mc_woods

I came here to say this. Part of learning is social interaction. Learning happens on both sides, from the teacher and the student.

In a world of AI everywhere, off-line social interaction will be the major currency. We're all going to crave people... and each other.... The kids who grow up with social skills will be the most successful.

Yup. WASM lacks the "domain specific" acceleration available to native code. So you miss out on any hardware codec support. Same is true for openSSL, there is a bunch of encryption acceleration in modern CPUs that WASM can't access at the moment.

There are compelling applications for WASM in the embedded space, here we run C / C++ applications and WASM supports this well. We can also run other languages compiled to WASM too.

On the server side this is less clear. Typically we don't write system level languages server side - we use other languages, like Ruby, Python, JavaScipt etc. These interpreted languages can run in WASM, but only as language interpreter inside the WASM interpreter - so they work, but they are not efficient. The benefit to the cloud / infrastructure provider is often not-clear, not when it's possible to run these very same applications in existing infrastructure. On the server side the benefit to the application developer is also not clear. There are few providers who have infrastructure to support WASM applications directly. You'd really need to see the big 3 cloud providers look at supporting WASM directly, without hypervisors / vm / container technology under it, to realize any performance improvements and hence pass on some cost benefit to the developer ecosystem.

"running stuff in the browser"; isn't old news. There are a growing number of applications that are migrating toward web-based UI and for these WASM is really useful. WASI-Preview2's benefits are not going to be realized in a browser, it's more for the non-web world....

Rust-Focus; yes, you are correct the existing technology, with the exception of perhaps WAMR and CloudEdge runtimes are rust based. As WasmTime is the only standalone technology which currently supports preview2, and it's written in rust, then the associated examples and tooling are naturally rust focused.

unfortunately wasi-threads is deprecated. You'll need to wait for threading support from "core-wasm" and that's a while off, there is no date on the horizon for this, as far as I know.

WASI-threads is not compatible with WASI-Preview2

The WebAssembly standard breaks into two parts, "core WASM" which is the spec the browsers use and everyone else. Then in the non-browser space there is WASI (system interface specification). The WASI-Preview 2 standard uses component model as the underlying mechanism for implementing the APIs it supports. It is not compatible with existing WASI functions... you need to change your binary with an adapter to get existing wasi binaries to run preview2, and of course, preview2 binaries won't work on non-preview 2 runtimes...

No, blogging won't return. Not in the same way as before. In the days of the dial up modem the written word was king. Twitter originally had SMS as a communication mechanism. But look at what the younger generations do, the use the internet for 3D gaming, for video watching.

It's the same micro-attention span as a tweet, but the media has changed. In the immediate term it's video content. But this will also give way to the next thing...

But, unfortunately the written word requires more attention than modern internet users have to spare.

Yes and the Neobanks, both N26 and Revolute rely on fact that financial regulators across the block recognise each other, so N26 regulated in Germany can operate in Ireland. Etc.

From a technology point of view there is a lesson in how a company controls the media it's customers consume. How alternative sources of data get discredited and how untrusted the information found online is. The result, when you can't trust anyone, is to trust the source you want to believe. Many men want to believe they'll get a bigger penis.

Next thing you know each wasm assembly will need a package format to ship assets with and have the app server provide common resources to all assemblies, e.g. db connection pools, some notion of security, etc.

You mean in a OCI image, a bit like this? - https://docs.docker.com/desktop/wasm/

and then deployed using Kubernetes? - a bit like this - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/aks/use-wasi-node-po...

That's civil war talk right there... :)

Reminds me of when Microsoft and Sony where going head to head with consoles, and Microsoft tried to introduce a marketplace for selling or sharing a game. The resulting advert from Sony; One guys says to the other "Here just take it" and passes a physical disk to his friend. That ad, basically sunk the idea with consumers.

Post COVID cloud spending is down. Companies are starting to wind in their IT budgets, why would they want to pay yet another subscription?

Public buy printers. Good printers last a long time. Printer company offers online services (drivers / patches / APIs - see original post) which have on gong cost. But revenue stops after printer is sold. Printer company's remaining income is ink, ink sales undercut. Printer company goes bust. Printer company, who make printer, force you to use their ink. Printer company does not go bust.

Alternative (game console model) printer company license right to make ink for printer. Printer company does not go bust.

Cost of printer is printer + driver + server over life time of printer... what the public pay; a single one time purchase price.... model doesn't work.

Harsh, but fair.

I worked on Symbian aka EPOC around the early to mid 2000. Trips down to London to visit their offices. I'm still connected to some of the guys on Facebook from that time.

It was one of my first roles outside of Uni, boy getting exposed to everything from low level system software and kernels to application development, and API creation. I learnt so much. Much of which, in principle is still valid.

I learnt a lot from the other developers and engineers a met.

Remember sitting a room with David Wood, where we talked through the creation of a book about Python development / entry level development on the platform. I still recall David's view that we should use the best, easiest, and also most expensive tooling in the book. But that seemed to lock so many people out of the ecosystem.

Anyway - to many memories, and so much I learnt. Meeting PhDs, and Grads today who struggle with how C/C++ works, I'm really lucky I got the chance to work on it when I did. And now I've a craving for a Series 5mx... ebay here I come...

If what he says is true, then legally, the issue is with Google. It is Google he had the contract with. The contract allowed Google to terminate his data service, which they did. However, it is Google to which he pays his money and with which the contract exists. The fact that under the hood they use T-Mobile, doesn't matter.

I was tempted to switch, but now. No. Staying far and wide away. Not for the locking, but the terrible customer support.

Many see just the headline, draw conclusion and may then repost / share, many more read only the headline. Click-bate headlines will fall foul. Robby (article author) - just write more accurate titles and the fact-checkers can't argue.

UK prawn laws? - proposed and then dropped?

You've just reminded me of how much I rely upon a free service provide something so critical to my everyday life. Time to move to a paid service where I can have someone to call when issues like this turn up.

@bananabat This is awesome, your write up put the biggest freaking smile on my face. Like you, it is something I've always wanted to do and put off, now 43 and still got to get back to my dream. I love that you've got your first game out, that is epic! - I'm off to go grab a copy, and I'm looking forward to seeing what you release next!

Each week, my sons aged 9 (3rd grade) and 7 (2nd grade) receive a set of words to remember and every Friday they get a spelling test. Neither of them are big fans of spelling tests. My eldest son, Ben hates being told that he is wrong. So, when revising and I tell him he didn’t spell a word correctly he can get quite upset. That’s not much fun.

Through a chance encounter between me playing with the text-to-speech API and my son, I created a very rough tool called RobotSpelling to help him. It is, admittedly still very rough around the edges, but hey, it works “OK” for now. I've shared it with my sons' principle and their teachers and I think the class used it for a little bit which was awesome.

I'm working on a completely re-written next version in React, which I'm learning along the way. My background is in C/C++ and embedded / backend networking software, so React is, right now - extremely frustrating. To be honest, I'm getting a little disheartened. But thought I'd share what I have.

Background and some more of the "Ahh Haa!" is on a blog post I wrote last year: https://withbighair.com/the-1st-version-of-robot-spelling/

Unikernels are probably best compared to RTOS that are used in embedded systems. They dramatically reduce the guest operating system overhead for virtual machines.

As the weight of the isolation technology gets smaller, we are going to see an increasing use of it as a form of security, and scalability in application designs. We've seen the first wave with microservices, but we'll see more.

You know, I've been doing a lot of linux / ssh work recently, and I'd love to have something in the console that could give me more of a graphical interface. The midnight commander is good, but a file manager, document preview tool would be awesome. Particularly since so much of the content we produce today is graphical in some way. Something that we could use over SSH without setting up RDP / VNC - I don't need an entire desktop, and often don't have the bandwidth to make it viable anyway. Do you think that something like RIPScript could be used for that? Would there be a way to create a linux graphical terminal?