Jerod Santo: On acid, yes. Which - maybe those are the models he’s working with. But you know, a thing that you don’t ultimately know what it’s going to do. Now, you can train, and fine-tune, and guard, and watch agents watching agents all you want… However, we’ve seen at scale the internet operating, distributed systems at scale - things go wrong in ways that are sometimes very quick, very catastrophic, and compounding and cascading.

[00:52:09.02] One thing that I think about is some of these stock market trades, when you have quick corrections or crashes is because you have software making margin calls and trading with software programs, and eventually what happens is the New York Stock Exchange actually just stops everything and is like “Let’s chill out here.”

Jerod Santo: I do know what the stock market is. This is true. I do know what it is.

Nathan Sobo: Yeah, I mean, the mission of that is to build the future of software development, as I mentioned. And the premise is that if you really do actually do that, build the future of software development, you’ll have an opportunity to, in a non-annoying or coercive way, sell developers services that integrate well with the fact that you’ve built this incredible development environment, where they’re like “Hey, I’ll happily pay for that.”

One of the services we could sell developers is AI-related services, which is largely compute… But I think over time there’ll be more indexing, more things we’re doing on the backend… We’re running the open source model for you, for edit predictions. That costs money to run. So I think, you know, sure. And we are actually going to be taking our – regardless of what our long-term plans are, we’re going to be taking revenue for the first time, really, real revenue, with this launch… Because it’s expensive to offer all this AI stuff, so it’s kind of like we have to charge for it.

But again, if you want to go bring your own API keys, or use some other thing, or literally take our code and fork it and do whatever you want, I’m not going to try to be sharp-elbowed about that, if that makes sense. I want you to have control over your stack, but I also want it to be convenient for you if you don’t want to go mess with all that and you want kind of a stock experience, like “Just let me do what I do with another of these AI editors”, put down a credit card, $20 a month…

The goal is to not – we’re not trying to be cheaper or more expensive than anybody else. Just offer a reasonable service at a reasonable price. But is that the entire premise of all of Zed’s business? No. The premise of Zed’s business is still selling teams and individual services that integrate with their dev flow.

Anthony Eden: It’s traded on the stock exchange under certain funds, right?

Joran Dirk Greef: Yeah… And been coding for 30 years, and it’s been my passion, and self-taught. So I didn’t actually study computer science, because I was already reading papers, and I thought, “Well, I’m more like an autodidact. That’s going along already.” Actually, I’ve always loved business too, and people told me, they said, “You know, a great subject to study if you wanna understand the schema of business across all sectors, and anywhere in the world, it’s double entry accounting.” That’s sort of – and there’s a quote from Warren Buffett, “Accounting is the language of business.” So that’s why many – well, yeah, that’s why I went and studied financial accounting. I majored in that at university, because I had a love for business and wanted to understand the schema, general entries, debit/credits. Because with debit/credit you are doing transactions. You’re doing multi-row transactions between multiple parties.

[16:25] A debit/credit transaction could actually be you have many debits on one side and many credits. You’re expressing something essential in life across – and it’s not only businesses. You could use this not only for money, but for inventory, stock counts, or just counting things, counting API usage, or counting kilowatt hours… It’s basically “a counting”, you’re just counting. So any domain where you need to transact with counts, and it’s quantities… It could be like valuable or not valuable, but it’s just things are moving, moving around, and that’s transactions.

And yeah, that’s sort of what TigerBeetle was meant for. Sort of the canonical, general purpose example would be debit/credits. And so often we see this example given… But we thought, “Wouldn’t it be great if you just got a database that did this out of the box?” That lets you in one query to the database execute 8,000 debit/credit transactions, instead of having to do 80,000 SQL queries to do the same. So that’s one query and you do 8,000, instead of 80,000 queries. And so that’s just TigerBeetle, you get these debit/credits. So we thought, “Let’s build it in.” It’s kind of like financial asset; not only row-column consistency, but multi-row column consistency, so like transactional consistency. Double entry consistency, yeah.

Justin Searls: Todd Kaufman - he’s my co-founder. He and I would joke a lot in over the course of the 2010s that what we practiced was a sort of like blue collar software craftsmanship… And we noticed that a lot of the people who thought like us and worked like us were from the American Midwest, because the money was too easy on the coasts. You could have these really, really high bill of rates every hour in the financial district in Manhattan, and you could go and work for a VC-backed startup and have massive stock grants and hilarious compensation packages, without being very good at the job. And so my heart genuinely goes out to a lot of people who were in the industry, in tech, being told that they were great, being given staff and principal titles that had gotten super-inflated, because HR had to find a way to keep people around… And they got soft, because they never had that sort of grit, that sort of like feedback loop of “If I become better as a programmer, then I will get this promotion.” It was like “If I just show up and I get along with everybody, and I check the boxes in my annual goals or my OKRs or whatever, then I will progress.” And the progression was just assumed. And when those people get hit on the chopping block - which maybe they are picking the low performers, but it’s probably pretty arbitrary, because nobody knows how to tell a good programmer from a bad one, generally… When they wind up on the market, now they’ve spent their career not gaining the skills to be able to demonstrate their worth, and now what are they going to do? The answer is “I don’t know, maybe hope for a recovery”, and the market getting back to some sort of equilibrium where people who aren’t competent can still get jobs.

Jerod Santo: …whereas the stock one lists them horizontally, I guess, like zero –

Techno Tim: Oh, yeah. It absolutely could. Because you could use that GPU for Ollama or for anything else while you’re not using it, or even while you’re using it. Because it’s just going to use the CUDA cores if you’re using NVIDIA. And so it’s going to use CUDA cores and VRAM. But if you’re typing a document, you don’t need that. You don’t need any of that, you know?

So yeah, you could do both. You could have it run both. And then you could keep the AI local. And I think there’s desktop applications that you could just install it and do it all local, local; not even on a server in your home, but on the machine you’re using. So yeah, that would totally work. It would totally work.

3090 - yeah. I have a 3090. I got pretty lucky, because right before the pandemic, or right as it started, that launched, and everybody wanted the 3070 and 3080, I think. And I wanted the 3080, but it just so happened Best Buy had one of those in stock, the 3090. And I thought, “Oh my gosh, I’m going to spend like a thousand dollars on a GPU?” It turned out to be the best purchase ever because you couldn’t find them after that. And I used it all through the pandemic, for all of my videos and everything. It was great. But I still think they’re solid.

I like the founder’s edition. If you’re going to buy something, I feel like the founder’s edition directly from Nvidia, just the design and everything, is fantastic. I understand why people don’t choose that, but that’s just me; my personal preference.

Jerod Santo: Mat, do you have a stock response for when someone says what Angelica just said to you?

Alexandre Défossez: Compared to some of the for-profits, if we take the biggest labs, obviously, I guess we have agility that is not really possible in a super-large company, where every action will have consequences in the stock market, for instance. So the decision process can be really fast. That was the case for the release of the model. For instance, we were able to release it under a commercially friendly license, which would be a bit harder in a larger structure.

Then I think we have a strong – for instance, we have a desire to go more and more towards on-device models. So Moshi is kind of barely on-device. We demoed it on a MacBook Pro, but it was like a top tier MacBook Pro, so it’s kind of like proof of concept; it runs on device, not every device… But I think we definitely have a value there, because a number of for-profits are not going to develop really powerful on-device models, because that would be a potential threat to their… Like, it’s harder to protect in terms of intellectual property. And I think in general, between the bigger players, there is kind of the race to the very top, very best numbers on the benchmarks, MMLU and everything… And so if it takes 10 times more inference time to beat the other on the benchmark, they are going to do it, because it’s either beating the other on the benchmarks, or kind of leaving the arena. So we’re not really in this mindset. We’re more like – the on-device, I think could have a very large number of applications. It definitely cannot solve all issues… But I think as a non-profit, we won’t have the kind of reservation other for-profit might have for on-device models.

Break: [00:16:18.22]

Jerod Santo: So that’s a really tough sell. I’m sure there’s people who are master debaters, who can probably give good reasoning to do that… But a lot of it is touchy-feely, in my opinion. Like, I don’t like it. I would forego more money in order to support a flourishing and diverse web… But when you have shareholders - I also own stock in companies, and I want those companies to return value to me as a shareholder. We all want that as shareholders. And so they are beholden to shareholders to do that. So it’s a really tough sell as a developer.

Now, what can we do? I think we build things that don’t do that. Just to be corny, “Be the change.” So you build the web that you want to see out there. And we’re doing that here at Changelog. Look at Changelog News, our main publication. It’s entirely a thing that links to other people’s stuff. Like, that’s entirely what it is.

Adam Stacoviak: There really isn’t. You can’t time that stuff. It’s like the market. You can’t time the entrance into a stock.

Autumn Nash: But they’re not buying it. Look at what you just said. The stock –

Quincy Larson: So because growth is so intrinsic to for-profit enterprises, it’s just – it’s not built for sustainability. Charities are by definition just built to sustain themselves. So if you want to go long, if you want to exist, multi-generational starships getting to Kepler or wherever, you need to have a charity type structure, or you need to have a family business that’s passed down generation to generation, where no single generation screws up, or sells it to private equity, or something like that.

So I know this is about open source, this podcast, but I will talk about sustainability, because I genuinely believe that if you are listening to this and you want to create an organization that is going to sustain itself long term, you should probably do a family type business, or you should probably do a charity, where there’s no ownership, and everybody’s just invested in the mission, and sustaining it. A charity can’t – I can’t sell freeCodeCamp to some giant education corporation. Only a charity can acquire a charity, and there’s no incentive for me. I don’t own any stock in freeCodeCamp. I could just give it to better owners. But when would I trust somebody to run it better than I trust myself or somebody else on my team, right?

Johnny Boursiquot: And the other people that are more action-oriented. So all that, there’s this aspect of the founder, sort of, or an individual sort of going founder mode, basically saying “Hey, boots to the ground. Let’s do this. Remove the layers, remove the fluff. Be action-oriented and sort of do things.” At least that’s what I took away from the whole thing. It’s like basically saying “Do whatever it takes to move the mission forward, move the product forward, whatever it is that you’re working on, move that forward.” And sort of know exactly what kind of management you want around you, if at all, that kind of thing.

Again, he was speaking to startups and scale-ups, companies that are not sort of huge, massive sort of empires… Because those companies, once you get that big, there’s naturally going to be multiple layers of management. I don’t know if you can even avoid that. That’s just what happens, the more people you have in an organization. But if you are a startup or a scale-up, perhaps sort of push back against that tide of all those layers, because you’re going to be more effective, and you’re going to be delivering stuff.

[25:49] So to me, I’m like “Okay, if I’m just a cog in a machine, I’m just low on the totem pole…” I’m not a founder. The founder’s saying “Hey, let’s push, let’s go. Let’s get in there and deliver things. Let’s work on things.” That passion, that energy. If I’m just getting a paycheck every couple of weeks from you, I’m putting in my 40 hours or whatever… Should I care? Because it’s your company. Unless I’m getting some equity or stock or something from doing more than you’re paying me for. Like, how should I view founder mode? If I’m a software engineer writing Go code, how should I – and you come at me with “Founder mode.” Should I care? Is it relevant to me?

The way I understood this is like, okay, I understand the spirit of the essay, but how do I make it applicable? How do I take the good parts, so to speak, and make them applicable to what I do on a day to day basis, if I’m not a founder? And that’s what our discussion focused on.

John Nunemaker: …to bring it home. Who do I want – I wanna help them get to a bigger lily pad, or whatever. I think it’s cool. Who do I want to spend time with? I’m going to work. I love the process. I’m not just going to like stop. I love building software. So I’m like “Who do I want to do it with, and how do I find things that can pay for them, so they can do it, and it makes it worthwhile for both of us?” And I think that’s – even the Fireside deal, that’s kind of what happened. It’s worth it for Chris, it’s worth it for Garrett, it’s worth it for me, it’s worth it for Steve, it was worth it for Dan… Everybody kind of wins.

And I think there’s more out there like that, too. It’s just a matter of like letting the dust settle on this one, and then we’ll see from there. But at least if I talk about it, then people will hear it, and then if it happens to them, they’ll think of me. And maybe it will be something that like “Okay, yeah, that’s a Rails app. It’s very stock and standard. It’s making good money. You’re tired of it.” Or maybe I like you, and you’re doing this, and why don’t you just merge our merry band of SaaS artisans, or whatever? So yeah, I just think there’s some cool stuff out there for that.

Break: [01:12:45.16]

Abi Noda: Those are the dimensions. Those are the categories. Think of them as your stocks, bonds, cash… To use the stock portfolio analogy. You need that balance. Because if you only measure speed, and everything else goes to crap, you’re not doing it correctly.

David Beale: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, what’s wild is how much COBOL is out there. It’s still everywhere. Anything you do, with a Visa or MasterCard, anything you do on the stock market, a lot of healthcare… Everything flight-related is still on AS400 at its core.

Johnny Boursiquot: At the very least – listen, if AI takes your job, at least have some NVIDIA stock, okay? You can get some solace out of the fact that “Well, I’ll get it down the road. I’ll get it back down the road.” You know what I mean? When you get some dividends, or something. But yeah, as usual, thank you, Sharon, Kent, Steve, for coming on the show and talking about the current hype. I think this might have to be a segment. Today’s it’s the AI hype. But we’ve seen a few hype cycles before, so maybe what we do is, as the new hypes come along…