Philosophy Mondays: Human-AI Collaboration
Today's Philosophy Monday is an important interlude. I want to reveal that I have not been writing the posts in this series entirely by myself. Instead I have been working with Claude, not just for the graphic illustrations, but also for the text. My method has been to write a rough draft and then ask Claude for improvement suggestions. I will expand this collaboration to other intelligences going forward, including open source models such as Llama and DeepSeek. I will also explore other moda...
Intent-based Collaboration Environments
AI Native IDEs for Code, Engineering, Science
Web3/Crypto: Why Bother?
One thing that keeps surprising me is how quite a few people see absolutely nothing redeeming in web3 (née crypto). Maybe this is their genuine belief. Maybe it is a reaction to the extreme boosterism of some proponents who present web3 as bringing about a libertarian nirvana. From early on I have tried to provide a more rounded perspective, pointing to both the good and the bad that can come from it as in my talks at the Blockstack Summits. Today, however, I want to attempt to provide a coge...
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Another announcement from last week that got strangely little attention was Amazon’s introduction of EC2 Reserved Instances. Now reserved instances in the cloud may sound like an oxymoron but it is simply guaranteed capacity. You pay an upfront fee for the guarantee that your instance will be availabl and then a lower ongoing usage fee.
Amazon clearly has a ton of usage information on EC2 available that let’s them price this fairly aggressively. For instance paying a 1-year guarantee fee reduces the ongoing usage fee enough to result in a total fee reduction of 33% (when you amortize the fee you get to 6.7 cents per hour versus 10 cents per hour without paying a guarantee). Paying a 3-year guarantee fee results in a 50% reduction of effective fees. EC2 was reasonably cheap before, but now it will be really cheap for folks who use it a lot.
This is of course a direct stab at the heart of the dedicated hosting industry. Some of the dedicated players are ramping up their own cloud offerings in response, such as Rackspace with their Mosso offering. Mosso is promising server availability for as little as 1.5 cents per hour, which will clearly cannibalize Rackspace’s dedicated offering.
All of this is great news for startups because it is further driving down the cost of hosting. At this point I am encouraging everyone who is starting up to write for the cloud from day one. In fact, I think it is time to be somewhat suspect of a technical team that is not doing that.
One issue that this brings up is of course the question of cloud lock-in and how to best avoid it. There are a whole bunch of startups working on this, including
Another announcement from last week that got strangely little attention was Amazon’s introduction of EC2 Reserved Instances. Now reserved instances in the cloud may sound like an oxymoron but it is simply guaranteed capacity. You pay an upfront fee for the guarantee that your instance will be availabl and then a lower ongoing usage fee.
Amazon clearly has a ton of usage information on EC2 available that let’s them price this fairly aggressively. For instance paying a 1-year guarantee fee reduces the ongoing usage fee enough to result in a total fee reduction of 33% (when you amortize the fee you get to 6.7 cents per hour versus 10 cents per hour without paying a guarantee). Paying a 3-year guarantee fee results in a 50% reduction of effective fees. EC2 was reasonably cheap before, but now it will be really cheap for folks who use it a lot.
This is of course a direct stab at the heart of the dedicated hosting industry. Some of the dedicated players are ramping up their own cloud offerings in response, such as Rackspace with their Mosso offering. Mosso is promising server availability for as little as 1.5 cents per hour, which will clearly cannibalize Rackspace’s dedicated offering.
All of this is great news for startups because it is further driving down the cost of hosting. At this point I am encouraging everyone who is starting up to write for the cloud from day one. In fact, I think it is time to be somewhat suspect of a technical team that is not doing that.
One issue that this brings up is of course the question of cloud lock-in and how to best avoid it. There are a whole bunch of startups working on this, including
Philosophy Mondays: Human-AI Collaboration
Today's Philosophy Monday is an important interlude. I want to reveal that I have not been writing the posts in this series entirely by myself. Instead I have been working with Claude, not just for the graphic illustrations, but also for the text. My method has been to write a rough draft and then ask Claude for improvement suggestions. I will expand this collaboration to other intelligences going forward, including open source models such as Llama and DeepSeek. I will also explore other moda...
Intent-based Collaboration Environments
AI Native IDEs for Code, Engineering, Science
Web3/Crypto: Why Bother?
One thing that keeps surprising me is how quite a few people see absolutely nothing redeeming in web3 (née crypto). Maybe this is their genuine belief. Maybe it is a reaction to the extreme boosterism of some proponents who present web3 as bringing about a libertarian nirvana. From early on I have tried to provide a more rounded perspective, pointing to both the good and the bad that can come from it as in my talks at the Blockstack Summits. Today, however, I want to attempt to provide a coge...
Share Dialog
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