miniblog.

When someone says "you should use the cloud", I'm never sure if they mean: 1: use a virtual server rather than running your own hardware, or 2: use hosted services rather than running your own e.g. database 2 is often surprisingly expensive IME.

The Rise of the Stupid Network: a remarkable 1997 essay on what ISPs as dumb bit pipes enables, moving innovation to client devices on the internet, and avoiding the scarcity mindset from when hardware was expensive: https://www.hyperorg.com/misc/stupidnet.html

Would it make sense for compilers to have a gas model for optimisations? It would enable speculative execution of transforms that are sometimes expensive.