpenAPI does a similar job and is great if you're using different languages, but I disagree it's not much of a value add. You can send way more types between client/server in e.g. NextJS without thinking about it like lists, dates, promises, etc. OpenAPI can't do that, and OpenAPI also needs a codegen step and then you have to work with janky generated clients.
I’ve been working with purportedly janky generated clients across an FE and BFF monorepo and it’s been painless. From where I’m sat, the benefits I’m missing aren’t significant enough to decide the stack.
I wouldn't say that's entirely true. I've changed my mind reading debates on the internet, and less frequently I've changed my mind months or years after having had a debate on the internet.
If someone did exist who was sincere and not fear-mongering, but was terrified of AI, what would their post need to look like for you to take it seriously?
Your response to someone afraid of the implications of AI is to leave. But you can't just leave society, the economy, or the environment, all of which there are reasonable reasons to think AI will harm them.
Isn't it obvious? I know the parent jumped to the most extreme comparison which is sure to cause dozens of eye rolls. But the point is clear - the reason why some aspects of the modern world are getting worse is because it's filled with order-followers who will always do the thing that benefits them alone in the short-term. This is nothing new, but usually this disconnect was acknowledged by the people doing this as an imperfect bargain. But here they're going a step further, where the thought terminates not at "I follow orders because there is little choice" but "I follow orders because that makes me a good worker/subordinate/person".
That's true locally but not globally - it means the economy will increasingly shift to serve those who still have a reason to bargain with each other, which will be the owners of the AI and other useful capital.
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