Amsterdam, I am in you. I'm high as hell. Ten stories on this hotel 😆
There's a Dev World conference starting tomorrow. I was told it'd be all about software development but seems to be mostly about ai.
We will see I suppose.
Timeline
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Remote status
Context
4Opening ceremony involves speaker asking the crowd individually why they are here. Mostly they seem to want to know how to use ai. And not lose their job.
Didn't ask me so didn't get to say that I'd like to learn how to defensively fight ai and prevent it spamming up the web.
The man from Oracle says they are making databases more AI. Support for vectors in the db and systems to ensure secure access for agents.
He wants to encourage us to use one big (Oracle) db instead of lots of caches and nosql databases. The ai prefers thst, he reckons.
Oracle is like a smart phone. It can do everything. No need for separate devices for music and notes and whatnot. It can even do json now. And vectors.
Data privacy is often done at the app layer, which means a rogue ai could generate SQL to bypas that. So do access control in the db direftly. Which is probably better even without ai honestly. This 'deep security' might work well.
Ai is happier , according to the man from Oracle, if it just has one Oracle db without competitors software at all.
Fancy that.
Flower framework to deal with ai engineering work transition
Juliette is a game dev who was excited by ai then , oh, its disruptive and can software dev be ending?
So she made a model for thinking about the impact on teams and engineers.
It activities:
What is the work that might be affected? She has a list of things too long to read.
Define how each is done, standard best practice etc. How outputs of each are inputs to others.
Claude builds skills based on that.
Ai capabilities:
Can si do those things? Can it ever?
Probably not for many.
So what is the impact going to be?
If its all done by ai the job is thinking about the product not coding. That plus working out the odds its done it right. More importantly, philosophy! The job is to define what good software is and have the robot implement.
So sounds like she thinks were heading to the job being thinking about systems then wrangling robots.
But only if its reliable and cheap and not regulated away.
Which might not be the case.
Buy her book for the full list and analysis.
All the talks in sync at 30 minute intervals. This is too short really. They either have to dive in with jargon I don't get to explain in depth, or barely manage to summarize before the time runs out. No time for Q&A at all which leaves you wondering why not just watch it on youtube?
There's a hall full of stands from corporations of varying evilness giving out useless tat with trademarks on it. People go mad for the loot. Seems to make people quite excited to get a pair of socks or a fidget toy. I leave them to it. Don't like talking to salespeople even if you get free socks with trademarks on them. I don't wear logos in general anyway.
The AI bootsterism is strong, but not omnipresent. Plenty of talks on team management or deployment or progress in non-amazon cloud systems or whatever. Even if they can only be quite surface-detail and lacking depth due to shortness.
It's like being in school really. Flowing from lesson to lesson. Mostly being taught things that will be irrelevent or are boring or are unlikely to ever really come up.
Short break before street party now.
Replies
2Day two, and a much earlier start. Now Kevin Lewis from apify is here to tell us about how http 402, payment required, has been pointless till now but now maybe AI agents will pay when people couldn't.
Giving ai a wallet.
Dollar payments too slow and expensive for agents paying a penny for a page. Days for payment clearance. Kyc means every payer has to be human even.
X402 then instead. Stable coins on blockchain. Programmable , fast settlement. Pay in millionths of a dollar.
Or l402 to pay with bitcoin lightning.
Server sends bill and specifies payment details in 402 reply. Agent making request settles on chain then retries request with payment reciept.
Agents will want to evaluate if its worth the money within budget and etc. Give agents only limited wallet with disposable funds.
There's a mech for paying unpredictable prices. Over pay and refund whatever the excess .
He shows a demo. On how to pay a web scraper to scrape Instagram for you. For a dollar his service will give you 400 scraped profiles.
Paying for questionable services eh?
Not clear why an agent would pay another agent to scrape a website instead of just doing it itself.
No indication of how the agent can be prevented from leaking its private keys to injection attacks.
Saravanan talks to us about making greener tech.
Everyone else is burning fuel for ai like mad but Saravan wants to make things greener instead.
3% or so of greenhouse emissions are from IT. More than flying.
Cloud providers claim to be carbon neutral but this is changing with ai centers and often software written for them aren't used most of the time.
Green Software Foundation thinks software can be greener and offers courses and a profiler to tell you the carbon footprint of your code.
We can write for carbon efficiency. Electricity and hardware manufacturing included.
Power usage effectiveness can be calculated. How much is wasted on cooling vs compute, say.
Do your compute when solar is in excess instead of during times the power network is burning oil. Or do it in countries with greener grids.
Support older user hardware. Extend the life of end user devices.
Can't help feeling like these efforts are going to be drowned out by everyone else here burning tokens like there's no tomorrow. Which maybe will ensure there is indeed no tomorrow.