It would be convenient if it could load local SLMs itself, otherwise I'll have to manually start the LLM server before I can use it, and it's not something I leave running all the time.

That's what the MCP is for, if you can get the LLM to use it. Sometimes they just like to do it their own way :)

That's why we're asking for the CLI; so we can write the skills.

All the same thing.

If you are really interested in this subject, you might want to read https://dataintensive.net/

If you clarify what your goals are, broadly speaking, maybe we can give advice.

Thanks a lot for the suggestion and the link!

I’m mainly building minikv to learn more about real-world distributed storage and consensus—and to see how far I can take it as a personal project. Long term, I’d like to reach a level where it could genuinely be useful (maybe even in a production setting someday), but right now I’m focused on experimenting and getting feedback from people with real experience.

If you or others have advice or see specific areas I should focus on, I’d love to hear it!

I think this field is mature, as far as it goes, so you'll be in the weeds by the time you get to the frontier. Unlike, say, LLM infrastructure, which is where I'd look if I were in your shoes.

Thanks for the insight!

You’re absolutely right—the distributed KV/object storage space is very mature, and I don’t expect to “out-innovate” the current leaders. My main goal is to learn by reimplementing challenging systems from (almost) scratch and to deeply understand how these pieces work behind the scenes.

LLM infra is definitely a hot frontier—makes sense that it’s where lots of cutting-edge work is happening. Maybe someday I’ll try my hand at that too. For now, I want to really master the fundamentals!

Thanks again for your perspective—it’s helpful to think about where the opportunities (and weeds!) are.

You're absolutely right(em dash)

Hilarious

> consensus—and

Even this guy's comments here are very obviously LLM generated.

No AI involved here—just me doing my best to be clear and thoughtful in my replies.

LOL

Our school had an Olivetti PC (286), which was memorable for two reasons: it was faster than my own 286 (surprising because I thought they were running at the same clock speed), and it was the only one. Indeed, it was the only Olivetti PC I'd seen anywhere.

I was 11 when my school got donated an Olivetti 286. This was in the early 2000s and to this day it remains the only one that I've seen and used (it ran MS-DOS 4.0 & came with a manual).

Does Codex not let you set command permissions?

Yea, it does so this would likely have been to be a `--yolo` (I don't care, let me `rm -rf /`). I've found even with the "workspace write" mode and no additional writable directories I can't do git operations without approval so it seems to exclude `.git` by default.

Third button has been "hidden" below the mouse wheel for well more than those 10 years, just press the wheel down and you'll hear a mouse button click.

And most Linuxes have option for dual click (right and left mouse button) to simulate middle mouse button.

Useful, as the wheel button is usually first to die in cheap mice.

Not useful, because it made it impossible to play Death Stranding on Linux :(

You'll be surprised to know that there are still some mice that don't support that. Admittedly, I've only had that happen once in the last 15 yrs in a budget "gamer" mouse I instantly returned and replaced with a Logitech g903 at the time (though I've switched mice twice since, and both supported it)

Ironically, Microsoft pioneered the scroll wheel.

popularized, not pioneered.

Remember Xerox PARC, the people that developed the first computer GUI?

https://archive.is/sKLL

> The three button Alto mouse enabled the first bitmapped and overlapping windows display, known as a graphical user interface (GUI). The Alto dates to March of 1973

My dude, my mouse has 5 buttons. No idea what you're talking about here.

I'm down to one. Less is more.

Is that one of those innovative designs with the charging port on the bottom of the mouse?

Sometimes more is more.

It sounds dumb but the battery lasts long and charges quickly, so I think they made the right decision.

Would we? You can look at places with less funding and see how many software companies get off the ground.

> You can look at places with less funding

Yeah, like FOSS which is drastically underfunded since birth, yet continues to put out software that the entire world ends up relying on, instead of relying on whatever VC-pumped companies are putting out.

I'm not talking "better software" as in "made a lot of money", I meant "better" as in "had a better impact on the world".

FOSS software is written by people working at companies that likely owe their existence to VC.

That sounds like more sign of recent times.

FOSS software that many rely on that has been around for a while were non-VC: VCS, Linux / GNU / BSD, web browsers, various programming languages, various databases...

Many of your examples came from people who were funded by Universities in the 80s, which was basically the VC of the time. And in the 90s, a lot of the core committers of those projects were already working at VC funded companies.

Back then it was very normal to get VC funding and then hire the core committers of your most important open source software and pay them to keep working on it. I worked at Sendmail in the 90s and we had Sendmail committers (obviously) but also BSD core devs and linux core devs on staff. We also had IETF members on staff.

And we weren't unique, this happened a lot.

Thanks for the insight and history. Glad to be corrected.

Was it in a different nature to current VC funded FOSS though? It sounds like their contributions to FOSS was tangential and not the sold product?

Maybe a bit more like Google and Chrome?

> FOSS software that many rely on that has been around for a while were non-VC: VCS, Linux / GNU / BSD, web browsers, various programming languages, various databases...

It's honestly hard to pick a pattern out for older open source project contributions. PostgreSQL started at UC Berkeley but people contributed to it from all over. Key engineers like Tom Lane worked a number of companies in the database field, some dependent on VC funding, some not. He's currently at Snowflake. [0] A lot of recent innovation around PostgreSQL today (Neon, Supabase, etc.) is VC funded.

That pattern changed with projects like Hadoop, which was about the time that VC funds recognized a standard playbook around monetizing open source. [1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Lane_(computer_scientist)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloudera

Sure, those projects were un(der)funded in the 80s and 90s but the reason we talk about them today is because of the huge amount of investment - both direct and in kind - that VC backed companies have managed to give to many of them.

I think it’s easy to forget how long ago it was when FOSS truly was the outsider and wouldn’t be touched by most companies.

Mozilla/Firefox started in 1998 and then started taking ad revenue from Google in 2005, which pays for a large chunk of its development. It’s been part of the Silicon Valley money machine for 20 years, most of its existence.

What gave you that idea?

Because Silicon Valley, which contributes the majority of the code, is venture backed. For example, 84% of the Linux kernel's development is corporate: https://commandlinux.com/statistics/linux-foundation-growth-...

I don't know why people are so upset here.

I don’t know why you are being downvoted. I mean, I guess I do, but sheesh, they are really shooting the messenger here. Maybe they are looking for more nuance: a lot of software is/was written by people working at…

I don’t think everything VCs touch is gold, but it’s also not the case that they are pure evil either. It’s almost as if you can’t claim they are all good or all bad.

I sometimes wonder if the VC ecosystem creates its own confirmation bias by making it easy to see and aggregate companies it incubates. Whenever I look for jobs, I'm always surprised to find companies that have taken no VC funding and don't try particularly hard to market to the industry as a whole, preferring instead to stay relatively under the radar.

They tend to have more grounded financials (read: paths to profitability) and while the pay packages aren't quite aligned with the top end of the market, they also tend to manage headcount more responsibly than FAANG. I work with a fairly niche stack and I'm constantly finding new companies that I've never heard of and don't raise VC rounds.

Long way of saying that just because they're not easy to find doesn't mean they don't exist.