Oxide and Friends

The Oxide and Friends revive an old Solaris Kernel Group tradition of making predictions, Adam and Bryan are joined by Redmonk's most famous Red Sox fan, Stephen O'Grady, to make 1, 3, and 6 year predictions. Kelsey Hightower stops to dispense some present and future wisdom.

Show Notes

Oxide and Friends Twitter Space: January 3rd, 2022

Predictions 2022
We’ve been holding a Twitter Space weekly on Mondays at 5p for about an hour. Even though it’s not (yet?) a feature of Twitter Spaces, we have been recording them all; here is the recording for our Twitter Space for January 3rd, 2022.
In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, our special guest on January 3rd included was tech prediction expert and noted Red Sox fan Steven O’Grady.
Below is a table of the oracles and their predictions: (If you made predictions, please submit a PR to add or clarify yours)
 Futurist  1 year  3 year  6 year
 | @openlabbott
47:15 |  Discord are going to annoy their userbase.  |  We’ll finally get a RISC V server in a datacenter, in some shape or form.  |  Email goes the way of the landline.
| @MattSci2
1:10:05 |  The framework laptop company will be unsuccessful. Existing laptops are not substantially different; with some retooling.  |  One major FPGA vendor will have a completely open toolchain for high end FPGAs.  |  At least 1 RISC-V supercomputer in the Top 500.
| @tomk_
1:16:45 |  At least one of the hyperscalers will become startlingly good at partnering.  |  Stablecoins will become regulated.  |  The biggest datacenter server provider (outside the hyperscalers) will be a company that hasn’t yet shipped its first server.
| @tinco
1:18:57 |  Multiple companies will have demonstrated a AGI (one shot machine learning system). It’s not gonna be useful for anything, but I think the problem is less hard than many critics think it is and several companies/organizations are actually going to be showing the first versions of these systems.  |  Drones autonomously flying around private properties will be a common thing. Factory managers, powerlines inspectors, large building sites etc. will have commonly available and affordable options to inspect or patrol their properties.  |  Web3 will actually happen, but not in the way it’s currently being talked about. In 6 years time bots will have improved to the point that they can not be warded off the major platforms (or any platforms) and will make the web absolutely unusable due to them disrupting all established crowd funded moderation systems. A new paradigm will have to emerge that fundamentally changes how we use the web (thus web3), so that we can still derive value from it.
| Ben Stoltz
1:24:40 |  Smart glasses become a viable alternative for computer monitors youtube. People who used to look away from their phones to have their own thoughts, and are now using smart glasses in real life situations, are subjected to an ads vs. attention “Tragedy of the commons”. As costs per unit decrease leading to ubiquity, this forces a modern-day “Highway Beautification Act” to legislate Ad Blocking.  |  A significant percentage of commercial office space will be converted to housing.  |  The best AIs have emotional problems. We don’t really know how they work. AI specialists are more therapists than programmers.
| @kelseyhightower
1:29:30 |  This year will be more of the same, competition to define the new normal as the pandemic winds down.  |  Pandemic-era solutions will backfire; crypto-currencies will give governments an excuse to track all actual spending. “We will give you the transparency, but not the kind you wanted.”  |  Technology will be recognized as sovereignty like money and land used to be. Governments will be wary of using technology from weak allies or competitors. Local hardware manufacturing, growth of local university training, etc. Possibly manifesting as national protectionism, or a reprise of the space-race. Open source will be the default model.
| @orangecms
1:53:45 |  a major OS from China emerges  |  high performance computing from Europe  |  ARM no longer as relevant
| @ahl
1:58:00 |  web3 is done; we’re not talking about it, it’s not a thing, we don’t use the term and we only vaguely recall what it was supposed to mean.  |  Productivity per watt becomes a highly important metric in computing. Tools tell us about our power use. We spin workloads up and down depending on power cost and availability.  |  AWS offers RISC-V instance types.
| @AaronDGoldman
1:07:14 |  Single-node computing: people will realize that that distributed computing has a lot of overhead and that one server can do a lot of work. This will lead people to people doing business analytics jobs by pulling all their data to a single a computer and doing the calculation, getting the result 100x faster than splitting data over many computers.  |  Microservices inlining: taking a lot of microservices and statically linking them together. This will enable calling functions without network overhead, making things run 100x faster.  |  We will start do scaling properly. Instead of thinking “how can I make this big data and scale up to infinity”, we will try to get the most out of single node. Only once a single node has been pushed to its limit will we scale up to first a rack, then a datacenter, and then the world.
| @dancrossnyc
2:01:10 |  Major workplace changes due to the pandemic will amplify and accentuate the wealth gap and disparity. Only some industries are privileged enough to be able to work from home. This will create social problems.  |  Regulation of social media in the aftermath of widespread political unrest, particularly after the US 2024 political season.  |  The effects of climate change will be sufficiently apparent that people will get serious about retooling around compute and power efficiency.
| @iangrunert
56:06 |  No one year prediction.  | CCPA copycat laws in other states, perhaps US federal legislation, plus changing global regulatory environment lead to GDPR-like protections to no longer be geo-fenced by bigger players. This’ll also have impacts on SaaS adoption - spreading data around makes right to amendment and right to deletion harder.  | RISC-V chip in mainstream phone (likely Samsung). Previously moving target, but longer upgrade times and slower pace of improvements will cause Samsung to chase RISC-V for high volume phones due to better unit economics. Will have prior experience in RISC-V fab for other applications.
|  Zach
59:50 |  Not much will happen in with tech industry anti-trust. Any bills in progress will be watered down.  |  Antitrust enforcement will have a chilling effect on acquisitions.  |  Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act lives. The ARM/NVidia merger will not go through, but it’ll will take 5 years to find out. 
Didn’t make it to the Twitter Space, but have a vision of the future? Submit a PR to add your own predictions. Be sure to abide by the rules. Deadline: 2/1/2022
 Futurist  1 year  3 year  6 year
 | @dendibakh
Prediction about optimizing compilers  |  We’ve reached the point of diminishing returns in existing LLVM optimization passes (<3% headroom, which is hard to get).  |  Compilers not only help optimize code, which is what they traditionally do. Compiler developers shift their focus on how they can enable application developers to write more efficient SW, i.e. help them indirectly. For example, a recommendation system based on the database of “golden” code written by performance gurus.  |  Machines are capable of programming themselves. Humans just feed a (formal) description of an algorithm to a machine and it comes up with an optimal code tailored to this particular HW. Compilers play an essential role here. (This is more of a 10-year prediction) 
|  You?  |  |  | 
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next Twitter space will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time; stay tuned to our Twitter feeds for details. We’d love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!

Creators & Guests

Host
Adam Leventhal
Host
Bryan Cantrill

What is Oxide and Friends?

Oxide hosts a weekly Discord show where we discuss a wide range of topics: computer history, startups, Oxide hardware bringup, and other topics du jour. These are the recordings in podcast form.
Join us live (usually Mondays at 5pm PT) https://discord.gg/gcQxNHAKCB
Subscribe to our calendar: https://sesh.fyi/api/calendar/v2/iMdFbuFRupMwuTiwvXswNU.ics

Speaker 1:

Yeah. Today was today was a little chilly. It'll be alright the rest of the week and then get cold again, but

Speaker 2:

nice. Artie, you 2 just seeing how long you can go without talking about the Red Sox? Because that was impressive.

Speaker 3:

Damn.

Speaker 2:

Honestly You

Speaker 1:

know what?

Speaker 4:

I I was sleeping.

Speaker 2:

I I I lost that bet, actually.

Speaker 3:

I think

Speaker 2:

he's got to go a minute.

Speaker 1:

There's a lockout, man.

Speaker 3:

I mean, what are we gonna talk about?

Speaker 4:

That's right. We're not we're not allowed to because the because the world no. No, Brian. I was really hoping that you would introduce Steven, and then I would say, hold on a second here. You know, we we we forgot his his his prime accolade.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. My my only accolade.

Speaker 2:

What's his prime accolade?

Speaker 4:

Being being a Red Sox superfan.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. That's his prime Steven has lived a much more important and fuller life than that. I I'm I'm, I haven't actually.

Speaker 1:

That's the sad thing.

Speaker 4:

I'm sorry. But, Brian, you've completely misunderstood. That is, like, the highest praise. Like,

Speaker 2:

the highest praise.

Speaker 4:

That that that anyone would say that about me. Like, I'd I would I, you know, I'd consider it a a full life.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. There you go.

Speaker 2:

So, Steven, the sorry. So, Adam, do you wanna introduce Steven? Should I introduce Steven, or should I I

Speaker 4:

think we just did. Red Sox superfan. What else does it say? Move on.

Speaker 2:

Red Sox superfan. So I have a so, Steven, when you and I first met, I wanna say, was it in 99, 2000, 2001? Sometime in there.

Speaker 1:

Man. I don't

Speaker 3:

I don't wanna

Speaker 2:

talk about that

Speaker 1:

for how long ago that was. I like to pretend I've been doing this for a couple years, man. Don't don't bust up my rap.

Speaker 2:

That is 2 plus decades ago. We've been doing this for a long time.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. 8 No. It would have been let's see. Probably would have been a little later than that. I think probably o

Speaker 2:

I mean, I I

Speaker 1:

03. Probably 03 or 04.

Speaker 2:

Okay. But right after you started RedMonk with James.

Speaker 1:

Yes.

Speaker 2:

So whenever yeah. Because that would be a

Speaker 4:

3 or 4.

Speaker 2:

I I noticed that you very carefully getting you under the 2 decade mark. Yeah. You're still better. I'm sorry. And, I mean, it was I mean, obviously, a kindred spirit.

Speaker 2:

It was great to be because you and I would meet you you were you'd get invited to the Sun analyst. I mean, you were an analyst. And you and I always ended up talking with James and others, quite a bit. And in I mean, I remember you being early and big on a couple of of big megatrends, clearly open source. And I I mean, I think it's been really I would I'd love to talk about how that has played out, and maybe that's certainly some of my predictions are related to open source, but also in terms of the importance of the the developer.

Speaker 2:

And I mean, you were very I think I mean, Adam, I think correct me from your perception, but, I mean, Steven was one of the first to really see the importance of the developer as a decision maker inside the Oh,

Speaker 3:

yeah.

Speaker 4:

Totally. Like, the new kingmaker and, some of the pieces you wrote on that topic, I I I've still forward around to folks and have on my mandatory reading lists. So yeah. Like, the the developer as this important force in sales that had previously just, folks thought you could just talk to the boss and they would dictate down to folks, you know, a a real revolution that I I, you know, I learned about from you first.

Speaker 2:

And so, Steven, when did you start making predictions annual predictions?

Speaker 1:

Oh, man. That's a good question. Probably would have been let's see. Probably 2010, 2 1,009, 2010, somewhere in that range.

Speaker 2:

And then and then for how many years were the predictions terrible? The it was only when the as I recall, you were making very safe but very boring predictions. Or maybe because he maybe this is my maybe this is my version of it.

Speaker 4:

Yeah. We all feel that way, Steven.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. I I don't know that any of the predict predictions were super super insightful at the time, but, let's see. You got you tricked me into

Speaker 2:

I tricked you. Ramping There we go.

Speaker 1:

Ramp ramping up the aggressiveness. That probably would have been, I don't know, 13 maybe. 2013, 2014, somewhere then.

Speaker 3:

And they

Speaker 2:

get a lot more expensive. Well, you were grading yourself on your accuracy. I'm like, you gotta stop doing that. Like, I think a a 100% on prediction accuracy is, like, a 0 for me because that's, like, what makes a prediction interesting is when it's it's big and bold. Because I think I mean, my thesis Steven, I'd love to get your take on this and Adam yours as well, but I think that predictions tell us way more about the present than they do about the future.

Speaker 1:

I think that's fair.

Speaker 4:

I think this is a prelude to what It is. Brian, this is a prelude to an apology about some predictions you've made, I assume.

Speaker 2:

Oh, I get I I didn't my cell's gonna be walked into an apology. I well, I do feel that, like, the when I have been so for full disclosure, Adam and I and I blogged about this couple years ago. We, starting in 2000, would get together, at kind of the 1st Monday after the New Year, and we would make 1, 3, and 6 year predictions. We all work for Sun at the time. So we made 1, 3, and 6 year predictions about both Sun and the industry.

Speaker 2:

And, Adam, I I sent you a bunch of those earlier today. Did you get a chance to go through any of those?

Speaker 4:

Yeah. I looked I looked mostly at my terrible predictions. Yeah. It was it was pretty awful. And you started this before I I think you started this in 99.

Speaker 2:

I Is that right? I think it started in 2000. So it would it would have been the like

Speaker 3:

Oh, yeah.

Speaker 4:

Yeah. Got it. Right. 1st days of 2,000. Right?

Speaker 2:

The first days of 2,000.

Speaker 4:

The those heady days of 2,000.

Speaker 2:

The heady days of 2,000. And it is kind of striking how many of the predictions are are right versus wrong versus present. Did you see my iPhone prediction, Adam?

Speaker 4:

No. I didn't. What what, tell me this one. What what year was that? 2003.

Speaker 4:

Okay.

Speaker 2:

I made a 3 year prediction that Apple has a new must have gadget that they dubbed the iPhone that is a combination m p 3 player, camera let me get my exact language. My exact language is almost almost chilling in its presence. Must iPhone, digital camera, m p 3 player, and cell phone. And which seems like an incredible prediction. 3 year prediction, 2003.

Speaker 2:

But I also thought it was gonna be a total flop. I thought it was a bad idea. So you know

Speaker 5:

know what I mean?

Speaker 2:

It's like, if the prediction is accurate, but, like, not for the right reason. Alright.

Speaker 1:

Alright. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait.

Speaker 1:

So I have an important question here. So if you're making that prediction, Steve Jobs is on stage at Generate 06.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. He was Yeah.

Speaker 1:

What the hell are the rest of us doing here? Like, let's just

Speaker 2:

just go. No. Be because I'm a jackass. 1, I'm cherry picking the one accurate prediction among the sea of laughably inaccurate predictions. So I'm, and 2, I I was right, but for the wrong reasons.

Speaker 2:

And I I, again, I thought it was gonna be, like like, Google Glass esque, and it wasn't as it turns out.

Speaker 4:

And I think, Brian, your your OKR like philosophy on, on prediction accuracy. I think the other tip on predictions is if you make enough of them, eventually, you have one that seems really good.

Speaker 2:

That's actually a very good point because I made a lot

Speaker 3:

of them.

Speaker 4:

Because we did this for, like, what, we have 9 9, 10 years of them or something?

Speaker 2:

Right. I got 9, 10 years. 1, 3, and 6 for Sun and the industry. So I got 6 predictions a year. We often did 2, so you often have, like, 10 predictions a person a year.

Speaker 2:

I've got, like, 80 of them. And it's like, yeah. That's a very good point, Adam. That, like, yeah, you're gonna, like every joker is gonna stumble into something that's impressive.

Speaker 4:

So so this is this is great advice that Brian gave you, Steven. Like, to to to be bold because then, you know, when it when it comes up your number, you look you look like a genius.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. See, the thing is is that I'm pretty sure I'm pretty sure I wasn't smart enough to follow that advice. I don't think I I have to go back and look. I don't think I increased the volume

Speaker 3:

when I

Speaker 2:

increased the aggressiveness.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. That that didn't really happen. I think, basically, the only thing that happened is that my my my predictive scores, you know, I so for folks that haven't read them before, I would do a prediction at the end of the year, and I revisit it before I did the next year's predictions. And I would score them as Brian mentioned. And, yeah, all I remember is my score, you know, basically going into the tank.

Speaker 3:

All of a sudden,

Speaker 1:

it was, like, 30, 40%. It was, like, thanks, Brian. This is great.

Speaker 2:

Not the way I scored you, Steven. I scored you top marks those years. Those the the those f minus years were an a plus from my perspective.

Speaker 4:

Okay. We we need to get to people's predictions, but I do I do wanna just set the record straight on this 2,003 prediction. Because Brian is exactly as you said. Yes. And then had another prediction.

Speaker 4:

And his other 3 year prediction was that he was disgusted by his trendy Apple predictions and expresses shame and remorse. That is true. Yeah.

Speaker 2:

I was, I was disgusted

Speaker 4:

by the true approach.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. And I, and, oh, oh, by the way, when the iPhone, if you go go back and read my predictions when the iPhone actually launched, and I we all of us were predicting that it was gonna be a disaster. So the other thing that we actually get into that I think is important, and I'm really glad we're recording this discussion. And, Adam, maybe you've got some concrete examples of where this happened. Where Okay.

Speaker 2:

Do you know what I'm talk do you know what I'm about to say? No. Where someone would make a prediction, and then we would revisit it, like, 3 or 6 years later, and it would be totally true. And then it would be like, well, yeah. Of course.

Speaker 2:

Like, everybody knew it. Like, you were just saying what everyone believed, and it'd be like, no. Fuck you all. Like, everybody was, like, arguing with me about this and thought I was crazy when I made this prediction, and now it's true. I feel like that happened a bunch.

Speaker 4:

I I think that happened all over the place. Like, I I had won in 2007 while everyone was betting against the iPad, the the iPhone. I think I said the iPad was a major gaming platform. I don't know if that's true. Probably it's true.

Speaker 4:

But but I think there's a lot stuff as you go back. You're like, well, either that is obviously false or obviously not, but it's but you're right. Having having some of the bickering recorded in the moment is gonna be helpful to remember, how bold some of these predictions might be.

Speaker 2:

That's right. So we can go back and figure out, like, alright. Was that actually a bold prediction at the time or not? Or was it was just one that kind of expressing consensus? And I think, you know, in general, we we wanna on the on the bolder side for sure.

Speaker 2:

And then I do think that these predictions are super revealing about the present. As I said, I mean, I think going back and you can see, like, something that was and it was often, like, revealing what was in the news, like, that week. And, you you know, something would be in the news, and, you know, half of the predictions are around, you know, Itanium or around which we definitely predicted the death of a lot. There was a lot of accurate predictions of the death of Itanium. So, and so so I think we we I'm really excited to do this.

Speaker 2:

And, and, Steven, again, thank you so much for joining us. I'm really excited to have you. Obviously, as as our distinguished guest, we're gonna give you kinda carte blanche. I think for the rest of us, we and I kinda tweeted out what the the we want the rules of the road to be. But we, would let's keep it to a 1, 3, and a 6 year prediction.

Speaker 2:

And then, you know, often we, I have found that at least with my kids, my kids like to enforce in their siblings what they fear most in themselves. And I I, I use that as a lead into my my restriction to 1 web 3 based prediction. You may think that that is Brian imposing a rule on Brian. I I I am I am so tempted to make 80 web 3 based predictions, and yet I I we we muster the temptation. And but and yet, I also feel that it would be depriving depriving ourselves of the agency, to say that we can't have any web 3 based predictions.

Speaker 2:

So that's what I'd like to say. I'd like to everyone gets you have at most one web 3 based predictions. You are, of course, welcome to have 0 web 3 predictions. Steven, as I made clear when I tweeted out the ground rules, these rules do not apply with you, especially the web 3 based predictions. You may go off on a web 3 tirade as long as you want.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. It's definitely it's definitely one of them in there for sure. Alright. But I only I only have the 3. So

Speaker 2:

Okay. Alright.

Speaker 1:

I'm not gonna take up the 4.

Speaker 2:

I'm not gonna take up the 4. Okay. And then so 1, 3, and 6, 1 on web at most, 1 on web 3. At most, one talking your book, and I'm gonna treat that, like, by the that's a kind of a that's a a VC expression or an investor expression when people are talking about something that they're invested in. I I'll leave everyone to kind of everyone to figure out what that means, because clearly, we all have particular interests and and domains of expertise and so on.

Speaker 2:

So, don't take that one too too literally. And then other than that, I mean, raise your hand to jump in. And then I would also say that, I I encourage folks to write down their frictions in advance. Please open a poll request on the notes. Cole, where wherever Cole has done such a terrific job on the show notes.

Speaker 2:

But I think let's say oh, let's each of us have responsibility for writing down our own predictions and getting those in the repo. So on the Adam, any any other opening remarks?

Speaker 4:

So so, Brian, I am not a co host, but I'd be able to un unmute and do that for stuff, but I I think,

Speaker 2:

that was an accent.

Speaker 4:

Everyone should, yeah, I got it now. Thank you. Everyone should, if you if you got some predictions in mind, put up your hand, and we'll start unmuting you and and give you the floor.

Speaker 2:

And I Steven, I sent you a co invite as well so you can unmute people as well. And also which it will also be invaluable when my Android client runs out of memory and I am forced to reboot. So, alright. Steven, with that, do you wanna do you wanna lead us off here? Sure.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. I don't think, I don't think I've probably done these in the the exact spirit that Brian intended because they're not not gonna make any well, I don't know. Maybe the web

Speaker 2:

3 Again, the rules do not apply to you, Steven. You can do whatever you want.

Speaker 1:

Okay. So I'll go through the I'll go through 1 year, 3 year, 6 year. So the 1 year and this is, probably gonna sound like equivocation, but I just haven't given enough thought to to sort of apply any quantitative metrics to it. But, I will say in a year, people are gonna look at AWS differently than they do today. And there's a couple of different reasons for that, a million reasons for that, but, a couple of the sort of most pressing ones are, some of the pressure, you know, coming from the EUS pricing.

Speaker 1:

I think I saw Rachel. My colleague is on. So maybe she's got some predictions there. They have been seeing some employee defections. You know, many of you have probably seen these, that are tied to comp.

Speaker 1:

Theoretically, that's being changed. We'll see. There is, sort of a fundamental, issue that they're facing in terms of preferences from a developer experience standpoint. And so that's leading to some interesting questions for them internally in terms of what they build, how they build it, how they target the market. And, you know, some of those scenes are being targeted, you know, sort of actively by, alternative platforms.

Speaker 1:

Right? So, you know, when I talked about this in the wake of of re Invent, couple of folks, Joe Emerson, who else? Simon Wilson, number of other folks sort of basically stood up and were like, hey. You know, we want, you know, sort of the experience of a Vercel. Right?

Speaker 1:

And if you give that to me, it would be happy. So I'm not gonna put any metrics on it. AWS is a juggernaut. They will certainly be a juggernaut a year from now, but I think they will be viewed, let's say, differently by the market. Alright.

Speaker 1:

So that's

Speaker 2:

one And so in the in in particular, in terms of developer experience, sounds like the emphasis, but, I mean, the different facets, but you think developer experience is 1. I guess, I think, though, the versatile contrast is an interesting contrast.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. So the so the interesting thing to me about the developer experience, you know, vis a vis AWS in particular. Right? So they are the company more than any other company in the market, you know, beginning way back in o in o 6, you know, when, March August was it March, s 3 dropped, August, e c 2 dropped. And, you know, that set the the sort of cloud market motion.

Speaker 1:

Right? So that was the sort of characteristic the defining characteristic as it were, of the market to date, right, has been, you know, we we forget this now, but the primitives, were at the time, you know, competing with, you know, sort of abstractions, you know, Google App Engine, force.com, you know, later on, you know, things like, Heroku and and and so on. And, you know, we all know what happened. Right? You know, Amazon and and its primitive approach and took over the market.

Speaker 1:

That's what everybody is sort of, that that's the path that everybody has followed, since then. And, they're in a position now where there are so many of them. Right? We're talking 100 and 100 of services, and developers are in a position where the experience of using them is is problematic. Right?

Speaker 1:

You know, how do I pick all these different pieces? How do I wire them together? How do I operate that sort of ongoing forward basis? Right? And it's been interesting because if you I mean, with the sort of notable exception Elastic Beanstalk, AWS started, you know, sort of down the path of, releasing some some higher level abstractions in 2017, I think it was.

Speaker 1:

You know, we've seen things like Amplify, Proton, App Runner, and and so on. Right? So it looked like they're gonna start taking little facets of this this experience and releasing abstractions around it, and then that came to well, I don't we'll see, I guess. That came to something of a full stop this year, at least in, you know, with with Werner on stage, you know, with a big slide. I'm sure most of you have seen it.

Speaker 1:

Primitives is not abstractions. Right? So the question for AWS all along has been, we know that they can do primitives. They can do primitives better than just about every anybody else. But at some point, you know, does the market, you know, begin to demand something that looks different than that and looks more like a seamless developer experience?

Speaker 1:

And if that's the case, are they the people to provide it? Right?

Speaker 2:

Yeah. It's strange.

Speaker 1:

And it looked like they were moving that direction, and now, you know, you could argue, you know, the point that, you know, that that sort of slide from Werner is almost like a sort of political statement. Right? So you wonder you hear different things depending on who you talk to, but you do wonder if there's, you know, sort of a lack of consensus internally in terms of whether they attack that market and how they do it. So I think the net is is that, like I said, you know, I'm not making any sort of dire Cassandra predictions. They're a juggernaut.

Speaker 1:

They will remain a juggernaut juggernaut a year from now. And even in a worst case scenario for them, a lot of the sort of abstractions are likely to run on Amazon. Right? So they'll they'll, in many cases, make money either way. But the further they get away from, the developer experience themselves because they've owned that, and, historically, it's one of the things that has differentiated them from a lot of their, you know, the incumbents that were around at the time.

Speaker 1:

Right? You know, you think of HP's, the IBM's, frankly, the sons of the world. Right? You know, very much lacking direct relationship with the developer. Amazon was able to build that, quite fast, quite effectively.

Speaker 1:

And so the further they get away from that, the further they are abstracted away from that market, you know, the more interesting their relationship will be. Alright. So anyway, we could probably talk for I could talk.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. No. That's interesting. That's good. Alright.

Speaker 4:

I yeah. I like it.

Speaker 2:

I the and that they will looking for that tension between abstraction and primitive to, sounds like to we can you we will see that grow increasingly intention over the next year is

Speaker 3:

what you're saying.

Speaker 1:

Well, but that so that's part of it. But the interesting thing is is that it's not just that. Right? They all of a sudden are this is the most affections I've seen in terms of their employees in a long time. They are under they're being put under substantial pressure, some other margins from an egress standpoint, from Cloudflare and and others, Oracle.

Speaker 1:

We're going that, that route. And like I said, you have a whole host of of folks at this point trying to attack the developer experience. You know, because I wrote a piece on that, let's see, a year ago, I think October. And, I mean, in response to that was probably, like, nothing since the new kingmakers. You know, I had companies coming out of the woodwork saying, oh my god.

Speaker 1:

Yes. We're building for this. The folks in Gitpod spun up a conference around the piece. As far as I know, I don't think that's ever happened. So there's a lot of attention on that problem.

Speaker 1:

And if it was just that, you know, sort of Amazon will have contend with that, particularly given their organizational structure, right, which is very much oriented towards we know how to build a lot of, completely independent parts at speed, at scale, but they're not organizationally set up necessarily to build these sort of higher level abstractions. Right? So that's a challenge. But when you're dealing with that with, you know, sort of pressure around some of your margins, you know, from lucrative network traffic pricing when you're dealing with it, you know, sort of having lost sort of a wave of technical talent. You know, that's, you know, well, it'll be interesting to see where they are in here.

Speaker 2:

And, Steven, what was the piece that you talked that you were referencing? Was that the fragmentation of the specs? No.

Speaker 1:

No. It's a developer experience gap.

Speaker 2:

Developer experience gap.

Speaker 6:

K. I wanna see.

Speaker 1:

I got it. Yep. October 2020?

Speaker 2:

That's right. Okay. Yeah. October 6, 2020. Okay.

Speaker 2:

Yeah.

Speaker 1:

If you got it. Yeah. So okay. So that's 1 year. K.

Speaker 1:

Out 3 years out, like, this is the my my sort of, token Web 3 prediction. I will say that Web 3 is the next web van. Woo hoo.

Speaker 2:

Oh, wait. What do you mean? Hold on. I wanted to

Speaker 1:

Yeah. I I I hopefully, that analogy mean, you know, for those of you who are sort of more recent to the industry, that that may not be a, an obvious sort of metaphor. But Webvan was was not a a noble success. It was a one of many venture efforts that, went into the online grocery space and they, you know, sort of, you know, built out this this they they invested a ton of capital, you know, building out, you know, what they thought would be a brand new network of grocery delivery stores and, yeah, completely find out. And with web 3, it is honestly, this is sort of the most perplexing technical trend maybe I've seen ever.

Speaker 1:

I'm trying to think.

Speaker 2:

It I I okay. Expand on that. I am totally with you. And I I

Speaker 1:

don't I don't remember a divide. Yeah.

Speaker 2:

I I

Speaker 1:

told a number of pieces sort of reference this sort of similarly, you know, which is, you know, you have, you know, people you know, you'll have a sort of population, you know, sort of one hand prone and the other hand con. And, you know, in many cases, these are, you know, the the sort of the pedigree of these people is relatively equal. Right? A lot, you know, people a lot of the people on the pro side have done interesting good work in their career and are adamantly sort of in belief that this is sort of the next thing. So, you know, to me, you know, if you sort of take it apart, I mean, can some of the pieces of technology sort of, you know, be of service and be of use?

Speaker 1:

Maybe. You know, I will say personally, I have not seen any of them cross my desk in the way that I've seen certain other things, pop yet. But, you know, look, there's there's time yet. But, you know, the bigger issue is just, you know, when you when you sort of sort of fundamentally think through the examples that, you know, people are talking about, for me, they just don't make literally any sense. Like, oh, no.

Speaker 1:

It's the Internet. You know? I'm like, do you do you understand how this works?

Speaker 4:

Yeah. But but but other than that, what what we've said is there were 2 critique.

Speaker 2:

And when I say it makes no sense, I mean, the words don't parse together. I mean, it is literal nonsense. It is like, that is not a sentence.

Speaker 1:

No. And the and the funny thing to me I'm trying to think of well, I probably shouldn't have names. But the, anyway, there there was a one of the the sort of higher profile backers, the technology, at one point where, you know, had this sort of comment on Twitter, which was like, hey. You know, maybe you're comfortable with Facebook and Google and everyone else owning the servers, but, you know, personally, I'm not. Then I'm like, okay.

Speaker 1:

But here's the thing. Like, literally, all of the market evidence we see today says that people are totally fine with that. And Yeah. You know, when you decentralize that, you take a lot of the value away from these networks. Because I I think when I looked it up who was it?

Speaker 1:

It was like 2,100,000,000 people, I think, on Facebook. Gmail, I wanna say, like a 1000000000 and a half, close to 2,000,000,000. Anyway, you just sort of run through the numbers, and it's like, you know, it it reminded me of conversations I had with Microsoft circa I don't know. You know, probably o three zero four who were trying to sell me on DRM. And they're like, no.

Speaker 1:

No. You don't understand. Yeah. This is great thing. It's gonna be able to protect these assets, you know, no matter where they go and so on.

Speaker 1:

And I'm like, sure. And then the first time that, you know, sort of a grandparent gets a picture that they can't open Yeah. Because you've secured it, Like, how, you know, how far do you think this is gonna go? Like, this is not gonna work for normal people. And I think in the web 3 space, this, let's just say this experience seems to be repeating itself often.

Speaker 4:

Like, so in in some

Speaker 1:

cases at great expense. So, yeah, count me as a, as a as a, a big no vote.

Speaker 7:

So so you're a 3.

Speaker 4:

So that's your 3 year prediction. But that that I think I hear in there that, like, 100, 1,000,000 or 100 of 1,000,000 of dollars or tens of 1,000,000,000,000 1,000,000,000 of dollars get invested. Mhmm. And it

Speaker 2:

in our careers because I mean, Steven, you and Adam and I, I mean, the 3 of us, we've seen a lot of revolutions in this business. And the I mean, god, you must be as trolled as I am when people, like, oh, well, you must be one of those people that was against the Internet. And you're like Yeah. Oh, my god. Fucking under the finger, dude.

Speaker 2:

It's like no. And, also, like, hey. Also, you you, someone who I mean, not to be generational about it, but often not alive in 1993. It's like, Steven, you you and I were bull's eye in that eternal September, September 1993. I got another in the Internet the year before the internal September in in 1992.

Speaker 2:

There were no naysayers of the Internet. Email was an obvious killer app. I'm doing what I said I would do. Email. I mean I I I'm so sorry.

Speaker 2:

I'm I'm I you know, this is why I need there's a fine line between the policing mind and the criminal mind, and I sorry, Adam. I we need to not spend this the whole time on web 3. I did that one. I'm sorry.

Speaker 4:

Well, we we can get back to web 3 because I I assume each of us has one production.

Speaker 2:

That's right. Exactly. We're we're we're gonna get to do this brand a couple different times. Right? So yeah.

Speaker 8:

That's right. Yeah.

Speaker 2:

That's your 3 year. Steven, what's your 6 year?

Speaker 1:

Alright. So 6 year is a sad one for me, which is that, I think, I think open source is gonna be considerably worse off.

Speaker 2:

Oh, provocative. Tell me more. In a

Speaker 1:

in a sort of, Yeah. It's it's, you know, and this is this is one of those difficult things that, as somebody who has, know, look, I didn't write, you know, sort of any of the core foundational software here. I didn't write any of the core licenses here. But, you know, sort of speaking personally and, you know, certainly professionally, we have spent a lot of time, you know, over our careers trying to do things that are visible and trying to do things that in many cases are behind the scenes, you know, work to advance the cause. Right?

Speaker 1:

You know, because, you know, this was, you know, sort of the a a sort of interesting juxtaposition for us and something that, you know, it makes sense if you can get to revise some of the politics of it, you know, for for enterprises. But it's also, almost universally beneficial, you know, for the developers and the practitioners that we care the most about. Right?

Speaker 2:

Yeah. And and, Steven, just to talk about your personal influence there, you absolutely played a very important role in terms you have it so many conversations so early with so many decision makers about I'm just speaking about your role in us open sourcing thing. It's at Sun. You played a really important role in Sun's disposition towards open source. And the understanding that this actually was, to the contrary, not a threat to the business, but was something that could be used to grow the business.

Speaker 2:

You were a very early adopter

Speaker 3:

on that.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. I mean, look, I think I think probably that the what what I would say about that is it's just that we were in a sort of unique position to amplify voices that knew the score. Right? And in a lot of cases, on sort of among other examples, there was an opportunity for us to come in, you know, and talk to to folks like yourselves. We're like, no.

Speaker 1:

No. Hey. Look. We need to do this. We wanna do this.

Speaker 1:

And to be a third party to come in and say, yeah. No. These guys are right. You know, you know, this is the way to do it and and so on. So,

Speaker 2:

but You think in 6 years, So it it it what is it? Is it this kind of this new, restrictive licensing that that makes you worried? What is it specific way to make you worried?

Speaker 1:

So there's three things that I I I'm sort of most, concerned about, and sort of tackling them in no particular order. The licensing trends are, an issue. I think that's a manageable issue. We're coming to a place where, mean, I can't I can't sort of go into well, so as background, so we talk to we talk to all vendors. So pretty much every vendor who has sort of introduced one of these license, we've talked to, many of them have sort of talked to us about these decisions and, all of them have more or less gotten the same piece of advice from me, which is this isn't necessary.

Speaker 1:

Here's the case why.

Speaker 2:

But anyhow, So, Steven, when we see these companies that are our clients of RedMonk, we should not blame you for their the adoption of

Speaker 1:

these. Right?

Speaker 2:

And I I I hear what you're saying.

Speaker 1:

Pretty much that's that's what it comes down to. But, you know, look. Can we can we get to a place where a source available model is permissible and acceptable? Maybe. And if we can, then look.

Speaker 1:

I think a lot of this thing of these licenses is taken out because there's nothing wrong with that. I you know, look. If you wrote a if you wrote a piece of software or your company wrote a piece of software, they have the right to decide whatever the license is, full stop. Right? And if that is a, you know, sort of proprietary license and the code never sees the light of day, I might disagree with that.

Speaker 1:

I think it's not the right decision, but that's your right. Right? The sort of issue is, you know, to me, is that a lot of the folks that have gone down this path have wanted the benefits of being open source, you know, from a marketing and a visibility and a sort of affinity standpoint and don't understand or frankly care about the collateral damage that they could do to the brand. Right? Because the reason that open source works, the reason that it is adopted within enterprises is because it's understood and it's a known thing.

Speaker 1:

People understand alright. You know, it took 20 years, but now if you walk into any large shop, even a license like the GPL, which used to be sort of verboten, except in cases where they really wanted the software like Linux, you know, the GPL is okay. Fine. We know what that is. It's fine.

Speaker 1:

You can use that. Right? And, you know, that sort of all of that adoption, you you know, sort of rests upon this foundation that this is a known thing. We know what it is, and we understand how it's circumscribed. Right?

Speaker 1:

We understand that it's not what Bill Gates said it was. It's not a cancer. It's not gonna go out and infect our other software as long as we're doing, know, the things that we would normally do. So a lot of these source available people, or non compete people as as Adam Jacobs might call it, you know, have, tried to blur that line, and that's a problem. That may be a solvable problem.

Speaker 1:

You know, we'll see. You know, companies are getting better at this. I can't say who it was. We we talked to a company that recently made announcements in this area, and they're very careful to say, this is open source. This is not open source, but, you know, you can get access to the source.

Speaker 1:

So, like I said, that that may be survivable. A lot of the sort of adoption of enterprise software more broadly, is, you know, shifting into a service format. So, you know, software as a service implementations of, open source software. One of the things that get lost in cases is that, you know, when companies do this and are successful at it, you know, there is, you know, sort of less and less incentive, you know, for them to contribute back and and certainly to maintain future parity with the open source equivalents. Right?

Speaker 1:

So you begin to see deltas that widen and widen and widen between, you know, what the open source implementation and what the software as a service implementation can do. Right? So that will, you know, potentially, you know, sort of contribute to, you know, decreased contributions, adoptions, etcetera, of open source software moving forward. But lastly, and this is the problem that, you know, there may be a solution to it, but I don't know what it is. It's just the fact that, you know, a lot of the software developers that we talk to today just don't care.

Speaker 1:

Right? These sort of you know, it's like, you know, if you have a personal project and you decided not to assign a license to it, that's fine. Right? You know, if your intent is not for this stuff to be used, but in some cases, you know, it comes down to like, you know, I'm trying to think of well, again, I probably shouldn't name names, but, you know, there was a dispute about in sort of this this sort of lack of license or lack of clarity around a license and source available licenses and so on. And, basically, what you have is, you know, sort of some some developers today who who don't have that history, right, don't remember a time when open source was anything other than the default, and don't remember how, you know, sort of the effort it took to get there are basically, like, okay, boomer.

Speaker 1:

Who gives a shit?

Speaker 2:

Right. Exactly. It's like, we fought for those freedoms, son. We were Yeah. We did we we we I was on a beach at Normandy open sourcing the software for you.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. Exactly. Right. I know. So that's

Speaker 1:

the thing is is that when you put those things together, right, you know, when you have pressures from from largely venture backers who are pushing these licenses, and then you have pressure from, you know, business models that compete with open source, in some cases quite explicitly. And then you have a generation of developers who, in a lot of cases, just doesn't seem to particularly care, you know, or be invested. That's not a super recipe for success for me longer term.

Speaker 2:

And then so, Steven, what what does this look like? Because, I mean, surely, you're not predicting that we go back to a a world of proprietary databases, proprietary optics, proprietary compilers. I mean, open open source obviously continue to exist. But in 6 years, it's struggling or it's no longer I mean, it it is as common to have proprietary solutions. And we do how what does this look like?

Speaker 2:

Yeah.

Speaker 1:

So so couple couple things. So first of all, I think, you know, what you'll end up seeing on this, on this offer to service side, right, is competing implementations that are sort of de facto proprietary. Right? It's open core played out in the sort of guys of software as a service, which is fine if you have this tiny core functionality. Yes.

Speaker 1:

There's, you know, we'll release outsource code to you because, you know, we don't really care. Right? And it's gonna seed our market and everything else. Right? So I think you you will see more defacto proprietary software, you know, produced, you know, sort of under that, under that label.

Speaker 1:

Depending on how the licensing questions get worked out. Right? I think you could begin to see sort of boring definitions of open source. Right? So what does that mean sort of in practice?

Speaker 1:

And, you know, frankly, to the point, like, why am I concerned about it? Right? So if you think about the licenses that a lot of these companies are using, right, which is essentially, hey. This is open source except for Amazon or any of the clouds or for this weird, you know, sort of wacky use case or whatever it might be. Right?

Speaker 1:

You know, what you end up seeing are, you know, know, sort of licenses which begin to introduce a bunch of different sort of, you know, sort of, hyper specific concerns or issues. Right? And, you know, it's funny to me that, you know, in many cases today, the the they don't recognize the the issue that this was for open source originally. Right? So one of the reasons that the OSI sort of argued against, you know, sort of, a license proliferation, right, which is the generation of more and more and more and more of these open source licenses is because that actually slows down adoption.

Speaker 1:

Because what that means is that every new project that has its every own license is a one off review for their legal, right, for procurement. And you would think that I mean, there were efforts to do this for sure. But you would think that the source available people would get together and figure out, right, do we need do we each need our own license? Right? Right.

Speaker 1:

And

Speaker 4:

But but that's sort of antithetical to their goal. Right?

Speaker 1:

I you know, that you

Speaker 4:

would Potentially.

Speaker 1:

Right? And it's like, no. And I talked to one of these one of these vendors. They're like, no. No.

Speaker 1:

We use the BSL. I'm like, can't use the BSL with your own, like, 3 totally unique

Speaker 2:

Right. Totally unique. That's the you know? Right.

Speaker 3:

Right.

Speaker 1:

So Yes. This is not

Speaker 5:

a big thing.

Speaker 9:

Source available, just to clarify, do you mean, like, Seagate firmware, where if you're Google, it's open? Or do you mean it's published on GitHub, but it's just got a weird ass license?

Speaker 1:

Largely the latter. Right? So so source available, it'll I mean, technically speaking, the definition well, I'm not even actually sure who would be the arbiter of this. But in practice, what I would refer to that, and and sort of when I talk to companies about this, what I'm referring to is more of a okay. We wanna make the source code available.

Speaker 1:

We do not wanna release it under the terms of an o of an OSI license because we're afraid of pick 1. Right? Amazon, whomever. So we're gonna introduce it with this license, which basically prohibits whatever it is that that we don't like. And in in those cases, like I said, I and I've written about this.

Speaker 1:

Oh, god. So, you know, I've written about this quite extensively, but the the gist of it is is that I don't see the justification for these licenses myself. I would support, you know, sort of as the people who are responsible for the creation of these projects, if that's their prerogative, then so be it. Right? I think in many cases, they substantially erred, by changing tax.

Speaker 1:

Right? To you know, sort of using open source in the beginning, you know, making a promise to contributors, developers, etcetera, and then sort of pulling the rug out rug out from under them saying, You know, we wanna do something different now, but set that aside. Right? So when I'm when I'm sort of referring to source available, what I'm referring to is effectively that model. Right?

Speaker 1:

Which is, alright. Look. I wanna make this available. I want developers to be able to see it, you know, in in some form or fashion, but I'm scared of it's usually Amazon. Right?

Speaker 1:

So that's the definition that I'm referring to here.

Speaker 3:

I have

Speaker 2:

to tell you, I'm tempted to take the other side of that prediction. I'm tempted to actually predict that these wonky licenses don't really hold up, and they're kind of viewed to be more complicated than they're worth and that the trend abates. But I don't know. I don't know. I have quite the guts to do it.

Speaker 2:

That would be great.

Speaker 1:

If you put it this way, this is one of

Speaker 3:

those predictions that

Speaker 1:

I would be delighted to be wrong.

Speaker 2:

Right. In contrast to your web 3 prediction, which if that's not wrong,

Speaker 3:

we're gonna

Speaker 2:

I I that's really gonna be problematic.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, that's what I got for you.

Speaker 2:

Great. Alright. Those are good. Those are those are very powerful. Awesome.

Speaker 5:

Yeah. Just quickly, where do you stand on the service side public license? The license licenses used by MongoDB and Graylog and, Elastic? Like, where where do you stand on that?

Speaker 1:

I think I think those licenses are a unnecessary and b strongly problematic. And I would further say that, you know, one of the things that with the SSP 0 in particular, one of the things that gets lost is the version. So I'm trying I don't wanna go through the the sort of whole backstory here. But so Mongo submitted the SSPL to the OSI. They tried to get it through, you know, it certified as an notice of well, agreed upon as an open source license.

Speaker 1:

And to, you know, in the midst of this process, they they, revised it. Right? You know, so they had a different version of the license, which, you know, tried to sort of narrow it down and and so on. That's not the license that actually is in practice today because when it became clear that the OSI and to be, you know, to be totally fair to Mongo the OSI at that point and still arguably, but certainly at that point had a totally broken review process. Right?

Speaker 1:

You know, the process of doing this was, is very problematic for a number of different reasons. Right? You know? So it's not as if the OSI is blameless here. But, the net here is that, they when it became clear that the the license was the SSPL was the revised version was not gonna be approved, they abandoned that process.

Speaker 1:

And, you know, the version of of the SSPL applied today, I I would just suggest that you go read that license. I think it's I wanna say it's section 13. And yeah. I would yeah. I I will I will say, I am not a fan of any of those licenses.

Speaker 1:

But, you know, the the sort of the important thing to me is is basically how the companies talk about them. That's the most important piece. So in other words, if you wanna have a license that says, look, if you do you know, if you, Amazon, or whomever is doing this thing that I don't like, then you have a lot of problems. Right? Like I said, I don't think that's necessary or whatever, but it's their right to do that.

Speaker 1:

The difficulty that the biggest problem for open source is when people begin to confuse that with open source. Right. And some of these companies have been good about making that clean delineation and some of these companies have not. Right? Some of these companies use open source and source available interchangeably.

Speaker 1:

So what that means ultimately is is that when you play this out over the longer term, you know, what you what you potentially end up with is a scenario where people begin to, you know, hear, hey. This is an open source license, and they go read things like this. And they're like, woah. Like, this is what open source is? Like, this is not for me.

Speaker 1:

This is not gonna work. I'm gonna go to, you know, pick pick something up. The software as a service implementation, you know, piece where I don't really care, you know, cause the license is, not applicable, you know, given I'm not operating the service myself. So

Speaker 2:

Yeah. Steven, I lose this

Speaker 9:

thing. Actually a problem.

Speaker 2:

He is what? Really at

Speaker 9:

the end of the day.

Speaker 2:

It it it Matt, in terms of, like, the proliferation of them, or is the what what do you mean by is it a problem?

Speaker 9:

The the proliferation

Speaker 1:

proliferation of them, you can actually argue it both ways. Right? So on the one hand, you know, you can make the argument, and I think there's a reasonable argument about this, that the proliferation of them actually will sort of impede their usage. Right? Because if they had one and it was consistent, you know, that's the kind of thing that actually, you know, sort of decreases the friction to using the software covering it.

Speaker 1:

Right? Because you're like, okay. My legal team can can review one of these licenses. I can't review 5 or 10 or whatever it might be. But the flip side is is that the more companies that do this, and we've seen this in practice.

Speaker 1:

Right? You know, the first couple of these came pretty slowly and were huge deals and, you know, generated a ton of controversy, but each one, you know, decreases the friction for next company doing the same and the next company doing the same and the next company doing the same. And so that to me is is certainly a problem.

Speaker 2:

It is a problem. And I would have by the way, Matt, I was kinda with you that I didn't really I'm like, is the proliferation of this but it all of a sudden, it went from a handful of companies to this being so broadly accepted that it really was becoming ubiquitous very, very quickly. So I think the proliferation is a problem, whatever it's worth.

Speaker 9:

But also at the end of the day, if it really matters to you when you're deploying it, you're not gonna be running on the open source stack. You're gonna go and have purchasing send them a purchase order for, you know, the the whatever the heck you want to public license. And now you have the rights to do whatever you want because you're not Amazon. Right? And do a licensing and things like that.

Speaker 1:

That's the argument. Basically, in all

Speaker 2:

the way before. Exactly.

Speaker 1:

But here's the thing. Sort of play play that out, though. Right? So in other words, for for companies, like, totally, you know, they you know, the the argument for if you go and talk to any of these vendors, the thing they will tell you is it doesn't really matter. They buy their way out of the license with a commercial agreement, blah blah blah.

Speaker 1:

True. Or at least true in in many cases. We'll be it'll be interesting to see sort of how some of the enforcement, you know, may take place, you know, some of these licenses down the line. But, anyway, that that's speculation on my part. The bigger problem in in sort of the short term is, you know, basically, what you get is that's a world which is, you know, pretty friendly, you know, from a, enterprise buyer perspective.

Speaker 1:

But to the extent that that begins to eat into the adoption, usage, circulation, currency, relevance of the average open source license, that's a net negative for developers in my view. Because all of a sudden, they will have to you know, the the sort of situation for developers historically has been, okay. Look. If I wanna go build something, say I'm Google. Right?

Speaker 1:

I can go use even a a reciprocally licensed asset like Linux, make my own modifications, but I'm not distributing it. So you know, the a larger and larger and larger share of these these, you know, of the total licenses for projects, are these, you know, one totally fragmented and totally individual, other licenses, right, that are not open source. And 2, they have, you know, sort of, you know, different qualifications or different, you know, sort of restrictions attached to them. That becomes more and more problematic if you wanna be the next Google or whomever, because all of a sudden, you have to contend with a lot of licenses that, you know, they haven't been sort of vetted. And like I said,

Speaker 3:

if you

Speaker 1:

go read some of these things

Speaker 2:

They're nuts. They're they're they they are so I actually the one thing I want to put an asterisk on, Steven, is that you said that, companies have the right to do this. That is actually not clear to me, honestly. And I think that the they are pushing the bounds of the law, I think. And I it would be very interesting to see one of the of course, with the moon we haven't even had the GPL be really seriously court tested.

Speaker 2:

It but it it would be interesting to see if one of these one possibility is that one of these large companies is like, hey. You know what? We actually know that we are technically violating the terms of your license. And, we actually don't think you've got the right to do that. We actually think that that exceeds the right of the copyright holder, and, you you're trying to enforce a URL that we never agreed to.

Speaker 2:

You just put this thing up on GitHub. We downloaded it and find us. And, it'll be interesting to see kinda how that but, alright, it seems that's a good prediction, albeit a sad one. I hope you

Speaker 3:

do well.

Speaker 1:

Yes. I hope I'm wrong too. That'd be great.

Speaker 2:

Laura, I saw you jumping in here. Do you have, I I'm worried that your predictions could get super dark. Is that is that

Speaker 10:

Where do you think that's coming from?

Speaker 2:

Well, you know, I don't know. I don't know where could that possibly be coming from. I don't know. Maybe your Defcon talk. I don't know.

Speaker 2:

I don't

Speaker 10:

annoying its user base or just generally pissing off its user base. So Discord is kind of fascinating to me in terms of being a chat plot platform. And of course it's but the thing is that I think where I think it's unresolved is that it's not just another chat platform. It's a way for you to be able to have individuals to have their own private chat platforms in a way that it's just super easy to be able to spin up. Just because the only thing comparable I could always think of was someone having to, like, spin up their an IRC server, which it turns out that it takes work to run an IRC server.

Speaker 10:

Whereas Discord just sort of lets you do that and anyone can do this. And it's kind of amazing this is this that this has grown. But it's really the I kind of wonder about what Discord's growth model is actually going to be. There was talks about they're supposed to be acquired by Microsoft, then it sounds like those talks fell through. So then naturally it seems like well, IPO may be in the business for them, which never really seems to do good things for a product.

Speaker 10:

So regardless of whether they end up acquired or IPO ing or something, I just have this hunch that Discord is going to do some of it, just going to annoy massive amounts of their user base.

Speaker 2:

Okay. So that's really interesting. And is you're right about is it Adam, are you aware of this with the kind of ubiquity? Because it is amazing what Laura

Speaker 3:

is saying.

Speaker 2:

Yes. It is. So literally Oh in my house over the weekend was Susanna, my 9 year old calling out to her 14 year old brother, I want you to get back on the discord right now. And I'm like, back what? Wait.

Speaker 2:

Wait. What's going on in my house? There there's a discord server in my house that my kids are all, like you know, they always say there's there's always a chat that is happening that doesn't include you, and it's a discord in my house. So, Laura, I the it it it it's amazing to me how ubiquitous it is, but you think that they are kinda losing track of some of what has propelled them to where they are?

Speaker 10:

It it's not clear if you're losing track or if it just seems like the I'm just waiting for the other shoe to drop for them to just screw up something. I mean, I'm not rooting for them to do this, of course, but it's like the the nature of where these things go just because I wonder exactly how they're going to be able to keep going and and what their stuff is. I mean, custom emojis are great, but it's not clear what what their model is going forward.

Speaker 4:

Laura, I really like your they get acquired and this happens. Little prelude for next week. Another way this could happen is they make an acquisition, and that's what screws up their user base.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. The acquisition they they they acquire poison that,

Speaker 7:

that's

Speaker 2:

that's the yeah. That's a alright. Well, that's a really interesting one. That's a really good that's a good one.

Speaker 3:

I was wondering if I can just just on the subject oh, go ahead. Sorry.

Speaker 2:

Go ahead. Yeah. Is this on the the Discord event, or did I wanna get to Laura's 3? Yeah. Go ahead.

Speaker 3:

They a while back, in the on the in the vein of them maybe screwing up their whole thing is that they, the CEO treated something about, oh, maybe we're gonna do crypto, maybe we're not, and build it straight into the product. And a lot of people got really mad really fast to the point where, like, they and, like, who knows if it's just, like, Internet mobs or whatever thinking that they did something, but they're like, oh, we're all canceling our Nitro subscriptions, which is, like, one the primary ways they need money, and it was the same big.

Speaker 2:

I I would I would like to say that that is a very tantalizing way that Laura's prediction could come true, but Laura, this does not count as your web 3 prediction. So the the the the web 3 thing on this prediction, you are still you still have, as far as I'm concerned, a web 3 prediction to give in your in your 3rd picture. But but that's a very good point in terms of, like, that could be a you could imagine that kind of thing. Imagine that that would really rile up a user base. Alright, Laura.

Speaker 2:

What's your, what's your 3 year?

Speaker 10:

Okay. 3 year, I have we finally get a risk 5 server in a data center.

Speaker 2:

Oh, exciting.

Speaker 10:

But but but I'm gonna put this with some caveat is that there there's going to be something that is finally going to arrive in a data center, but I I don't know exactly if that means it's actually going to be successful or that just mean in in ubiquitous or if that just means that something finally arrives in the data center in that server. Just because I think so far we've seen that risk risk factors have shown a lot of progress but nothing is really panned out to be able to to deliver anything. And I think it's still a little bit too early at least for the hardware side of things and for still trying to come with with the standards. So

Speaker 2:

So in You you are

Speaker 1:

in very good company there because I ended up predicting that Arm was gonna be a thing on a server. And this was like in I don't have to go back in, like, like, 2010 or 2011. And, I mean, I was right. It just took, like, a decade.

Speaker 4:

Well and, Laura, just just for future generations of of, you know, legal scholars looking over this. You said you said risk 5 in a data center. You didn't say a risk 5 server.

Speaker 2:

Are you are you like Laura's lawyer? Are you represent are you representing future Laura? No. No.

Speaker 4:

Sort of. So I I just wanna make it clear for future generations. But but yours but that might be, like, an embedded storage processor or something like that, but not, like, if we were to switch our, you know, from ARM to risk 5.

Speaker 5:

Yeah. This could be this could be a risk v risk 5, BMC, for example.

Speaker 2:

I don't think that's a lower I don't think that's lower restriction.

Speaker 11:

The risk drive that's in your hard drive doesn't count.

Speaker 2:

I I would The trick.

Speaker 10:

But I but I would expect that that that that if we were talking something like, actually in a well, technically in a data center, I think we'd be possibly seeing that much sooner. But

Speaker 2:

Yeah. I assume that, Laura, you but by by that, you meant a a data center class part. Oh, I'm glad I'm gonna mute you. The you mean, like, a a modern, aggressive process, what would today would be a 7 nanometer, 5 nanometer process, that is consumes a lot of power, high clock, many cores. Is that a is that a fair statement?

Speaker 6:

Yeah. Nice. Nice.

Speaker 2:

That's a great one. I think that is I

Speaker 9:

hang on. On that note, I've got a one up that. 6 year prediction, there is a risk 5 super computer in the top 500.

Speaker 2:

Oh, there we go. That's a good one. I like

Speaker 1:

that one. Yeah.

Speaker 2:

Alright. Laura, that's that that's a great prediction. What's your, do you have a 6

Speaker 10:

year? Okay. 6 year is that, email goes the way of the landline. It's still going to be around, it's gonna be used, but it's not gonna be popular. It's just gonna be falling off.

Speaker 10:

Email is dying, honestly. Anything other than trying to use something like Gmail just seems to be a nightmare to be able to get to work. I mean, you either have you basically have divergence. You have either everyone's on Gmail or something like that or they're running their own boutique, mail server some somewhere. And I mean, trying to get these 2 to interact is just a a nightmare.

Speaker 10:

I I think it's gonna go the way to of the I

Speaker 4:

I feel like Stewart Butterfield just joined this call.

Speaker 2:

That is a great prediction though. And I Laura, I also love the way you're phrasing it in terms of, like like, landline still exist. It's email will obviously exist in 6 years. It's just that it will be the way, like, yeah, I use email to, you know, for these kind of to communicate with my teacher, but not something or maybe not even that. That's that feels very, that could, like, very chilling and that could be very accurate.

Speaker 2:

It's a a great prediction.

Speaker 3:

I don't

Speaker 10:

have I don't have

Speaker 11:

Use email to communicate with CI.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. Maybe GitHub's notifications are a way to get me to delete my email address, like, earlier rather than later, because I know I need to manage my notifications later, but better. But, holy god, that thing

Speaker 3:

gets a lot of notifications.

Speaker 10:

But, yeah, I have no idea what exactly will replace email, but I'm just guessing that here, it's going to be on the on the climb.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. Well, I think that the, assuming that Discord has not completely lost its user base in your one year prediction, I think that the kind of the instant messaging platforms seem to be replacing a lot of what the value that email brought.

Speaker 10:

Yeah. Which has its pluses and minuses there. I I think in terms of of the, what exactly and once again, you get into the argument of what's an open standard and everything there, which is an another can of worms. But

Speaker 2:

Well, Laura, those are the 3 great predictions, and I had no reason to fear none of those were related to the world being rooted in us all being. So that was, that none of them had to do with security vulnerabilities. I'm really impressed.

Speaker 11:

Well, you told her not to do the things that were a 100% gonna happen.

Speaker 2:

No. There we go. Well played. Well played. That's it.

Speaker 2:

That's it. Yeah. Exactly. Maybe those aren't exciting because we know that their future vulnerabilities are out there. Alright.

Speaker 2:

Who's, Sophia? I saw you, you asking to join. Do you have some predictions? What? What?

Speaker 2:

What's happening?

Speaker 4:

Okay.

Speaker 5:

I I do have some predictions, so I could go next.

Speaker 2:

Go for it. Yes. Yep.

Speaker 5:

I don't have a 1 year, but I have a 3 and a 6. For the 3 year, I think that due to CCPA copycat laws in other US states, possible, US federal legislation plus changing, global regulatory environment. There will be, GDPR like protections, kind of rolled out globally SaaS adoption. So, the more you spread data around, it makes things like right to amendment and right to deletion of the GDPR harder to implement. So I think that there'll be more in housing of of, software solutions rather than an increased proliferation of of usage of SaaS services.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. And that's really interesting. So when you do you mean, like, GDPR, like, regulation at a state level inside the US or federal level regulation or maybe all of the above?

Speaker 5:

Yeah. So I I I think that for CCPA is the first step that we've seen along that path where California has rolled out some GDPR like legislation. I think that Colorado has passed something similar to CCPA, and, a number of the other larger states have, similar legislation kinda in the pipe. I think that it's gonna take a a while for it to hit critical mass on the number of states and or, some federal legislation being rolled out. But, you could see that, you know, between California, New York, Texas, for example, or maybe Florida, you can start to get to a point where a majority of your users need these protections.

Speaker 5:

At which point it doesn't make as much sense for players to geofence those protections to particular locations. Instead, it it becomes easier from a maintenance standpoint to just give the same protections to everyone.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. Interesting. That's really interesting. Oh, yeah. It's a good prediction.

Speaker 2:

I like it. And then you said that's a 3 year prediction?

Speaker 5:

That's a 3 year prediction. Yeah.

Speaker 2:

Okay.

Speaker 5:

And then at a 6 year, I've got a RISC 5 chip in a mainstream phone likely a Samsung phone as in the main the main chip driving that that device. I think that there's a couple of reasons for that. One is, like, Samsung is going to have a a decent amount of fab, experience at that point for for VIS five chips, where the the they will have experience building lower power chips, and they'll be able to iterate on that. And then I think the other kind of factor there is that, phone upgrade times and life cycles is are getting longer, where people are hanging on to their phones for longer and the pace of innovation is kinda slowing down a little bit, which means that risk risk 5 isn't really going to be, chasing a moving target as much as it would have been in the previous, say, 3 to 5 years, or say even the previous 6 years. Right?

Speaker 5:

So at the 6 years from now, it was it's a lot more feasible for, a risk 5, processor to be able to be competitive in that market.

Speaker 4:

Nice. A lot of risk 5 hype. Love it.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. Wait. It'll be the the the success of risk 5 in the data center in 3 years is gonna propel it onto the phone.

Speaker 12:

That's right.

Speaker 2:

Those are great predictions, Ian. Alright. Vint, you wanna go next? Thanks for raising your hand. That that really helps for us to know who's got predictions.

Speaker 2:

What do you have,

Speaker 3:

Yeah. Hey. This is Zach. And I'll I guess I'll follow-up with, more sort of political predictions, but I'll caveat this with just why I'm talking about this specifically specifically the antitrust field. I, I'm an expert in antitrust.

Speaker 3:

I got there's a New York Times article about it about, some research I did on Google and web crawling, and so I'm not speaking. I'm trying I'm just I guess, I'm trying to establish authority. Like, I'm not just some programmer talking about antitrust. I I know a fair amount. I watch it, fairly closely.

Speaker 2:

Exactly. Are you accusing programmers about speaking about things with authority in which they have absolutely no understanding?

Speaker 3:

I've I've sure. Yes. It's

Speaker 4:

how it looks like. Right?

Speaker 3:

Yes. So I'll just I guess my one year prediction for antitrust is that we're not gonna see much. It looks like the antitrust bills in Congress are fairly well locked up. There's a near term goal about how there's a lot of noise, last year.

Speaker 2:

And just to and this is the antitrust specifically in social media, in cloud computing? And we do where where the whole

Speaker 3:

Well, I'll say the tech industry in general.

Speaker 1:

Okay.

Speaker 3:

But sort of the American economy, right, in particular. I don't think that the if the bill gets passed next year, this year fuck. It's 2020. Sorry. Or 2022.

Speaker 3:

I think it's gonna get fairly watered down, and I don't know if it's gonna make it past the midterms. Like, the general hubbub that's gonna start happening very soon. So I'm I'm somewhat pessimistic on the legislative side that things are gonna happen. And on the executive side, I'm more optimistic that a lot of stuff's gonna try to happen, but I'm still kind of a little a little skeptical because Lena Khan, fantastic, really great, chairwoman of FTC, really excited to see you there. Really about the most aggressive pick that, the administration could pick.

Speaker 3:

But that's after 20 to 30 years depending on how you count it of not really of the FTC not really doing anything at all, right, of of deciding of declining to do much of anything. Interesting. So there's, like, a lot of staff turnover actually of people just like she she rolls in a lot of, like, more senior people are just like, you know what? I think I'm gonna go into the industry. I really don't like where the directions is going.

Speaker 3:

And there's sort of a talent drain, and it's talent that wouldn't have gotten along with her anyway, which is why they're leaving, but it's a talent drain nonetheless. So I think it's kind of a rebuilding year. And also, they don't have the funds that they need to to pursue a lot of the stuff that they're trying to do. So I think they're probably they're gonna get some they, like, they definitely got the they, seated in the NVIDIA merger. But I think that's kinda how they're gonna have to do it is they're not gonna be able to do as many of the they can't do everything.

Speaker 3:

They have to pick and choose. And I think they're gonna try to go after the big guys, and the big guys know that they can kinda overwhelm this for a while with a lot of money. Right?

Speaker 2:

And and is alright. So does NVIDIA ARM go through?

Speaker 3:

I think, yeah. Video Arm, couldn't tell you, to be honest.

Speaker 1:

Oh, come on.

Speaker 2:

Is there other way we're making predictions. You gotta predict. We

Speaker 3:

No. I'll say it does it, but it'll take 5 years to know.

Speaker 2:

Okay. So that is a 6 year prediction that that you think it could take 5 years for NVIDIA ARM to not go through?

Speaker 3:

Yeah. Every antitrust case every major antitrust case that you can read about in the tech industry takes, like, a decade.

Speaker 2:

But so do you think that would that mean because the NVIDIA acquisition of ARM is very germane to the industry, and that's why I wanna I wanna kinda peg you down on that one. Yep. The, do you think that it goes through and results in litigation? Do you think it will I mean, because if it's held in limbo for 5 years, it will fall apart. When would it That's

Speaker 3:

that's kinda what I'm thinking they picked this one, and they're gonna stick with it. And

Speaker 2:

Well, this is where you get to, like, these predictions kinda being linked because, honestly, NVIDIA acquiring Arm is pretty germane for risk bot.

Speaker 3:

Absolutely. Yeah.

Speaker 2:

So interesting. Okay. Wait. Wait. Wait.

Speaker 2:

So 1 year, nothing on the antitrust. NVIDIA ARM dead after 5. Wait. Do you have a 33 or 6?

Speaker 3:

I guess my my feeling is, like, we're not gonna like, you're gonna see some big stuff. Really, what we saw during, sort of the micros the story around the Microsoft antitrust case was that not much came out of the Microsoft anti stuff antitrust stuff. Right? But there was a chilling effect within Microsoft, and that's why they didn't immediately send assassins to kill Larry and Sergei, right, like, in the crib, which, sure, maybe that's maybe what Microsoft's people are telling them. It's a, you know, obviously, multibillion dollar case.

Speaker 3:

But I think probably there might be, like, a the thermometer in the merger and acquisitions department at and, like, this is the American context, but in the global context, like, the UK CMA telling Facebook to unacquire Giphy definitely is big chill. Right? So Mhmm. Like, maybe there won't be as many acquihires slash, like, big companies bailing out little companies that don't have a business model.

Speaker 2:

So is it is it fair to say that your 3 year prediction is that this will have a chilling effect, that FTC enforcement will have a chilling effect?

Speaker 3:

The general push for antitrust is gonna have a chilling effect. Yes. Okay. I don't think like, in comparison, I don't think that there's gonna be, like, an antitrust GDPR moment in the sense of, like, I remember GDPR. It was the first time me and my coworkers working on a database were like, oh, this is something this is a piece of legislation that we have to care about.

Speaker 3:

Right?

Speaker 1:

Right. Right.

Speaker 3:

In our in our, you know, decade long career, whatever.

Speaker 2:

And then, do you

Speaker 3:

have a stick to your picture

Speaker 2:

in the same in the same vein?

Speaker 3:

I think section 230 probably lives.

Speaker 2:

I under the

Speaker 3:

the entire thing. I think there's no everybody's mad at it, but they aren't mad at it for the same reasons. And so there might be some small modifications, but I don't think that the people who are mad at it, like, it's just they're 2 different I don't see it coalescing into a thing where they strip it, but that's not my area of expertise. It's just sort of a sense of, like, when push comes to shove, they're gonna try to strip it in different

Speaker 1:

about for 6 years, and then they

Speaker 3:

move on to something else.

Speaker 2:

Interesting. Alright. Good for good, good predictions of the NVIDIA arm production, especially, again, especially Jermaine for for us. See, I think, Aaron, you were you were next.

Speaker 11:

Yeah. So my prediction is that what's coming is single node computing. And there's a bunch of people who are gonna suddenly have this realization that we're doing a lot of these distributed system works, and we are paying enormous overheads, turning every function call into a network round trip. And And there's gonna be this realization of, oh, like, one server can do a lot of work. And I think in 1 year, we're gonna see a lot of people pushing the, hey.

Speaker 11:

You should be doing your business answer and it'll run like a 100 times faster.

Speaker 2:

Interesting. And so what do you, what buzzword do you is this node 3? What do we call this for this to become a, I like single node computing.

Speaker 11:

I like single node computing.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. It's good. Okay.

Speaker 11:

As opposed to serverless, it's like one server.

Speaker 2:

Right. That's

Speaker 4:

one one better than serverless.

Speaker 11:

My theory here is that this is going to lead to people talking about microservice inlining and and be like, so we've got all these microservices, but I'm gonna bring all the microservices onto one box and run them together and, like, statically link your microservice into the same binary

Speaker 3:

so you

Speaker 11:

can just, like, call the function so that we'll do the thing.

Speaker 2:

Oh my god. Here, I thought Laura was gonna be one with the direct predictions.

Speaker 11:

Well, I I think 1 year is single node computing for batch analytics. 3 years is microservice inlining where we actually have our microservices running in the same computer that's calling it and things get a 100 times faster. And then by 6 years, we've actually are coming around to doing scaling properly where people think not just, oh, how do I make this big data and scale up to infinity? But how do I actually make sure I'm getting the most I can possibly get work done on one node? And then what is the most I can get done in the rack?

Speaker 11:

And then when should I be actually going to data centers? And actually thinking about, oh, a node, a rack, a data center, and the globe are 4 different things. It's not just distributed.

Speaker 2:

So you are I mean, this is a 6 year prediction for common sense. This is very, very gutsy here.

Speaker 3:

I got

Speaker 2:

this is this is the guttiest prediction. That that that's great though. I love that the single node computing that does feel very right. That feels very, and now when the the microservices are in line, the in line microservice movement

Speaker 11:

Oh, yeah. If you wanna replace Cassandra with SQLite, you'll be amazed with the speed up.

Speaker 2:

Oh, I absolutely agree with that. I I cannot tell I can't tell you the number of times we were tempted to do literally exactly that with those specific names of, like, can't this Cassandra be replaced with SQLite?

Speaker 12:

Yeah. Isn't that what we used to just call running a program?

Speaker 2:

That that's right. Exactly.

Speaker 1:

That's correct.

Speaker 2:

That's great. Alright. Good good series of predictions, Aaron. Those are those are terrific. Matt, I think you were, you were next.

Speaker 9:

Yeah. So I am gonna say for, I guess I'll start with the 6 years since I kinda jumped the gun on that one. One's risk at least one risk 5 supercomputer in the top 500 within 6 years.

Speaker 2:

That's a great question.

Speaker 9:

You know, especially because once you start to realize that x86 assembly and arm assembly are in fact a high level language, and that they do not represent anything underneath, I see next to no reason that anyone should go paying for the abstractions there.

Speaker 2:

Well, I also like your picture on the supercomputer too because that does feel there there are a lot of economic reasons why you would expect that to be an early place for it to be to see that kind of use.

Speaker 9:

Right. And unlike, say, Oxide Rack v 2, which is going to be running mostly, the same sort of enterprise y workloads to whoever you figure out who to sell these things to. You know, there is there there's just a lot less need to run completely random legacy applications from 1986. Right?

Speaker 2:

Totally. Yeah. And you have post docs who are a a labor force that you have that is captive effectively. So yeah.

Speaker 9:

Right. Yeah. I mean, the the real true benefit of open source is that you get the work of a 1,000 unpaid graduate students across the world working on your project if you can convince them it's interesting.

Speaker 5:

The,

Speaker 9:

like, the interesting thing is that I'm not sure how far risk 5 scales beyond about 6 years. Just because I think they've done some things in the way it's designed that are just gonna completely, like, kneecap it as it grows.

Speaker 2:

Interesting.

Speaker 9:

So, like, maybe 15 year prediction, risk 5 is in the same sentence as MIPS.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. I

Speaker 9:

just because the whole modular ISA concept, it turns out you really can't shrink the ISA post facto.

Speaker 2:

And I also think that maybe you got the same concern that something I've got about the reprioritization of risk 5. It and encouraging proprietary firmware so on is a real problem. So a good 6 year prediction, what do you have for 3 years?

Speaker 9:

For 3 years, I think we are probably going to see some level of daylight in terms of Open FPGAs. In that, to be more specific and to be more bold, because heck, why the heck not? We are going to see a contemporary equivalent level FPGA, equivalent to, like, an ultra scale plus type FPGA with completely open tool chain or at least much more open tool chain than we see today.

Speaker 2:

Amen. And may I read to you and, Matt, I'm getting a little bit of feedback from you. So I'm just gonna,

Speaker 9:

you do

Speaker 2:

in your doc. The just mute yourself when you're not talking. But the, I'm gonna read to you verbatim by 6 year prediction. 1 of the top 3 FPGA manufacturers has adopted a deliberate all open strategy, bringing a Linux like democratization So, Steven, this is going this is a a counterpoint to your, your gloomy open source, but the looking towards open FPGAs, I I Matt, I definitely agree. It feels like we're close to an important moment.

Speaker 1:

I hope you're right. I will say that much. Yeah.

Speaker 2:

I

Speaker 9:

would not necessarily agree with you on the top three point. This strikes me as something that's probably more likely to bubble up as a startup than it is to come down from the top just because the closeness of Xilinx and Alterra's tools is just so intrinsic to their DNA that, like

Speaker 2:

To be clear, I said I'd but the Vibrext is one of the top 3 in 6 years. So I actually think Okay.

Speaker 9:

Okay. Yes. I'll I'll give you that one.

Speaker 2:

And then what's your, what what do you have for a 1 year prediction?

Speaker 9:

Are you familiar with Framework, the laptop company?

Speaker 4:

Yeah. Right. Good. Yeah. I actually have one.

Speaker 4:

My my son installed Linux on it, over this last vacation.

Speaker 9:

You know, honestly, my probably my going prediction is that they are ultimately unsuccessful.

Speaker 6:

That

Speaker 2:

one. Do you love it Adam? Because if you love it, I really want to, I want, I want you to be here for this production.

Speaker 4:

I mean, you know, the it's jam, it's like an open source or like a kind of an open platform where you can repair it yourself. And it's very cool when you when you get it, you open it up and like every component has QR codes and you can scan it and it'll tell you how how, you know, not to zap your DIMMs and

Speaker 2:

That looks great.

Speaker 4:

Yeah. It's it's a really cool box. I mean, very much in the in the oxide ethos, you know, not as as ambitious on some things. Like, the the main board still looks like sort of a normal, you know, collection of components. But it's a a lot of it's open.

Speaker 4:

A lot of the components are open. You can replace things that break, which is pretty nifty.

Speaker 2:

I think that's great. I don't care if nothing's gonna die.

Speaker 4:

Too bad it's gonna fail. Right?

Speaker 9:

My my going counterpoint to that is not that the fact that it's open is problematic. It's that, really, it is not substantially different enough from what is out there already to be compelling. You know, the

Speaker 2:

It just thought it up.

Speaker 9:

They claim that this is all open, and it turns out that, like, m dot 2 SSDs are m dot 2 SSDs. Right. And, like, you know, it turns out that a couple of laptop makers decided to solder down LPDDR RAM and then framework decided, hey, let's not do that and call ourselves heroes. But, like, if you crack open the majority of laptops in the market, they are not substantially different with the exception that, like, they don't have a massive hype train

Speaker 2:

this looks pretty cool though. I I'm like, I wanna get one of these for my kids. This this looks good. Yeah.

Speaker 4:

I mean, I think you're right in the, like right now they are default debt, right? Like they, they, they need to achieve a new kind of success. Man, if if I were betting my hopes and and not my money, I'd I'd definitely bet on them.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. Tom, I saw and then I I Tom, I saw you'd raise your hand earlier. Do you have, just some predictions? Then and then I wanna get to Tedco.

Speaker 13:

Sure. Thanks, Brian. I promise to be quick. And my my prediction, I think if they do arrive, even then, there'll be way overdue. 1 year, I think that at least 2 of the large tire providers will become startlingly good at partnering and surprises all.

Speaker 13:

3 year, stablecoins will become regulated. That's my sort of web 3 ish

Speaker 2:

development. Okay. Okay. No. So the the stable coins become regulated in that act of regulation.

Speaker 2:

Do they kinda fall apart, or do they actually become part of

Speaker 13:

Yeah.

Speaker 2:

Okay. Just just checking. Phew.

Speaker 13:

Yeah. I mean, I I think that, you know, I I think that there are regulators already who who view them in the same life that, you know, there was a I can't remember the code name for it, but that that project during the war where, Hitler, took on printing bunches of 5 pound notes and plan to drop them, you know, throughout the UK in order to try and destabilize the currency. I mean, we're going to that point. So yeah. And 6 year, my 6 year is the biggest, outside of the, you know, the the clouds, the biggest data center server provider will be a company that hasn't sold any servers yet.

Speaker 2:

That's awesome. I love that prediction.

Speaker 13:

And 6 years isn't soon enough.

Speaker 2:

6 years isn't enough. That's great. That's a great prediction. I love that prediction.

Speaker 4:

Talk in our book.

Speaker 2:

Right. Exactly. Well, listen. You can't predict your book, but you can predict someone else's book. That that's okay.

Speaker 2:

I we we welcome that. That's great. Those are great pictures. And, Tom, just your first prediction, you said that the the cloud providers will be partnering. Is that I want to understand that a little bit better.

Speaker 13:

Yeah. I think I think that, even, you know, with vendors whose services complete directly with some of their own offerings, they'll they'll deeply partner.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. Interesting. That's very interesting. Good. Alright.

Speaker 2:

Those are those are, those are good predictions. Especially love that 6 year. That 6 year is great. As long as it's well, anyway, that's a great prediction. Alright.

Speaker 2:

Tinco, what do you what do you got?

Speaker 6:

Hi. Alright. Yeah. I think for my first prediction, I want to be a little bit bold and something I don't have any authority on. So it's going to be good.

Speaker 6:

I think multiple companies who have demonstrated a general intelligence one shot machine learning system.

Speaker 3:

Is that because

Speaker 6:

I think that's

Speaker 4:

that's in in a year? I know oh, so now we're Yeah.

Speaker 2:

I think we're so close to this that

Speaker 6:

it will pop within 1 year.

Speaker 2:

Okay. Okay. Companies.

Speaker 6:

Yeah.

Speaker 4:

That's bold.

Speaker 6:

Yeah.

Speaker 2:

And for my So so it happened it actually happened several years ago. Adam is actually a bot that I've been called

Speaker 4:

Not a very good one.

Speaker 2:

That's exactly what I trained the bot to

Speaker 1:

say. Nice.

Speaker 3:

Do you

Speaker 9:

have any top candidates for who those might be or just generic thought?

Speaker 6:

Yeah. Probably, like, the the like, I think the the Google one, it's called DeepMind, they already announced that they have done it, I think, or that they are very close. So that's probably one. And the other one might be, like, a total random one. I don't know.

Speaker 6:

But I yeah. I think that's like, it's not gonna be efficient. Like, it's not gonna be, oh, I'm gonna tell this machine how to drive, and it will drive a car. Right? So not not at that level, but more at the it's a system that should you scale it infinitely, make it infinite fast, it would be able you you could teach it to do such things.

Speaker 6:

But in the beginning, it would be like teaching a toddler how to play chess or something. Like, it would be

Speaker 12:

Yeah. I wouldn't recommend it.

Speaker 6:

Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. But also, you don't have to show them a 1,000,000 games or 10,000,000,000 games before it knows sort of how to play chess. It would actually learn the rules, make a model, of the the chess game, and then execute that model within its own system to to make prediction on what the best move is gonna be.

Speaker 6:

This is Without yeah.

Speaker 2:

Without I I I infer that you either don't have a toddler or the only toddler you have or have are are chess prodigy because they teaching a toddler chess, it feels like a very

Speaker 6:

happy sport. Months pregnant.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. There you go. Okay. Well yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. Yeah. Come back

Speaker 4:

come back in 6 years. Right?

Speaker 3:

Okay. Okay.

Speaker 2:

Alright. What else you got? That's a good one. What else you got?

Speaker 6:

Okay. So the 3 year is actually from my book. So that's gonna be, I think, drones, flying around private properties are gonna be, like, a standard thing. Or in in in 3 years, it's just gonna be like the the the sort of Star Wars, drone that something is just flying around, scanning things and stuff, that's gonna be something that's just common by then. And I think many people think it's already possible or, like, it's already existing.

Speaker 6:

But I think there's still some things that have to happen. But the products that are getting released right now, they'll they'll make it possible. And I think in in 3 years, they're gonna be all over the place.

Speaker 2:

That's right.

Speaker 6:

Yeah.

Speaker 2:

And then in in primarily kinda commercial applications? Like

Speaker 6:

Yeah. Like, maybe factory, plots or, like maybe, so one one funny thing is the power line industry. So power line inspections is a big thing where my company is also active. And there's companies selling products for specifically that business case, like very high resolution cameras and stuff. But there's actually not, as far as I know, any companies that are doing it successfully.

Speaker 6:

And I think this is also gonna change. So in 1000 miles of power lines going from here to there. We want them want it to be inspected in a in a manner that's, competitive with humans going there and taking camera and and zooming in on something. Yeah. Or or PG and E's example,

Speaker 4:

case, not inspecting them at all.

Speaker 2:

That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.

Speaker 3:

I I don't

Speaker 2:

know if I trust PG and E to get it right, but as as but we're a California resident, so, that this can't happen soon enough. That's a great prediction.

Speaker 6:

And then the 6 year one, it's going to be that web 3 will actually happen.

Speaker 2:

Oh, goodness. Alright. We got one of those.

Speaker 6:

But not in the way that people are currently talking about Web 3. I think I'm I'm preaching what's required here in the sense that it's just bullshit what's going on with what people are talking about with Web 3 right now. But I think that in 6 years, the web is going to be so absolutely unusable due to machine learning, AI, and agents, and whatever, disrupting all currently established crowdfunded moderation systems. So, yeah, all moderation systems that are currently making the web really valuable and useful, they're going to be totally gamed and messed up by by autonomous agents and and companies with big big money.

Speaker 4:

That's just gonna be just gonna be inundated with with spam effectively.

Speaker 6:

Yeah. And something will have to come along that that sort of, like, disrupts that in some way. I don't know how. I don't know, but I think that's that's just gotta happen.

Speaker 2:

That's interesting. Looks like moderation plays such an important role in the web that we don't necessarily see because we don't see what the moderators are saying. But that is no. That's really interesting and dark.

Speaker 3:

Yeah.

Speaker 2:

Alright. Those are good. Those are the those are the those are the 3 good predictions. Congratulations on your I'd I'd look in you definitely come back to us and and let us know how the the the chess lessons are doing, in a couple of years. Alright.

Speaker 2:

Ben, you are next.

Speaker 3:

Yeah.

Speaker 7:

So I actually submitted a poll request as directed.

Speaker 3:

I I think

Speaker 2:

I've done that. But anyway,

Speaker 7:

yeah. A couple comments on on past predictions people have made. I think, as soon as the big x86 vendors feel threatened by risk or any other architecture, there's no problem with them throwing that instruction set alongside, what they already have. The the problem with that approach is the accretion of behaviors that makes it impossible to reason about, a part and to trust it, and also burning all those extra gates, which at scale, waste a lot of power. You know, know, in much the same way that c is not a low level language, any modern instruction set, is not that low level.

Speaker 7:

Yeah. They start low level. Risk and MIPS and are involved sort of low level, but, as as they try to optimize their behavior, they become more complex. And and your your assembler is not really the representative of what the machine code's doing. Yeah.

Speaker 7:

Interesting. So let's see. I'm I was thinking about the global pandemic. You know, what's different between the last one, Spanish flu, and how technology relates to that. And I was, you know, thinking about working at home and, just wanting space for another few monitors on my desk.

Speaker 7:

And what do people do who don't have that space even for, you know, one extra monitor? I think smart glasses might actually have a market, if they come down from their current approximately $1500 price to something more the the cost of an affordable cell phone. Mhmm. I think Google Glass, you know, the Google Glass type thing, will have a place. I don't think people are I think people are there's gonna be a lasting effect of people not really wanting to get into crowded workspaces again.

Speaker 7:

So that's my 1 year prediction that that smart glasses become a viable alternative.

Speaker 2:

That's interesting. Yep.

Speaker 7:

Relating to, you know, AI and moderation system breaking down, I think that if people step away from their desks and use these in real life, that that's another venue where ads are gonna be completely inundating,

Speaker 4:

you know,

Speaker 7:

in inundating that space. And much like, you know, Lady Bird Johnson's Highway Beautification Act, they removed both so many billboards from highways. There's gonna have to be, there's gonna be such a revolt. There's gonna have to be legislation to, severely curtail intrusive ad advertising. 3 years out, I think that the cost of maintaining all this commercial space for offices is just gonna be such a burden on companies that they're gonna find something else.

Speaker 7:

And, you know, the world's gonna find something else to do with it. Whether whether they go bankrupt or sell it off, at fire sale prices, and I think that, you know, may be used to, provide housing.

Speaker 2:

And is that a 1 or 3 year and that's a 3 year prediction, it sounds like?

Speaker 7:

That's a 3 year, you know. It it'll be based on financials of companies.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. Yeah. It's right.

Speaker 7:

Everyone thinks, pandemic's gonna be over. People are gonna go back to the workplace. Everything's gonna be exactly the way it was before. And I think that, yeah. I don't think that's gonna work out.

Speaker 7:

I think it I think it's gonna stretch out longer than the finances of of the companies that maintain these, workspaces. Sorry.

Speaker 2:

The the, the workforce is gonna remain remote longer than you can remain solvent from a commercial real estate perspective. Yeah. Okay. It's like yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2:

Yep. And

Speaker 7:

then 6 years, just kind of a throwaway one, you know, as I as AI has become more complex, you know, we we don't understand the low level the same way we would a piece of firmware, how a brain works. And, you know, AIs are, you know, trained on databases and we and we judge their behavior. We score them and how well they did, you know, take to give them aptitude tests. The, my prediction is that AI specialists are more therapists than programmers.

Speaker 2:

It's it's totally something that I have said as a kind of an AGI malcontent is that there are lots of things that the brain does that we don't like, like brain cancer and neurodegenerative disorders that we probably don't want our computing systems to have. So, the, we we, yeah, we may be signing up for therapists, AI related therapists. That'll be pretty funny.

Speaker 7:

Yeah. And that's it for me.

Speaker 2:

Those are great. Those are terrific. Those are those are terrific. So, Adam, I I, do you, I think Kelsey Hightower just joined us. Kelsey, do you have some, some 1, 3, and 6 year predictions for us?

Speaker 8:

Oh, man. I'm in the wrong state of mind for predicting. My one year would be, I think I think this year is gonna be a really, basic year in terms of predictions. I think it's gonna be more of the same. A lot of hope of getting back to normal, whatever that means.

Speaker 8:

I think redefining normal, will be the thing. But so that 1 year is gonna be the land grab of defining the new normal. So there'll be a competition between the metaverse, whatever that means, figuring out what your life should be, but I think the competition started last year. So the 1st year is gonna be just a competition for who wants to define the new normal. Whether it's going back into the office, working 9 to 5, or realizing that we were stuck in the matrix and we should get out.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. And the the this year will be kind of a we'll start to see some of the options emerge.

Speaker 8:

3 years. In 3 years, I think a lot of things that we started during the pandemic, I think we're starting them from the wrong place of desperation, they will backfire, like, dramatically bad. So for example, I think cryptocurrency will open the door to government finally finding a way to track your actual money. I think they've held off for a very long time in the name of freedom and thinking that would freak people out. I think cryptocurrency's given them a free pass here that people will actually accept full tracking on all your spending as if it's good for you, which is pretty insane.

Speaker 8:

But I think

Speaker 2:

Oh my god.

Speaker 8:

I I think these things will backfire. If you accept them in some form, you will probably accept them in all forms.

Speaker 2:

And I mean, that would be talk about the animals walking upright. In terms of the animal farm, you've got I mean, the fact that this has started with kind of liberation and we end up in in your dystopian world. We end up in this kind of state where all of our finances are being monitored all the time.

Speaker 8:

Yeah. I think I think what's being presented now, some would say, if it's bad and you wanna see something change. So I think change is being forced. And so when you force change, that means you said there has to be something, and it has to look like this. I think China's giving you a hint at what that will look like, and it will be this, government money that will allow you to do all the things that you complained about before with one major train off.

Speaker 8:

We will give you the transparency, but not the kind you want it. I think I think that one is that we're playing into it is what is what I'm getting at. 6 years, we will finally see the full realization that technology is now considered sovereignty. I think money and currency was considered sovereignty. Land was considered sovereignty.

Speaker 8:

But now that we spend a lot of time, whether it's in a video game or in the cloud or checking email, you can already see it unfolding, but I do think the regulation will catch up that, this idea of using services from a potential adversary or a potential ally that's pretty weak. I think in 6 years, you would actually see governments really start to treat technology as part of their full So you'll see those kind of 49, 51 percent ownership deals that we saw in finance. Wow.

Speaker 3:

Which hasn't that

Speaker 9:

already basically happened?

Speaker 4:

I don't think so. Not not not to the degree that I think Kelsey's alluding to here.

Speaker 8:

Yeah. I think we saw hints of it where, you know, this supply chain shortage has thrown a lot of governments for a loop. They can't do anything about it. You can't really threaten wars like we're in the foundation here. It's like, you don't have the skills to manufacture this stuff even if you want it to.

Speaker 8:

So you gotta remember, there's gonna have to be a period of time, and I think maybe 5 or 6 years, maybe more like 10, where you can say never again. So I think people will realize that just outsourcing your sovereignty digitally is a no go, and so the work will be in full swing to prevent that from happening again. That starts from talent. You gotta invest in your local universities to make sure you have the skills, and you're gonna have to figure out a incentive system that doesn't draw everyone to the same 10, 20 companies globally, to do this kind of work. So this is natural because we're now infusing government sovereignty into all of our technology, so something's gotta give.

Speaker 2:

And and Kelsey, is this fair to call this, like, techno nationalism? Is that a fair way of characterizing it? I mean, we do what are some of the specific things that we would look for? Would that would indicate this trend?

Speaker 8:

Can see this. So if you're in the SaaS business, more than likely, a government has asked you to host that SaaS business in a particular country and guarantee the only people with access to that data have passports from that country or are natural born citizens of that country, and you need to be able to prove that those are the only people who can touch those systems. We already see that in the cloud, but you're starting to see smaller vendors being asked to comply with this level. So this is beyond PCI, HIPAA, GDPR. This is beyond that.

Speaker 8:

This is a government saying, we don't have a CTO, but maybe we should.

Speaker 2:

Can I add is this world better or worse? Is this world feels very the am I right that these predictions seem a little grim, or are is this

Speaker 8:

I I think I think they're better because we we can no longer pretend that there isn't a power structure at the helm. So now every country is gonna have to you can't just delegate capitalism to the 2 or 3 most popular countries you believe in. You can't delegate your education to just a few educators. So I think this gets better because if we really believe in opportunity, all of these countries need to get good at this stuff in order to see some healthy competition again. So that's more opportunities for you.

Speaker 8:

That's more opportunities for anyone that's building something because you no longer have to compete in such a constrained market that we have now.

Speaker 4:

So you're saying almost a kind of national protectionism to to foster some of those industries that would struggle to compete on a global stage?

Speaker 8:

Yeah. It reminds me like the space race or even the Apple race where the internal two teams had to compete with each other to produce the very best thing that they will call the iPad or the iPhone.

Speaker 5:

But right

Speaker 8:

now, we don't have that. Right? Because if you're a small country, you just delegate that to Samsung or Apple and say, hey. We'll buy whatever they're they're pushing out there. And that that doesn't necessarily tap into all the intelligence that's available.

Speaker 8:

So even though it sounds grim, I think responsibility does sound grim when you're used to not having to worry about something or a whole lot of things. So now when someone tells you, you're gonna have to step up to the plate, skill up, and be able to do this work as well. That can sound a bit grim, but I think it's probably exactly what we need long term.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. Interesting. And is this world open? I mean, is this world nationalistic, but also one in which technology is being shared across national borders This is software?

Speaker 8:

Yes. I think open source will be the default model mainly because it will take too long to start from scratch. So if you're smart and you're asking you know, we all know the time pressures of anything that's serious. They're gonna want this stuff like tomorrow, and the best thing to do is go to fork a repository or have people in these communities because most of these open source contributors are already global. A lot of these people, you know, despite the US fallacy that we create everything, a lot of the technology is being worked on globally.

Speaker 8:

So imagine now being able to stay in your home country and be rewarded for working on problems that are local. So I think the open source will be the default model that this takes on because just doesn't make sense to start from scratch every country.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. That's interesting. That's that's exciting. And then I'm I you know, we've been limiting folks to 1 Web 3 prediction. I'm not sure.

Speaker 2:

I guess you would you would maybe count your 3 years of Web 3 based prediction. Kelsey, I just have to say, while we've got you, thank you so much for your explorations of web 3. So, I think a lot of technologists, including myself, have really appreciated you. Can I

Speaker 8:

can I explain the web 3 exploration?

Speaker 2:

Yeah. Definitely.

Speaker 8:

Every technology has potential to be really, really good for a lot of people or really, really bad for a lot of people. I think there's some people would say during, like, the World Wars, the advancement in, like, bombs was didn't work out for a lot of people. So you you have to pay attention to this stuff. When I look at web 3, I was really excited actually. When you hear a a version number being bumped in technology, we tend to get excited and we wanna go look at the release notes.

Speaker 8:

I went to go look at release notes, and what I saw was kinda cryptocurrency at the top of the release notes and said, okay. Why is this being rubbed on on everything? And you look at it, and it looks like I've never, in my 20 years of tech, seen something being pushed so hard Yeah. Before it can naturally be useful. Right?

Speaker 8:

Because typically, you throw technology out there even if it's ready, even if it's not ready. Other technologists will pick it up and say, oh my god. This is cool. Let me show you what I've built. And I'm yet to see what people have built.

Speaker 2:

Well and I think also when you have those kind of technological shifts, which obviously you've been a part of of some really big ones, the the the the complexion of it is totally different. It's technologists actually, like, building stuff and getting stuff working. And other people may just be dismissing it as, like, not serious or not at scale or not as good as, like, your digital photograph isn't as good as my as my slide photography. But it's like, no. It has all these other advantages, often economic advantages.

Speaker 8:

This is the first technology shift that I've seen that brings politics into the picture as part of its foundation.

Speaker 4:

Yeah. You know, Steven referred to this as a tech trend, and you just called it technology shift. But I think to your point, the the technology is actually a trailing indicator rather than the leading indicator in this case.

Speaker 8:

Yeah. I think this is the thing of saying, you know, and for my 20 years that I've been in tech, you've been able to dodge politics for the most part. You could just say, hey. I'm agnostic. The software I'm writing is agnostic.

Speaker 8:

But if you look at some of the charters for some of the stuff, it's literally saying, we need to go and break up company x, y, and z. We need to go disrupt, this particular government. So this gets very serious. You can't just be someone writing code. You have to actually maybe decide where do you stand on some of these political issues, which wasn't really a requirement for most of the technologies that I was experienced with.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. It is really unlike anything we've seen. And again, I'm like, oh, you know, you and I are in Steven and Adam. We're all kind of a similar vintage, but in at this, you know, between 2 3 decades. And it really is very, very different and very divided.

Speaker 2:

So but I thank you for you you took such an earnest look at it, and, you know, I it it was just very, very helpful to watch your explorations. And I I think that been a lot of time where technologists have been kind of almost afraid to speak their mind on this because it has had such, made the proponents or so. Yeah.

Speaker 8:

Right. I'm gonna say something nice about web 3, though. So one thing is

Speaker 2:

Do it. Yeah.

Speaker 8:

There there there are some things that are decent. So I think the you know, I do think there's a lot of people who've taken over, this opportunity to make a lot of cash off a lot of people who are unsuspecting, but there are some things that I think are okay. For example, that concept of logging in with your own private keys, this idea that you can own your identity. Look. We already do it for, like, GitHub.

Speaker 8:

So it's not like it's something we've never seen before. You do it with m t l s. But the average person, I don't think have that on their radar. Ideally, we could do this for, like, 2 factor, Fido keys or something. But this idea of making that UX easy, I I applaud them for rethinking, do you own your own identity, and can you take it somewhere else with you?

Speaker 8:

I think that's a reasonable challenge. And then things like IPFS, just thinking about storage outside of POSIX semantics and giving people a concept of where does your storage live and how do you locate it. And, again, we've seen this before, but there are some tenets of that movement that make a bit of sense minus the, microtransactions.

Speaker 2:

Right. Yeah. That that it's totally true. And certainly, there are some elements as always, there's some elements of decentralization that are that are hugely valuable. People talk about owning their own identity, though.

Speaker 2:

I'm not sure they wanna own what happens when they lose their identity accidentally or their identity. I mean

Speaker 8:

I'm writing a blog post, and that was the first thing I couldn't resolve. Normally, when you use lose your password

Speaker 2:

Yeah.

Speaker 8:

You get an email. There's some recovery process. I know that they're thinking about that as well. But, yes, if you lose your keys, you lose your account. If this is the library, maybe you open another one.

Speaker 8:

But if this is your bank account, then things get a little bit more, serious.

Speaker 4:

We we we we like centralization, it turns out, in some cases.

Speaker 2:

Well, the the order this is your spouse who has died suddenly and with with affairs not in order. And now you have, like I mean, their identity is deceased. And, you know, boy, how would you I mean, so I think, yeah, there there are some really thorny there.

Speaker 8:

We're thinking about trust in a whole new way. And I think the terms they've given people or at least people like me to think through is, when I think about decentralization in the way it's being framed and centralization the way it's now being framed, I've been using this kind of responsibility slider. If you can name the entity, if you can name the person, that you closer to centralization. So that's who's responsible. Like, you hurt me, you stole from me, and you can fix it.

Speaker 8:

The more of that you have, the more insurance, the more responsibility. I think people consider that centralization. The less of that is decentralized. And I think people are starting to think about it as a slider. Have you seen anyone that has their NFT stolen?

Speaker 8:

They wanna call the police, or they wanna call some law enforcement to say, I now need someone to be responsible. Yeah. Give my things back that was stolen from the decentralized world. So it's it's weird, but I think people are starting to discover that slider needs to be there.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. Interesting. Sorry. I'm once again doing the thing that I said I would do in terms of I I it's just like it's it's like a it's like a fungus in my brain.

Speaker 4:

You can't look away. Yeah.

Speaker 9:

Can I also just ask how you think this compares to previous decentralized? What might what might have been previously called Federated, or if you're more cynical about it, feudalist?

Speaker 8:

I think there's a reason people gravitate to communities. People gravitate to a sports team. People gravitate to groups. To ignore that, I I think, doesn't make a lot of sense. So we have to ask the question, why do people gravitate towards communities?

Speaker 8:

Right? People wanna be what other people are. And so when you think about social media and I hate using this web 2 thing because I never called this stuff web 2 in my whole life until someone told me about web 3. But I'll play the game. People go to where other people are.

Speaker 8:

That's how it works. If someone throws a concert, you wanna be there because there's an experience that humans like to do. If you can make a better experience, maybe people will gravitate towards that. In terms of the other models, it just depends on who's actually in control. And for me, I follow the money.

Speaker 8:

When I look at any of these systems, I'm asking what's in it for you. If you wanna be the gatekeeper, right, they complain about the existing gate keepers, but then they shut up the toll booths, and the fees look a little bit higher than the ones I'm currently paying now. So regardless of what they name it, I always ask, who stands to make the most money, and what is the model for doing that?

Speaker 2:

Well and and specifically, Kelsey, you asked and then answered a question. You asked a question that I have had and not answered. Namely, who gets the gas fees on this stuff? And the I could not believe the answer. I mean, I was jaw on my lap at the answer of that.

Speaker 2:

Adam, do you know this?

Speaker 4:

No. What what is it?

Speaker 2:

Kelsey? Do you know what I the gas fee? Go I mean, I I I Who gets

Speaker 8:

who gets the gas fees?

Speaker 2:

Nobody. It gets burned. It and they in fact, I think they caught literally burning, don't they? It's like the vast majority of the gas are like it is it is it it goes

Speaker 4:

It's inflationary? Yes.

Speaker 8:

But, Brian, I believe that was in a response to the fact that from what I read from the website so I try to study this from the source of truth. And, you know, when Ethereum was set up, there's a reason why we have to expand the money supply. It's not just to cause inflation and make people at CNBC mad all the time. There's a reason why you need to accommodate the expansion of people Yeah. And economic activity.

Speaker 8:

And I think ether was designed around that function. But imagine a currency that you keep minting, I think it's like a 1,000 ether ether a day. That gets to the same kind of problem you have with inflation in general. So I think the proposal was to start bringing it, to make up for the lack of activity. You don't have enough activity on that particular blockchain.

Speaker 8:

Number 1, it's expensive. The virtual machine is expensive to run those programs. It's very expensive to handle. So you need something to speed things up. And I think in the short term, and they can always change it, is to burn it.

Speaker 8:

If you burn it, then you can actually reduce the supply. And I believe they said something at the rate of 1 point 4 percent every year over time, and that would should add some stability in the system. Because without burning it, then you're right. You would have a bunch of people centralizing all of the ETH through their fees. Right?

Speaker 8:

You would have all the miners basically accumulating all the wealth, and then you have the exact same problem, you claim to be defending against.

Speaker 1:

Well, I think I think one thing to at least that I think about, you know, when I think about these systems is, as Kelsey just articulated, I think very well, is the idea that, you know, to to understand some of the claims here, to understand some of the proposals, you do have to think through both the existing systems. Right? Gatekeepers, you know, follow the money. Where is that coming from? But the interesting thing to me has been, you know, sort of, you know, on the end user front.

Speaker 1:

Right? Which is to think through, you know, the, you know, sort of what are the incentives here. Right? What are the drivers? What are, you know, what's entailed here?

Speaker 1:

And, you know, the the sort of analogy I was using with a friend of mine last week was if you go watch, I don't know when it came out, the movie easy rider. Right? So it came out in what late sixties, I want to say 68, 69, somewhere around then. And, you know, basically tried to articulate and capture through the the ethos and sentiment of a generation of disaffected youth, you in the United States in the sixties, and I guess to a lesser extent worldwide. But anyway, one of the interesting sort of, you know, takeaways when you sort of look at that was that there was this generation of of, And then they got to the farms, and we're like, this is terrible.

Speaker 1:

You know, I I I don't wanna get this work.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. That's a crazy analogy.

Speaker 1:

Miserable. This is a miserable experience for me. This is not the utopia that sort of I had anticipated. And, you know, I I think of that a lot, you know, when, you know, you hear about these sort of, you know, these sort of purely idea, ethos, you know, sort of, justifications for a lot of these technologies. And at least from what I can see, you know, it's just, you know, I remember talking to somebody years ago again about this, about Gmail.

Speaker 1:

And if you led with Gmail, right, and said, okay, you know, look, there's going to be this email system and it's going to, you know, sort of algorithmically mine your email and serve you ads based on that. Right. If that's what you lead with, people are like, yeah, I'm out. Right. If instead you present the interface, you know, which at the time was revolutionary, had a revolutionary amount of storage space, you know, interact it was much more interactive than than certainly competitive clients at the time.

Speaker 1:

Also, you have this you have this incentive, right, which is like, yeah. Yeah. Fine. I will deal with the ads because it's so much better than what I have. And at least at present, you know, for me, when I look around, you know, I I have some of the same questions, I think, on sort of the mechanics of the systems here, right, in terms of, you know, who runs them, who owns the machines, who are the gatekeepers, you know, where are the sort of rates of tax?

Speaker 1:

You know, what is the role of currency and inflation and fiat currencies and bear bear you know, currencies and so on? Those are all interesting questions. But to me, so much of the the sort of promise of decentralization, particularly from those who are its strongest advocates, you know, I I am

Speaker 5:

I I think

Speaker 1:

mildly skeptical that the that the demand is gonna be there.

Speaker 8:

I think the biggest thing that people forgot to decentralize was the power structure. I think some people have mentioned, you know, when you when the number of people who are involved in the design of these proposed systems is not representative of the world at all. This is the same people who benefited from their previous power structure attempting to tell us they're here to present a new one where they're still at the top. They still have the starting precision, and, ideally, this one will be good for you as well. And this is where I think a lot of the skepticism comes from.

Speaker 8:

Who was at that table? Who was named on those papers that look like the people they're supposed to be rescuing? I think that's where we fall apart.

Speaker 2:

Did you see Jack Dorsey's tweet today? Oh my god. I mean, Dorsey has just been on a rip. And the he Adam, did you see this? This is Chris Dixon.

Speaker 2:

So Chris Dixon, who's been the major proponent of web 3, amazingly, that hasn't blocked me out, though. I almost view that as, like, I I'm almost, like, ashamed

Speaker 3:

of that.

Speaker 2:

Like, all my friends have been blocked. You're trying.

Speaker 1:

I'm trying as hard

Speaker 2:

as you can. I'm trying as hard as I can out here to be blocked by this guy. Can you please block me? The, but, Chris Dixon blogged the ownership or blogged, tweeted the ownership of all these web 2 companies, of course, all of the hedge funds and so on. And Dorsey replied to that, now do your LPs.

Speaker 4:

Nice.

Speaker 2:

Which is like, oh my god. George Dorsey is deadly right now. I mean, he is just dropping bumps. But I feel I mean, Kelsey, to your point, it's like the ownership structure of those who would displace the excellent ownership structure. It's the same ownership structure.

Speaker 2:

Like, you haven't actually changed the fundamental problem.

Speaker 8:

But you know what I worry the most about though is that we're starting to bring in this very negative, and it's probably always been here in tech to some degree. But the way people have these conversations, it's it's really bad in my opinion. Totally. And some of these are just bots. But if you say something that seems not in line

Speaker 2:

Yeah.

Speaker 8:

The response you get these days is crazy. I can get in a place where people say, hey. I did this benchmark. You're totally wrong. Here's my results.

Speaker 8:

Here's the code I ran. I can I can deal with that? But when you say, you're not gonna make it, like, that's how we end disputes now. You're not gonna make it.

Speaker 2:

Which is crazy. Yeah. I know. That's such a good point. Like, not gonna make it.

Speaker 2:

I mean, that is such a terrible thing to say, actually. We've normalized it, but it's a terrible thing to say. Yeah. That's a really that's a really good point. So, Daniel, I know you've had your hand up for a while.

Speaker 2:

I I'm hoping you got some optimistic predictions for us.

Speaker 14:

Yeah. Thank you. So I hope, Twitter won't crash again. Anyway, a few hot takes. 1 year, we're talking about a major operating system from China.

Speaker 14:

3 years, we're going to be talking about some high performance computing from Europe. And 6 years, ARM is no longer relevant. So that's not a positive one. I'm sorry. And no web 3, but that's mine.

Speaker 4:

I think the ARM one is a positive

Speaker 3:

tells you I kind of think that that is

Speaker 2:

a kind of a deep tech equivalent of some of the things that you're talking about, where you are seeing some of the an operating system from China as a 1 year, a the the deep technology from Europe is a 3 year, I mean, I you're starting to see, tech deep

Speaker 8:

change the game, period. I think we're going to and it may not be a good direction. I don't know if the ARM 64 will be the standard we all do, but we're gonna get to this hyper specialization of hardware that you can't buy. That is I I believe the better price on serverless will because of hardware you can't buy. I've said this for a long time that the early days of cloud was, you know, somewhat hosting things you could buy.

Speaker 8:

But I think the hyper specialization will be around the things that you can't buy in order to get scale. I don't know if that's good or bad, but the utility computing, I think, Brian, and maybe I love your take on it, is going to require going beyond consumer grade technology.

Speaker 2:

Absolutely. I mean, it would obviously mean this is the crude oxide thesis is taking that technology that you're right. People can't buy right now and democratizing that and bringing that to people who can buy it. But, no, you're totally right. That it right now, there is now I am actually optimistic, and I also kinda be curious about it because Daniel's done so much in open firmware, about the and for my own predictions, actually.

Speaker 2:

I, again, I only have 1 web 3 based prediction. And, Adam, I wanted us to get to our predictions as well before we before we have to split. But, DNI and, Dan, I wanna get to you too. But for, my, actually, my 3 year prediction is around my my 6 year prediction I said earlier, I think that one of the top 3 FPGA manufacturers is gonna be open. My, my 3 year prediction actually, around Daniel kind of and I think Kelsey tapping into some of your themes as well.

Speaker 2:

I think KiCad is one of the most KiCad 6 is a really important development. I think that right now, EDA is still proprietary, basically, for reals for, quote, unquote, real stuff for for many layer boards. You know, you you you have a 24 layer board that's on a key KeyCAD board. I think it's going to come. I think in the in 3 years, keypad is gonna be used in major shops doing complicated many layer boards, and keypad is seen at the moment as the moment that open source EDA became ready for professional use.

Speaker 2:

So I think we're on the custom dig in in EDA.

Speaker 4:

What what that was 3 year or 1 year?

Speaker 2:

That's 3 year. So, of course, with with my with those 2 out, you know that my 1 year is clearly the the Web 3 brain fart. So let's just get it out there. I think that there's gonna be a high profile Web 3 flame out. And both skeptics and proponents point to it as confirming their thesis.

Speaker 2:

So Everyone declares victory. Everyone declares victory. So somewhat, there is some some there is a pets.com equivalent. Because you remember when pets.com flamed out, there was a sense and Steven, you remember this, Kelsey, you probably remember this, that early.com flame out. There was definitely a sense among the infrastructure com flame out, there was definitely a sense among the infrastructure providers that, like, yes, that never made sense.

Speaker 2:

And now there's gonna be do you remember when we called it the correction briefly? Very

Speaker 7:

briefly. Yeah.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. We I think, like, that happened. We called it the correction, not the bust. And then the correction gave way to the bust when we realized, like, oh, no. No.

Speaker 2:

It's not sorry. That elevator doesn't stop at the ground floor. That that one goes all the way to the center of the Earth. So I so I think that we are gonna have but we have our first flame out. But, but Chris Dixon is telling telling us why it confirms his web 3 thesis.

Speaker 2:

And we're we we continue to be annoyed in a year. And I don't know what can you jump

Speaker 4:

in with mine? Yes. Yeah.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. Yeah. Do yours.

Speaker 4:

And safely, much less thought provoking than than the ones we've heard. So, starting with my web 3 and my 1 year, sometimes you bet your your heart and sometimes you bet your head, and this one is definitely betting my heart. But my bet is, January 3, 2023, web 3 is done. Like, we're not talking about web 3. You you you say it and people don't necessarily remember what you were talking about is that this was a deep fad and, and it didn't last.

Speaker 2:

So Web 3 is like Ajax. No one can even remember what it stands for.

Speaker 3:

You're

Speaker 4:

like, oh, yeah. No. I think I remember that. That was like, the pandemic. Right?

Speaker 4:

Yes. Yes.

Speaker 9:

So Can can I get an over under prediction? Does web 3 die before or after Ethereum 2 comes out?

Speaker 2:

Oh, that's yeah. Good question.

Speaker 8:

I think the thing we're missing is that, remember, web 3 did something very clever. You can keep appending its definition forever.

Speaker 2:

What what what what

Speaker 9:

5 of web development, sir?

Speaker 4:

Well, it's it is it is a relabeling and it and it continued to relabel, but, I mean, at least the term, the insufferable term will will go away. So we don't we can we can be we can grouse about other things that are equally insufferable, but that specifically one has gone away. So that's my 1 year. My my 3 year, and we haven't really touched on this, is that we focus, as an industry much more on productivity per watt or per unit energy. And, no, this does not count as another web 3 prediction, Brian.

Speaker 4:

This is different. But that we're building observability tools that let us understand how our workloads are working. And this is on large scale systems, not on, like, embedded systems. And people care a lot more and they're, about how much, power and and the cost of power is going into their systems, or into their workloads. And and we see this because people are spinning up and down workloads based on the the cost and availability.

Speaker 2:

Adam, unfortunately, Twitter Spaces rebooted during that is that is that a 3 year prediction? I've just got the end of that. That was a 3 year. Yeah. I love that prediction.

Speaker 2:

That's a good one. Thank you. And then, and then,

Speaker 4:

in my 6th year, along the lines that we've heard is, Amazon is selling a risk 5 based instance. And I guess everyone is is long

Speaker 6:

on risk 5 on

Speaker 4:

this one, so I don't have to go into it. But, that's that's my 6 year.

Speaker 2:

That's a good one. I I now the we will look back on this year as, like, really prescient or the year that everyone just, like, lost their mind over risk 5.

Speaker 4:

Like, risk 5 fever. Exactly. It's like

Speaker 2:

risk 5 fever was everywhere. That's great. I can no longer see who's got their hand up. But, Dan, I know you you wanted to get in here, and we wanna get Adam back to his family before too long. So, definitely wrap it up.

Speaker 4:

Yeah. Dan, go go

Speaker 3:

for it.

Speaker 12:

Alright. I'll be really brief. Mine are very pessimistic. 1 year, I see, major changes to workplace continuing to be driven by the pandemic, but these are gonna amplify and accentuate the effects of the wealth gap and, wealth disparity. You know, it'd be people who are privileged to work in the information economy or the service sector who are able to work from home will be able to both be afforded people continue to be afforded the flexibility to do so.

Speaker 12:

Those who are not, will not, and that's gonna create a lot of social problems. In 3 years, I see, regulation of social media in the aftermath of widespread political unrest around, especially in the US, the 2024 political season. That's gonna happen. There's gonna be political violence. And I think this time around, it's gonna be people are gonna be like, alright.

Speaker 12:

This is enough. We have to rein in social media somehow.

Speaker 4:

I like I like that this is your prediction, Dan. Like, blah blah blah. Unrest. Sure. But also social media is gonna need to get framed.

Speaker 4:

I gotta say I'm concerned about the unrest as well.

Speaker 12:

Yeah. No. The unrest gonna be unsettling. And in year 6, I think that the effects of climate change are gonna be sufficiently evident that people are gonna really get serious about retooling around compute efficiency and and power efficiency. In much of the same way that Adam predicted, I think it's gonna take us a little longer to realize that the frog has been boiled, but we're gonna get there.

Speaker 12:

And those are my 3 predictions.

Speaker 8:

Nice. Don't don't look up, Dan.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. I I Kelsey, I already try not to.

Speaker 9:

Can I take a short position on the other side of all 3 of Dan's?

Speaker 2:

No. I will I actually so I think that's right. We know we did the long bet. So, actually, again, I'm gonna retool your 6 year prediction, which I I definitely agree with. On a slightly more optimistic note, which I do feel that on climate change, the tenor is going to start to shift to not we need to prevent this from happening to this is a problem that we need to collectively solve.

Speaker 2:

And how do we humanity summon our ingenuity and our innovation to go take a swing at some of these problems and compute inefficiency is certainly one that those of us in here definitely technologists have our eyes on, as something where there's a lot of opportunity to to really improve things. And I really want us to get back. Kelsey, you said this earlier about, you know, this kind of this disparaging tone that we've adopted in tech and, I don't know, maybe we've we've exacerbated it and improving people's lives.

Speaker 8:

We we have to invite those hungry, curious, naive new people to bring that kinda optimism. You know what I mean? Like, the longer I've been in debt, I've seen the loops too many times. So it's very easy for me to become a little bit pessimistic when that's not necessary. So, you know, be on the lookout for all those new people coming in, and let's not poison them too early.

Speaker 2:

Let's not poison too early. That's a great note, I feel. And, Adam, a good one. Any closing thoughts that got that's a good one

Speaker 4:

that got off. Perfect. It's it's so easy to find no and and to help people find no. It's a lot harder to find yes. And, I I love that, Kelsey, to to to help

Speaker 3:

find that optimism. Well, thank

Speaker 4:

you, everybody. It's a great

Speaker 2:

a great to get. Kelsey, thank you so much for for joining us, Steven. It was obviously, thanks for kicking us off with a bunch of really great predictions and a a lot of great predictions for a lot of great folks. So, I know we're, very excited to, look towards the future here. And I think, one just kind of, show note is we're definitely gonna try to get these recordings out via a podcast vector as well.

Speaker 2:

So, if you wanna be able to listen to this while you're, you know, driving or whatever, make it a little bit easier.

Speaker 4:

That's our that's our New Year's resolution.

Speaker 2:

That's our New Year's resolution.

Speaker 4:

Do you wanna pitch, next week's show? Because it's

Speaker 8:

Oh. I do

Speaker 2:

I do wanna pitch pitch next week's show. So, yeah, we I got a terrific book, from my mother who knows me well, called Flying Blind. It's by Peter Robinson, on the 737 Max. When we saw the the the tragic 737 Max crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia, and we knew that there's gonna be a lot more to know about the 737 MAX and and what failed. The book goes into all that detail.

Speaker 2:

I thought I know, Adam, you're reading it now. I'm hoping that I have oversold it to you, but I don't think I have tossed. Yeah. It Yeah. It's well written.

Speaker 2:

It's very absorbing, and the author is gonna join us next week. So really excited to have him here, and, this is, you know, one of the one of the great strengths of this medium is the ability to to talk about democratizing it. In fact, we Adam, I know it when when we were setting this up, you're like, are we, like, Terry Gross now? I'm like, I think we are. I don't know.

Speaker 2:

Like but first, the news. So, very excited for that. It's gonna be a great conversation, and, hopefully, you can, join us next week. Alright. Alright.

Speaker 2:

Thanks, everybody.

Speaker 3:

Yeah. Brian,

Speaker 11:

it's it's a Yeah. Sure.

Speaker 9:

You are now the car talk of tech.