[HN Gopher] The fifth epoch of distributed computing
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The fifth epoch of distributed computing
Author : simonpure
Score : 47 points
Date : 2024-02-16 12:39 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (cloud.google.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (cloud.google.com)
| superkuh wrote:
| It's not distributed if it's all owned by the same corporation.
| If anything distributed computing has gone backwards the last
| decade. This switch to centralization was mostly forced by people
| using low functionality dumb terminals (smart phones) that users
| don't control and that literally can't hold a TCP connection
| open.
| cmrx64 wrote:
| don't conflate decentralized with distributed
| toast0 wrote:
| > This switch to centralization was mostly forced by people
| using low functionality dumb terminals (smart phones) that
| users don't control and that literally can't hold a TCP
| connection open.
|
| Not being able to hold a TCP connection open is an
| implementation choice of the OS developer (and some choices at
| the network level too). At WhatsApp, we would find Nokia
| Symbian devices with 45 day old TCP connections to our servers
| anytime we looked. Nokia S40 isn't a smart phone platform, but
| it could hold long connections too. Old versions of Android
| could do it, although old versions of Android had trouble
| switching between wifi and cellular. You can probably do it on
| current Android if you turn off all the Doze or whatever stuff
| (which isn't always easy to turn off).
|
| There's an efficiency argument for having a single long TCP
| connection for platform push, rather than one per app that
| needs it, of course. But in that case, platform push better be
| reliable.
| swozey wrote:
| I think that the engineers who began their careers in the first
| epoch are going to turn out to be some of the most productive and
| technically skilled having gone through each epoch which,
| frankly, grew easier to deal with every time.
|
| They call that point out, basically, but I had no idea it'd be a
| 100x improvement.
|
| > While we cannot predict the breakthroughs that will be
| delivered in this fifth epoch of computing, we do know that each
| previous epoch has been characterized by a factor of 100x
| improvement in scale, efficiency, and cost-performance, all while
| improving security and reliability.
|
| I'm worried about 5th gen epoch engineers. On one side there is a
| massive amount of smart rust programmers who are super young in
| all the rust communities just as an example and on the other a
| lot of people who don't know anything beyond a gui operating
| system and have never owned a computer and do everything by
| phone.
|
| I've been happily teaching linux quite a bit lately.
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| I can imagine fifth epoch engineers only doing code review and
| prompt engineering or handling major incidence once the LLMs
| handle the code writing.
| ActionHank wrote:
| My son is the only one in his class that has a PC.
|
| There is going to be an astounding gap between those in the
| know and those who are not.
| dagw wrote:
| I've noticed the same. I'm convinced that the generation
| that is under 16 today will on average know a lot less
| about computers compared to 20 years ago.
| ActionHank wrote:
| Not my son, he's counting binary and hex, built his PC
| with me, ran network cables with me, is coding his own
| games for himself and his friends.
|
| Assuming some form of ubiquity for AI tooling people like
| him are going to build amazing things.
| geodel wrote:
| 20 years from now your son is founder/CEO of a large
| gaming company and my son a union worker raising slogan
| outside offices "Free gaming credits are Human rights!"
| dagw wrote:
| There have always been and will always be outliers that
| are super into anything. My point was that the kids who
| didn't really care about computers when I was in school
| still knew a lot more about computers than the kids today
| who don't really care about computers
| uticus wrote:
| I can imagine first epoch engineers doing this, they are the
| ones who are in most need of giving their wrists a rest and
| less keystrokes.
| evbogue wrote:
| I've also recently convinced myself that the 5th Epoch is
| coordinated attempt by marketing professionals inside of
| Silicon Valley companies to encourage a generation of
| programmers to not learn anything about computers or how to
| program them.
|
| In the future the only thing you the engineer will do with a
| computer is type into a text area, hit the submit button, and
| be returned variations on strings of text that seem to say
| something important but upon careful considering do not mean
| anything at all.
|
| We can only hope the next epoch will bring about some kind of
| enlightenment that will herald a new era of blog posts that
| convey information across the Internet.
| passion__desire wrote:
| Is it really necessary to learn things in depth when AI can
| do it for you? e.g. Recent Gemini 1.5 result of learning a
| language just from grammar book? If AI can do this, can't it
| be expected to excel at lower-level stuffs trivially which
| are more deterministic than a human language. After all, we
| don't learn / teach assembly as our first programming
| language.
| notpachet wrote:
| > can't it be expected to excel at lower-level stuffs
| trivially which are more deterministic than a human
| language
|
| Our current LLM's excel at nondeterministic problems (style
| transfer, summarization, etc), not at deterministic ones.
| geodel wrote:
| > On one side there is a massive amount of smart rust
| programmers who are super young in all the rust communities
|
| I think actual Rust programers maybe in reasonable numbers but
| RIIR evangelists would be in massive numbers.
| anonymousDan wrote:
| A lot of words to say not much frankly.
| thundergolfer wrote:
| > Epoch five: from information to insights
|
| Eugh, this article is full of MBA-speak, not something I'd expect
| from a highly technical Google Fellow.
| JSR_FDED wrote:
| Geez I only just wrapped my head around the "fourth Industrial
| Revolution" we are apparently in...
|
| https://www.salesforce.com/eu/blog/industry-4-0-where-are-
| we....
| reactordev wrote:
| I somehow feel like these are cover pieces so that the execs
| can show to their board that they are "thinking about AI".
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| The dominant shift in the internet of the last ten years was
| monopoly consolidation and a dramatic reduction in access to
| information since almost all of it is behind their walls.
|
| Mobile has extended these walls with mafia racketeering app
| stores and absolutely atrociously designed gambling-addict
| games, information stealing, and outright fraud.
|
| The dream of the internet died completely about five years ago.
|
| This overpaid google shill isn't worth listening to. Google had
| about a decade of plausable deniability on "do no evil". They
| stopped the charade, and we know what they are. Like sociopaths
| always do, they tell you and you should listen.
|
| AI is an even more intrusive, dangerous penetration and control
| of our lives, and a massive power grab by these tools of the
| very very very elite few.
|
| The guy is right: the internet WAS about access to the evolving
| body of human knowledge, WAS about sci-fi level capabilities
| and conveniences, and WAS a miracle.
|
| WAS.
|
| AI is the rocket fuel that accelerates the vector from the
| momentary point of near-idealism to the dystopian corporate
| control we are currently mostly in, that as a DOUBLE BONUS
| serves as fine grained total information awareness for all the
| state actors of the world, and likely a worldwide destruction
| of the last semblances of democracy.
| spacecadet wrote:
| This.
| 0xcafefood wrote:
| Google is trending towards IBM levels of hype and self-
| aggrandizement.
| throwanem wrote:
| And delivery.
| stonogo wrote:
| It's amazing how every few years we get another article claiming
| Von Neumann architecture can't cut it, we're not measuring
| computers right, and we're going to have to give up general-
| purpose computing any day now.
|
| Sometimes they change the order, but it's always the same claims,
| and it's always the 'unique' circumstances of (insert date here)
| that make everything different this time. I wonder why they
| bother?
| geodel wrote:
| As per this 5th epoch seems to an _answering machine_ for users
| whereas all compute is owned out cloud vendors. All efficiency
| gains is to be accrued by cloud companies and users can pay
| less(due to competition) or more (due to rise in costs) depends
| on which way wind blows.
| tracerbulletx wrote:
| Can we please stop taking everything Google says seriously? This
| is a white paper for bad CTOs with made up terminology and self
| serving predictions.
| GMoromisato wrote:
| Here's my History of Computing, which I arrogantly think is
| better, though more focused on program architectures:
| https://medium.com/@gridwhale/gridwhale-and-a-brief-history-...
|
| I wrote that before the AI revolution, and I honestly don't know
| what's going to happen. The future could go one of two ways:
|
| 1. AI just becomes a smarter compiler. We programmers still
| "write" code, though maybe at a higher level. AI helps us deal
| with complexity, but we're still the ones designing UX,
| architecture, etc.
|
| 2. AI becomes the front-end layer for everything, so that users
| only interact with an AI and that AI carries out tasks as needed.
| All other software is just an implementation detail (the way we
| software people think about hardware).
|
| Most likely we will start with #1 and evolve into #2.
| 0xcafefood wrote:
| I'm not so sure about either of these, but especially #2.
|
| Engineers need to control the behavior of their software very
| precisely. The fantasy of firing all your engineers and just
| letting product folks write something extremely high-level like
| "Write me an app for reviewing movies" and letting a language
| model fill in all the details seems like a nonstarter.
|
| First, the details it imagines likely won't be what you
| actually want. So they'll have to start getting more and more
| precise. So precise in fact that it's back to "programming"
| instead of something like actual natural language.
|
| Second, this seems unlikely to provide stability over time.
| Trying to evolve your FE, BE and storage to remain compatible
| between one prompt and the next or one language model and the
| next likely will involve specifying those details fully as
| well.
|
| Natural language just isn't precise enough for this. There is
| way too much inference involved. This situation is
| fundamentally different from abstractions that allow one group
| of engineers to encapsulate implementation details within a
| system.
| uticus wrote:
| > the fantasy...seems like a nonstarter
|
| i see what you mean. _but_ I wonder if this is because we
| have difficulty imagining a totally possible thing. i mean,
| surely at one point it must have seemed like less machine
| code engineers, and more script monkeys writing something
| extremely high level, was a nonstarter. or perhaps firing
| system software engineers and just letting FE devs write
| something extremely high level must have seemed like a
| nonstarter at one point.
|
| but here we are.
|
| > natural language just isn't precise enough for this
|
| i often make the mistake of thinking business needs something
| more precise than what it is actually asking for (or what it
| truly needs). of course precise dollars and cents truly
| matter in some situations, but in other situations a crud app
| or report has a great deal of flexibility in its
| requirements. not willing to die on this hill, but i wonder
| if precise software and precise computer modelling is because
| the tools require it to be precise? and if so, a less precise
| interface tool may well lead to less precise inputs that
| still meet the underlying business requirements.
| GMoromisato wrote:
| Today, a customer tells a programmer what to build using
| natural language. The customer doesn't write a precise spec;
| instead, they iterate with the programmer: "no, add a button
| here.", "yes, but make sure you can decline an order.".
|
| Imagine you're a non-technical person and you communicate
| with a programmer only via email. You could still get your
| product built.
|
| Is it really hard to imagine than an LLM could (someday) be
| on the other side of the email?
|
| As for stability, I think that's something that LLMs have an
| advantage in. Imagine the user and the LLM create a set of
| regression tests. The LLM can patiently run the tests on
| every change.
|
| The goal isn't perfection (LLM reads my mind and instantly
| creates a program). The goal is better/faster/cheaper than
| dealing with a human programmer.
|
| Believe me, I know LLMs today are not there yet. The question
| is how long will they take to get there? My guess is 10-20
| years, and I'm probably a pessimist.
| uticus wrote:
| #2 has seemed an obvious waypoint for a while.
|
| A waypoint, not an end goal, because surely someone will derive
| sellable business value from combining things in a world where
| AI is the near-universal front layer.
| Aerbil313 wrote:
| > Complexity will only increase in the years ahead, essentially
| requiring new declarative programming models focused on intent,
| the user, and business logic.
|
| This line of thought has never occurred to me before. The idea
| that complexity will be so unmanageable that we'll need to
| rewrite the computing stack in a more easily debuggable,
| functional way. Modern computing seems simple: The kernel and
| your application on top of it, but the existence of solutions
| like Antithesis suggests something different.
| Aerbil313 wrote:
| > Complexity will only increase in the years ahead, essentially
| requiring new declarative programming models focused on intent,
| the user, and business logic.
|
| This line of thought has never occurred to me before. The idea
| that complexity will be so unmanageable that we'll need to
| rewrite the computing stack in a more easily debuggable,
| functional way. Modern computing seems simple: The kernel and
| your application on top of it, but the existence of solutions
| like Antithesis suggests something different.
| Ecstatify wrote:
| keynote in 2023 at the University of Washington for The Allen
| School's Distinguished Lecture Series.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lBbqH_1KS4
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