This doesn't scale, though. It can work if you're a superpower or a bloc, but most countries don't have enough resources to each run their own cloud, mines, energy production, and food production.

> We’re building Helix, an AI platform where autonomous coding agents work in cloud sandboxes. Users need to watch their AI assistants work. Think “screen share, but the thing being shared is a robot writing code.”

This feels like a fast dead end. Agents will get much faster pretty quickly, so synchronous human supervision isn't going to scale. I'd focus on systems that make high-signal asks of humans asynchronously.

> What if we only send keyframes?

I think the author reached this conclusion, but individual jpegs is essentially only keyframes.

> We don’t spam HTTP requests for individual frames like it’s 2009.

Uncompressed frames are huge, somewhere between 5 MB and 50 MB. The overhead of a request is negligible. It's also different when you're optimizing for latency and reliability where dropped frames is OK. Really, the lesson is they should have tried the easy thing first to see how good it was.

There's also the issue that you're making apples-to-pears comparison if Ryanair shows up in results. While Air France and British Airways have largely equivalent products, Ryanair's is...different.

I think that works out to 0.01%? There's some hand-waving around solar radiation in the atmosphere vs. on the surface and double counting some that goes to solar power, but the number looks smaller than the variation in solar output over the solar cycle.

I think they build the demo with pirated music, but it was licensed by the time customers started paying for it.

Correct, the pirated music library was before they exited the closed Alpha.

No, that's what they ran on when the general public could join on a referral basis. They called that "beta".

The technology was already proven, i.e. The Pirate Bay and other torrent networks had already been a success for years. What Spotify likely aimed to show was that they could grow very fast and that their growth was too good to just shut down, like the entertainment industry tried to do with TPB.

After they took in the entertainment oligarchs they cut out the warez and substituted with licensed material.

Not sure if it was called "beta" or "alpha" and "closed" is of course up to interpretation, but it was indeed by invitation. Swedish law at the time (still?) had a clause about permitting sharing copyrighted material within a limited circle, which I know Spotify engineers referred to as somewhat legitimising it. I also know for a fact that once the invite-only stage ended there was a major purge of content and I lost about half of my playlist content, which was the end of me having music "in the cloud". Still, this is nearly twenty years ago, so my memory could be foggy.

When I first started using Spotify, a lot of the tracks in my playlists had titles like "Pearl Jam - Even Flow_128_mp3_encoded_by_SHiLlaZZ".

Always made me chuckle, it looked like they had copied half of their catalogue from the pirate bay. It took them a few years to clean that up.

Yes, when the entertainment industry came onboard they immediately made the service much worse. I reacted the same way you did.

IIRC, 2008, a little less than twenty years.

> The technology was already proven, i.e. The Pirate Bay and other torrent networks had already been a success for years.

Spotify showed that you could have a local-like experience with something backed by the cloud. BitTorrent had never really done that. The client wasn't that good, and you couldn't double click and hear a song in two seconds.

The way you said that made me think you might be remembering when it was partially P2P, but I don't remember the timeline, it was only used to save bandwidth costs, and they eventually dropped it because network operators didn't like it and CDNs became a thing.

If you don't remember, why speculate?

Ek had been the CEO of µTorrent and they hired a person who had done research on Torrent technology at KTH RIT to help with the implementation. It was a proven technology that required relatively small adaptations.

They moved away from this architecture after the entertainment industry got involved. Sure, it was a cost issue until this point, but it also turned into a telemetry issue afterwards.

In fairness, the cryptography backing key fobs is likely more computationally intensive.

> ESR

That's a name I haven't heard in a long time. I'd almost forgotten about the webcomic.

https://geekz.co.uk/lovesraymond/

In other news, the National Defense Authorization Act working its way through congress is trying to loosen restrictions around DCA that were put in place after a military helicopter collided with a passenger jet.

When Citizens United was a big deal, I was torn over the premise of the concern for election integrity. Ideally, voters would make rational, informed decisions. They'd see ads, but know they all have an agenda, so they'd do their own research and come to a conclusion. Worrying about biased or inaccurate noise influencing elections means you think people can't be trusted to vote. Which might be true, and if it is, it's a bigger problem than corporate speech and fake accounts.

Other western democracies go further than the U.S. with campaign restrictions, including restrictions to campaign financing. One might say they protect the functioning of their democracies more with these additional restrictions, protecting voters.

And one might ask why we don't want to protect ours more.

I'll swing wildly in the other direction with campaign financing and point out Bloomberg's run for president. He outspent everybody and won American Samoa. He wasn't unqualified, either. He was mayor of NYC.

Money matters on an s curve. The bigger the election the more you tend to spend, but it reaches a saturation point. This said in the average election this saturation point is a lot of money.

This is “why are we going to space when we haven’t cured cancer” reasoning.