Mikeal Rogers: This also happens to your currency in your pocket. There’s inflation, there’s currency exchanges, and how valuable your currency is when compared to other currencies… I’ve run into this a lot, because I have a stack of money from other countries, so that when I land in those countries, I can spend it… And this has not been a very good last five years to be holding currency not in dollars, so that kind of sucked.

Anyway, so for blockchains there’s this whole side of things that’s like currency speculation, and it’s a lot of ostensibly gambling, like fun gambling, a lot of money flowing into it, and gambling on these exponential increases in the value of these digital coins. But the underlying technology can solve a lot of problems outside of just currency exchange, and outside of just things that we need a currency to do.

There’s an element of transparency and provability without a centralized owner that is really important for a bunch of use cases. What Brave is going after with this basic attention token is essentially the ad market. If you’ve ever read a bunch about the advertising market, especially online, there’s a huge amount of fraud, a huge amount of fake clicks… There’s everything from click farms to people just generating crazy wild numbers for what has and has not happened on different services and what not.
If you wanna try to solve that, you need something that is provable and has a lot of these elements of transparency and provability baked in… So what they’re looking at is this basic attention token. This is a provable way to show that you spent some attention on something. That could be used to prove that you saw an advertisement or saw some content… Or what they’re probably betting on a little bit more than that is you can prove that people spend time on a site, and then you can inject capital and money into where you spend your attention, and that can be doled out as micropayments to those sites.

[12:19] If you’ve used the Brave browser, they already have this feature baked in where you can do these micropayments. You can say “Look, I don’t wanna deal with advertisements on website, I hate all that kind of stuff, but I do wanna support content creators, so I’m gonna pour $20/month into wherever I spend my time.” What happens is that Brave tracks that in a way that is anonymized and protects your privacy, but it also allows them to dole out some of that to all these different places where you’re spending your time.

Amal Hussein: But no, it’s basically a platform for – everyone says “It’s a platform for anything”, but it really is. But the area that we’re focused on right now is digital engineering. which is this concept of, if I had to kind of explain it like you’re five, it’s how folks working in aerospace and mechanical engineering people building things for the physical world, all the tools that they use, how those things can connect. So how do you actually connect highly secure, classified, IP-sensitive technical data? How do you connect all those threads together while being able to share, collaborate, have audit trails, and also protect your IP and protect the data?

So we have a zero knowledge, zero trust multi-tenancy platform, that has a control plane and a data plane that allows users to integrate all of their third-party tools, and all the things that they use to do their regular jobs, and like pull data from those things and connect them. We almost have an IDE-like experience, where you can make a digital thread, is what it’s called… And actually, one of the founders of the company was the person who actually coined the whole term digital engineering and digital threads.

Zac Smith: That’s why I wouldn’t build a data center right now. It’s because where’s my time and energy best spent, when I can think outside the box a little bit? Move about the cabin, as my brother likes to say… Which has been super-useful, because I’m not stuck within an existing organization that has to answer to its shareholders this quarter, and do this and that, but I still have touchpoints and trust within it.

So areas that I’ve been focused on there - and I totally agree with you, Adam, that we can take these areas… I’ve always believed building businesses was about building a bigger tent. It’s like, how do you create more opportunity that’s good for society? It’s not just about how do you create something that’s valuable. How do you create opportunity that people can – I mean, the biggest joy I’ve had out of building several companies has not been the money I’ve made, although that hasn’t hurt… It’s been that a thousand people said “Wow, I got to have careers that started here.” Or “I grew up my family because I worked at this company.” That is awesome to me.

So I like the bigger tent policy of creation. But where I was referring to earlier, related to aligning civic infrastructure, like energy, with the awesome capitalistic movement… If you can harness that stallion called hundreds of billions of dollars going into digital infrastructure right now and use it towards the right thing - well, shoot. That’s amazing. That can benefit society in way bigger ways than “I’ve got ChatGPT or the AI can answer my thingamajiggers or target my ads better.” It can say “Wow, that helped decarbonize a whole bunch of our grid.”

Or on the water side, I’m invested in a hydrogen-based data center business, which I believe to be a foundation. I just got back from the Atacama Desert in Chile, which has this project, too. It has the highest solar radiation percentage annually of any place on Earth. Why? Because it’s so high, it’s so dry, and it’s so sunny. And it’s only a couple hundred miles from the Pacific Ocean. They have this plan to create basically the Saudi Arabia of hydrogen there, with this huge amount of energy they can produce that they can turn into a portable fuel. That when you burn hydrogen, what do you create? Water.

[01:28:13.01] And it’s pretty amazing. We built a test – not we, but Yuval on the ECL team built a test site over in Mountain View. They have a one-megawatt hydrogen-based data center. It produces hundreds of gallons a day of water. That’s the byproduct. Versus a normal data center, which uses thousands of gallons of water a day through evaporative cooling. Sometimes millions.

I think there is really an opportunity to take existing technology, whether those are like battery storage technologies, for example I’ve been exploring a heat-based, like a thermal long storage solution… These are awesome opportunities. Your data centers create heat, and also use a bunch of energy… But they can store energy, which is really important. So I think that there’s some ways that we can start thinking, and my challenge is how to activate that, between the - let’s call it sub-50 people who build and operate all the data centers in the world, the capital that flows around it, and some of these weird innovation things that are so hard for that group to see, because it’s not part of their big-scaled organization and how they’ve always done it. There’s almost… What was the thing? I was discussing - somebody who was building a new data center in a far-off place, and I was like “Why are you building it with all these standard rows, and no storage space? You realize nobody’s ever going to go there.” It’s in South Africa. It’s like 16 hours on a plane ride from Paris. Nobody’s going to the data center. Why are you not building it for robots, and five lights-out people who are going to rack and stack everything? And they’re like “Well, we always build it this way. Why would we change that? We’ve built hundreds of data centers like this. Why would we change the design just for South Africa?”

And I think [unintelligible 01:30:06.09] represents where I’m most interested intersecting, is could I take some of my relationships and experience and gather some of these new, potential opportunities and help normalize them? So that way we can build a hundred new hydrogen-based data centers. I know Yuval’s building a gigawatt facility in Texas. He’s going to produce a lot of water. The challenge is right now he’s going to use kind of gray and blue hydrogen. But he’ll probably be the largest customer for some of the new hydrogen plants coming out of the solar and wind energy in Texas, which is awesome. The oil and gas industry in Texas can start to produce hydrogen from all the excess renewables that sit in the Western Texas side, and that’s awesome, because there’s going to be a demand driver called a big-ass data center who says “Give me your hydrogen and I’ll pay you for it.” Versus like a government subsidy or some sort of other thing that would take a long time.

So yeah, that’s where I’m kind of swimming. I’m happy to help, really anxious to be able to make a positive impact there, and I think that this moment right now that we’re going through with a lot of change and opportunity in the digital infrastructure space represents a unique spot. So… Blessed to be sitting here, able to do some of that.

Adam Stacoviak: Chicago. We’ve got 30 more bucks to spend because of Digital Ocean going away, so we’re coming there on fire with some money to spend.

Chris Benson: Well, I was doing lots of software for years, but actually, even that would be the same thing, in that I learned how to do software fairly early in my career, and my degree is actually in finance. So it has nothing to do directly with any of these things that we have been talking about, whether it be software, or deep learning, or the things that come next.

So I think the beauty of a book like this, as I’m looking through the web page about it, is that this is really the core about how people build careers now. If you are thinking about how to get there, you have to build in constant, life-long learning into your process, and if you don’t do that, you will fall behind. And I meet people all the time that are doing both. I meet people that are constantly learning – I know you and I are definitely two examples of that. I have some other good friends, good colleagues that are constantly learning as things are moving forward, and figuring out where and how they’re going to dig into those ideas incrementally as they go… And then you see people that don’t do that, and they do fall behind.

And as things are moving faster and faster forward, the ability to thrive in a digital world, going back to the book’s subtitle, is really crucial to having it. Because anything you’re learning right now in more of a formal context, if you’re coming out of school for instance, a lot of that will be obsolete. The basic math will be there, but the algorithms are gonna change, how you’re achieving problem solutions will change, and so you really have to be able to do that. I think that is a fundamental for being a digitally literate person in the job world these days.

Gergely Orosz: Well, and [unintelligible 00:03:56.19] second-guessing, and I think this is a little bit hard to explain, and here’s why. Around, let’s say - I wasn’t there, but I read the story of what happened when the compiler first came out. Before the compiler, people would just write their machine-generated code, often onto a card, and they would feed it into this big mainframe… And it was a lot of work, and that mainframe was very expensive, so there was time sharing, and developer time was very valuable. The compiler just sped that up; it was a 10x improvement, literally. And what you would have expected is “Well, you need fewer developers”, right? Like, one developer can do 10 times as many. But curious enough, the number of developers has exploded since then, because there was more… And then after the compiler, we still had lower-level languages; we had these higher-level languages come off, like let’s say we had C, and then we had obviously C++… But C# or Java, which are more productive line, which is arguably – which, again, it would have meant that you need fewer developers, and it just kept exploding. So again, with AI - of course it’s gonna make us more productive. I’m not saying this is even 10 times as productive, but it will be easily 20%, 30%, 50%, who knows, depending on who we’re talking to. And the logical thing would be we can do more with fewer developers. Like, we would need fewer developers. But again, looking back at the past, what always happened is we just had more developers, because now what happened every single time is a lot of businesses that couldn’t afford developers or development had this.

A good example is website builders. Back in the ‘90s, you all remember, you had to hire a webmaster to build a web page, and they had to maintain it, and it was expensive, and so the bigger companies all had their webmasters, but small businesses didn’t have it. Fast-forward to today, you can just click and put together a website, but there’s strangely not less demand for people building or tweaking websites, other specialists who are tweaking WordPress etc.

[00:05:48.17] So my sense is that as long as technology is still spreading across the world, we will still see a demand rise. And technology is still not everywhere, and I’m kind of thinking that we might see a little bit different – until now, it’s kind of gone into big tech, and these amazing positions where which pay very well and generate a lot of value… But here I am, sitting, frustrated with my utility company, for example; how just awkward it is to pay. Or public transport - again, technology is there, but it’s not particularly good. So I wonder what might happen if we see a lot of technology and technologists, and good software engineers end up at these places as well. Maybe work conditions improve, compensation improves, and our kind of quality of life improves. Because I’ll be honest, my quality of life is not really driven by Facebook or Netflix, it’s kind of driven by the more mundane thing; how easy it is to reach the local council. I can now do this online.

And so I wonder if that part of like these businesses that are still not really digital - are we going to see in the next 10 years a boom there of software, maybe AI-assisted, going there, and obviously, software engineers building that? So I’m kind of optimistic that that’s going to happen. AI makes everyone more productive.

For example, small businesses until now, building an app - how much did it cost? $20,000, $50,000, $100,000 to build a custom app. It was not affordable for a lot of small businesses. My trainer at the gym was telling me he really wants to build this app, he’s got this dream of doing it, but he cannot afford it. All these people might be able to do it through, again, a little bit what happened with websites becoming point and click, it might happen with all sorts of apps.

So I think it’ll be super-interesting, exciting. There will be demand increasing in a lot of these areas… I don’t know about the rest, but so far, I’m not seeing [unintelligible 00:07:35.01]

However, one thing I will say - this is the first time I’m seeing software engineers becoming worried about our jobs. Until now, let’s just be honest, what we did is we kind of automated other people’s jobs, right? Like customer support - at every single company customer support teams have been going down in headcount as software engineers. Not me, but I saw teams at Uber were building more and more efficient ways to do it, adding machine learning, adding helpful tools so one human could serve more people. And we were very proud of this, and it was cost-saving. And now it’s the first time where software engineers are asking “Am I going to automate myself out of a job?” And I hope the answer is no, but we’ve never asked this question before. So I think this is a big, big change.

Nayana Shetty: Yes. I think over the years I’ve been in teams where we’ve built microservices, and when you scale up and have hundreds of microservices, how do you then make them reliable and keep them reliable? That’s what I’m interested in.

I was working at the Financial Times, where we had all of these hundreds of microservices, and how do we manage it there. And now I’ve moved to the Lego Group, where we’re going through massive digital transformation. And here it’s like we want to build these hundreds of microservices, so should we care about reliability now, or can we think about it in ten years’ time, when we have these microservices? So yeah, that is my context to how site reliability, microservices, all of these work together.

Jeff Meyerson: Yeah, the reason I came here was to be closer to the things that were really emergent and at the tip of the spear. As you guys know, the world is changing in a way where now there’s interesting stuff going on everywhere, and technology is infused with whatever local set of concerns there are. In Houston, for example, Adam - I’m sure you could go out and find oil companies and banking industries who are going through a “digital transformation”, and there’s plenty of interesting software stuff going on there… And you could ask them to point you to their new vendors and they would have probably a wide suite of new vendors and new technologies and new design patterns that they’re exploring right now because there’s so much going on in software.

What I like about San Francisco is there’s kind of a filter for people who come here, where it’s sort of hard to make it here. It’s expensive, it’s hard to elbow your way into the right conversations and figure out how things work here, but there is so much opportunity and the overall ethos of San Francisco is so welcoming, and there’s such a diverse lineage of arts and culture and technology and all these different things that for somebody like me who is really addicted to just stimulus of all kinds, I haven’t found any place that comes close to it.

Joshua Meier: Yeah. When you think about an antibody therapy, the antibody is targeting a specific antigen. So those are the antigen targets that we’re starting with in the beginning. And what we like to do is to generate an antibody that targets them. So that exactly parallels the inputs and outputs of our machine learning model. The input is going to be an antigen, so some receptor on the cell that we’re trying to hit, and the output is an antibody.

Going back to that digital twin example, you can almost think of that model as an AI model of the immune system. So that’s naturally what a body is going to do. It sees some infection, it’s trying to create some antibodies. And what we’re trying to do here is create a much better version of that, so to come up with a single antibody drug, that can really hit that with the potency that you need. So that’s what you can think of for that first de novo discovery. It’s like that artificial immune system that’s creating a new drug.

Drew Marshall: So that was telling me that your upstream was struggling with the amounts of bandwidth that it was demanding. So when BT, when Openreach decided that they were going to invent ADSL (asymmetric digital subscriber line), it’s bigger down that it is up. It was designed always for downloading stuff.

Jack Shanahan: Yeah. Thanks, Chris, and thanks, Daniel, for allowing me this time with both of you today. And it’s a big thought, and it’s something I’ve been thinking a lot about… And when I retired, I went back and got another master’s degree thanks to the GI Bill… And I did get a chance to think big thoughts about technology over the course of human history. I mean, really, back to the very beginning I took some courses about looking at what we would call - maybe not technology today, but it was back then; [unintelligible 00:49:07.11] and how it just sort of diffused globally. What I say in my testimony, I do believe in my core that we are going to be in the middle of, at some point, a third revolution. Sort of agrarian revolution, industrial revolution… This is different. It’s not the Fourth Industrial Revolution, it’s some kind of digital revolution. We don’t know what it’s going to look like, because we just haven’t been there yet. I say in my testimony, “The future is, to a large extent, both unknowable and unpredictable.” Why? Because it’s not determinism, and it’s not technological determinism. It will be dependent upon the decisions by many, many, many, many thousands of people, from leaders to citizens of countries deciding they like or don’t like the technology. It’s going to take maybe 50 years to 100 years to play out, and historians will be the ones that look back and define when this revolution began. But to me, it is fundamentally different, which means warfare will be different. The character of warfare is going to change. I will not say the nature of war is changing, because the nature of war is a human-centered decision. Like why we fight, and why one country fights another country, and so on. So I don’t believe the nature of war. But that character of warfare is going to change dramatically, as we’re seeing in Ukraine, and we have a chance to be on the right side of that, as I say in my testimony, asymmetry equation. If we’re on the wrong side of it, we risk losing. And we’re not used to losing… And this is a very serious risk. So this idea of it’s playing out as we speak; get involved in it. Don’t wait for it to catch up. You’ve just sort of got to dive in and start working these big projects in the government, wherever you are, or anywhere else in the industry.

Adam Barr: I would recommend that ACM and IEEE Computer Society - which are sort of similar, and they both put on conferences, and they’re both useful… ACM has this awesome digital library, they’ve got all their publications going back 50+ years online. All the OOPSLA stuff… OOPSA is the ACM object-oriented conference. If you wanna read the original Scrum paper or the original Law of Demeter paper, or whatever… You can read Edsger Dijkstra complaining about this, that and the other… So there’s a lot of good stuff, if you just want some historical background… Probably half the references in my book are just some obscure ACM paper that you have to – I think you need a membership to read. Although your company may have a membership; if you’re at a university, as you said, you can probably get a free membership.

I think ACM and IEEE Computer Society are very valuable things to join. Though my brother is a civil engineer, so he belongs to ACSE, the equivalent to the American Society of Civil Engineers, and it’s kind of unquestioned, that of course a civil engineer would at least belong to that, and get their publications, have access to their library… And the fact that most programmers don’t know about them, and certainly don’t belong to them, is just kind of a strange thing in software. We’re professional engineers working in industry, why would we not be involved with the two big professional associations in our industry?

Joran Dirk Greef: It did, yeah. That was great, you know? And there’s national projects, three different countries, whether it’s for the whole national transportation system, or the central bank digital currency, or another central bank exchange… TigerBeetle is going into the current production version of that gate switch now, as we speak. But I think, just to go back, Jerod, to the DST - it’s a lot like formal methods. The difference is that formal methods check the design of a protocol, so that you know that the protocol could possibly work. It’s formally proven that it could work. But for me, always the challenge was, “Well, how do I know that I’ve just –” Because I’m not a – I always feel like I’m getting slower every day. How do I know that I coded this correctly? I know the protocol’s correct.

David Heinemeier Hansson: [00:49:38.25] A little bit, right? So I think it is all quite fluid. And also, fundamentally, I’m fine with that fluidity. I don’t care. I just want you to have a path, a roadmap, a tool to get from A to B to C to D to E without it feeling like there are hard lines and hard walls. I want you to be able to start on a VPS, or a VM, or a dedicated box, and move every which way around them.

In the Kamal config, for example, that we ship with new Rails 8 installations - Kamal is the deployment tool that we’ve made default - it should be as simple as changing the IP deployment addresses. And that IP can point to the VM, it can point to the VPS, it can point to the dedicated box, it can point to your own hardware, and Kamal won’t care. It’ll be the same.

Now, part of the pitch for Kubernetes, for example, was that that was going to be true sort of at a broad scale, and [unintelligible 00:50:29.05] was not true at all. I’ve never, ever seen a Kubernetes installation of any sophistication being able to just, “Oh, we’re on Amazon? Flip the switch, George. Ket’s move over to GCP.” “What?! No.” That’s like “Flip the switch, George. We’ll start having the meetings about the meetings about how we can move out four years from now.” That’s what the Kubernetes migration path often is. And I was just like “Yeah, there’s got to be a better way for that”, at least for some style of application.

Now, again, I actually think Kubernetes is an amazing piece of open source infrastructure, and if you have it in your heart that you want to start the next AWS, or the next GCP, or the next even Digital Ocean, you should probably look into Kubernetes. You’re going to be operating at that scale, and you’re going to have hundreds of engineers, and it’s going to be very complicated. Great. Kubernetes sounds wonderful for you.

I’ve looked at Kubernetes enough. We ran Kubernetes on AWS for long enough that I realized that is not what I want to do with my time. And it is not proportionate to the kind of problems that we have. Something far simpler is possible. And if that simplicity is achieved, we also get portability. And I think portability is actually less of a thing at super-high scale. It’s not that common that huge applications and businesses move from one provider to another. Where I want to make sure that the portability is present is in the early days. Is that you start your startup, and maybe you start it on Heroku, whatever, or something else like that, and you could just move on. You don’t get locked in. You don’t get locked into a cost basis that’s prohibitive.

Guy Martin: Yeah. So it’s what we call a full-fidelity visualization; you can look at a scene from any angle, you can actually run through a set of scenarios and see what’s changed… And the interesting thing is that you look at something like what Pixar needs it for, right? Again, they sometimes need unrealistic physical things to happen, but they don’t have this concept of – an example is you have an object and you want to throw LIDAR at it, and see what the physical reaction is to that. It’s not something that Pixar needs to do for visual effects. But the rest of the industry, that’s looking at full fidelity digital twins - you need to have a digital twin act in the virtual world as it’s going to act in real life.

Jerod Santo: Right. Maybe downsized is a better term. So maybe two people can do the job of ten, because they have so much aid. And so less of us are required. But I think there’s always gonna be more software needs as it continues to eat the world… And so there’ll be more people required. Yeah, I mostly just speak tongue-in-cheek a little bit about being completely replaced… But, I mean, look at a lot of artists out there. I mean, at this point they were like “We’re the creatives. We’re gonna be the last ones to be replaced.” And man, Stable Diffusion and Midjourney and these things - they’re getting pretty good. They’re still going to be times where you need to have a digital artist draft something from scratch, but for a lot of use cases, I guess they’re already kind of commoditized.

Adam Stacoviak: Yeah. I really feel like the clincher for me is the transcription, because if you’re a product team trying to use Rewatch and you’re trying to catch up – I was just thinking, if you’re rewatching this video from your team, it’s like, well, you can almost say the next time you have a meeting, “Oh, I saw you at that one thing, leading that class.” It’s still like the office, so to speak, in quotes “the office”, without having the actual building be the office.

The office essentially is the comings and goings of those who are involved in the company, and where they connect. And in a lot of cases these days it’s a digital connection, especially when it comes to… You know, technical companies can tend to have a lot of remote opportunities, more so than say like rocket science. They tend to have to be near the rockets. Sure, they’re theorizing and stuff like that, but at some point, you have to test it, and you generally put that thing into real-world production, or something like that. That’s one example. Or if you’re building a car, you can’t build a car from your home; it’s pretty challenging to build a Tesla from home, for example.

Joe Percoco: It’s critical. Across any business, like in the history of humanity, one of the most important things you need to get right is distribution. It’s sort of like, who cares if you produced the best product in the world, if you cooked the best apple pie? It doesn’t matter. Sort of like if the tree falls in the forest and no one’s around, did it make a sound? Same thing as a business. If you build a good product and you don’t have distribution, do you even have business?

[12:06] So I pay very, very close attention to where audiences are en masse, because that is what’s called distribution. Those are the – what was the town square, what was the OG amphitheater where people came together and discovered services, discovered ideas, debated things, dialogued, that has just shifted online.

So one needs to pay close attention to where are these digital counting squares forming, because those are the best ways to enter dialogue about the products and services you have to offer. A lot of brands are now going beyond just, “Let me pay a TikTok influencer to shout about my brand. How do I build an authentic connection in this digital Town Square in a way where it cuts through the noise and say, “Hey, TikTok community, this isn’t just another ad for you to scroll through. This is an authentic product that could add meaning to your life that’s worth paying for. Click to discover more about it.”

Madhurima Khandelwal: [20:23] Yeah, absolutely. I think when it comes to fraud, the number one problem that we are faced with, even in the space of online fraud, is really our ability to detect fraud in real time basis. What that means is that when a transaction is actually taking place, can we make a decision whether or not that transaction is fraudulent.

If you think about American Express transactions, we have more than $1.2 trillion transactions annually, and we would like to create this decision in almost milliseconds, when the transaction is taking place. And that is where the need for really building machine learning models that can be deployed in real-time becomes the number one ask, so that we’re able to service our customers.

So while the fraud definition or the data has remained 1/0, it has magnified basis the number of transactions that exist globally, but at the same time with digital coming into play, you have online transactions happening; it becomes difficult for you to detect fraud, because it’s often not happening at the physical address of the resident… So a variety of, I would say, identifiers which feed into our models to be able to detect that.

But what is more critical is our ability to really run this algorithm in real-time, which is where a lot of the engineering, a lot of the architecture is coming into play to deploy these models.

Adam Stacoviak: Yeah, a friend of mine said “I’m talking to a lot of people these days via the phone.” That whole social connecting - he finds himself talking to friends more on the phone that generally with Instagram, or text, or some sort of digital connection… And a physical phone call to people, maybe in this way, like putting a line out to your friend group, “Hey, if you’re going out, we’re low on water. Pick us up some if you can and then drop it off at the front door.”

Adam Stacoviak: Yeah, a friend of mine said “I’m talking to a lot of people these days via the phone.” That whole social connecting - he finds himself talking to friends more on the phone that generally with Instagram, or text, or some sort of digital connection… And a physical phone call to people, maybe in this way, like putting a line out to your friend group, “Hey, if you’re going out, we’re low on water. Pick us up some if you can and then drop it off at the front door.”

Adam Stacoviak: Well, just… Maybe the easiest way to say it is like “drop it like a bad habit.” [laughter] That’s something I say for funnies, but I think that, like, “Could you drop me like a bad habit because we have a digital connection, versus a face to face or live connection?” That’s my varying degree of disagreement. I’m still thinking about that one.

Shawn Wang: So a lot of AI discussions tend to devolve into existential risks and AGI discussions… And part of my goal of defining AI engineering is to create a space where those discussions are the side discussions, and not the main thing. Because we’re all here to engineer, we’re all here to build for today’s problems, with today’s capabilities… And I think that’s a lot of how I think about my impact in this field, which is how to guide people in a more positive direction that basically nobody’s against. A lot of Dev Rel is “The future is here, it’s not evenly distributed”, but a lot of engineering here, and especially in AI, is “The future is here, but it’s not evenly distributed. And how do we distribute it best to everyone else?”

I come from Singapore. One of the my favorite stories to tell is that the Singapore government is embracing AI really well for their older folks; the people who don’t speak English, the people who are disabled, the people who need the natural language interfaces to the many, many digital forms that are coming up in our lives… And applying this AI technology to that civil service I think is like the best form of how we do AI engineering.

[01:14:04.24] So yeah, I mean, we don’t have to go to the freshman dorm room conversation of “Are we bootstrapping a life form?” That’s fun to discuss; happy to engage with that. But why I try to keep it to an engineering conversation is to let people have a way to ground their conversation in “What can we do today?”

Adam Stacoviak: [00:52:24.14] I think you’re right. I think in a lot of applications, which you’re on the edge of like… And what I think will happen is - it’s already happening - you have a lot of entrepreneurs who have a vision or a big idea or a direction, and they don’t necessarily need to camp out and “Let me learn how to build the best XYZ in Figma specifically.” It’s more like “What does my user need communicated to?” So that might be A/B testing landing pages, that might be A/B testing, or even just iterating on the design of, and the editing, as you said, of a homepage. What really captivates the essence of our brand, and what we offer, and what we aim to offer?

Sometimes you call that working on the business, versus in the business, and that reminds me of that. It’s “Do I want to be working on the business, which is vision, systems, people, direction, product, customer, analysts, analysis, capital raising? Or do I want to work in the business, which is moving this from here to there, literally hammering if it’s a physical thing, or literally coding it if it’s a digital thing?” And obviously, we’re talking about digital here… But I feel like this is like this era where that line begins to blend, because you’ve got a lot more possibility for the non – I don’t want to say non-talented necessarily, but someone who doesn’t really need to gain the talents in a particular area just to achieve their outcome. You know what I mean? And that might seem like a shortcut, but it’s sort of this weird world we’re in where that’s more real than it has ever been before, or more possible.

Nick Sweeting: Yeah, I think they broadly agree with not depriving publishers of content ownership. That’s not really the issue they’re fighting. They’re more fighting that the publishers crossed a line by forcing licensing as the only option for content access. And that that was not where the line was before. That they moved it, and this was their way of fighting back. And that there’s broadly been a sort of Overton window shift of what is acceptable content release policy in the first place. And the publishers have successfully moved that to licensing only, and you can no longer own anything. And that’s what they were fighting.

[12:08] So yes, they did cross some lines with the controlled digital lending, where they were not counting how many copies they lent out… And I think that they expected to get sued for that. I think that they wanted to take a fairly strong stance there by saying that the way that the publishers are releasing the content in the first place is unacceptable.

Rooweither Mabuya: Thank you so much. I’d also just like to maybe just promote also the organization we’re coming from, the South-African Center for Digital Language Resources. Any researchers that are working in any of the South-African languages, they can check us out at sadilar.org.

A parting word that I can say in my language is [32:26] which means “Thank you so much for listening to me.”

Chris Benson: I’ve got a quick follow-up question, because one of the things that you said along the way - you raised it and I didn’t wanna interrupt you, because what you were saying was fascinating… But I’m gonna go back for a second. When you were talking about that data representation - and this may be too abstract to easily describe, but I’m kind of curious… Obviously, the numbers are representing things - you’ve talked about a hundred numbers, or whatever it is… Is that a proprietary model? Is that something that is an industry standard that already existed? In my head, I’m thinking about the way I tie visual to RGB when I’m programming and when I’m dealing with devices… So I’m trying to find some sort of analogy, aside from just going into the model, how might I conceive of the representation that you have and tie that to what I’m smelling. I’m trying to make a connection between the real world and that digital representation of it that would make sense to me.

Andy Walker: I’ve gotta be honest, I’m there with you. I desperately want to be able to be a good digital note-taker. What’s that really popular one that’s kind of coming down now, that new kind of Evernote thing? It seems like every other month –

Derek Collison: The way NATS 2.0 came about was I tried to think through the notion of “Is there an opportunity to create a company where NATS might play a role?” Prior 2.0, NATS was rock-solid, performant… Again, it was like a lot of distributed systems today - you couldn’t stretch it. It liked to be close to its neighbor, have good throughput, good RTT and so on. And it wasn’t a company, by the way. A lot of startups aren’t companies, they’re just features of their systems.

So I really wanted to think hard about that problem, regardless of whether NATS was a fit. And what I came up with - and we’ll see if I’m right or wrong; probably wrong, but that’s okay - was the notion of the internet, that defining moment in ’94-‘95, and then in the early 2000’s with the realization of the global cellular network, and what those two platforms with hyper connectivity provided and it actually ended up, we haven’t had that event for digital system services or devices. We pick a different technology, and even if we use the same technology and the same company, it’s siloed up Yin Yang, you’ve got 40,000 RabbitMQ servers running, or whatever that is… So I said “What if we try to create the first secure digital dial tone for digital systems services and devices?” That all they do is connect, and it’s kind of like connecting to the cell tower; you’re not even aware of it. It just kind of works, and it’s all in the background. But we have the ability to connect anything that’s out there.

So that’s where we started, and NATS was not up for that. It needed three major things that we identified right up the get-go, and then the fourth one there we just talked about, about that hub-and-spoke extending utility SaaS and private owner mix. But the first three were pretty simple. The security model had to really be forward-looking, and there’s lots of fun, interesting math, and all kinds of cool stuff underneath the covers, but the easy version is the system should never have private keys or passwords, period. It’s really simple. So if someone routes all of our net server devices and steals them all, they don’t have anything. So we did that.

[44:08] The second was multi-tenancy, which we talked about. That was a big one. Multi-tenancy is not something you can slap on top. By the way, security isn’t either, but most people slap both of them on at the end. It just doesn’t work. So multi-tenancy goes all the way down to the root of the codebase, and start from the ground up.

And then the last one was global topology, so the ability to have a network topology span lossy systems, very high RTT, low signal to noise ratio types of things. You can’t use the same topology to talk between servers that you expect to be really close and buddy-buddy with, as to one all the way in China, let’s say. So those three main things had to be done.

Now, what’s nice is that as you get older, you remember lots of stuff, meaning we knew we could never break anyone that was using NATS before 2.0. So it’s totally backward-compatible. Any config that works with NATS 1.0 will work with NATS 2.0. Everything works. Which was hard, but we thought it was important. But the major version was the signal; this is something different. This is not a message broker, a queue. It is a ubiquitous routing and framing technology that can run anywhere, and can do any type of pattern, but the major ones are services and streams.