This looks very interesting. I’m not sure I understand this, but it seems to me like it competes (or is in the same space as) both Tailscale and zeromq/nanomsg via the protocols? I think it would be nice to have a comparison page to make it easier to position it (I didn’t find one).

A key distinguishing factor is that iroh is meant to be used as a library that you can embed into your desktop, mobile or embedded apps.

Up to now our users are mostly teams that have a rust or C/C++ core, such as https://delta.chat/ . But now that we have bindings teams who use other languages should be able to use iroh.

So you can write e.g. an android and ios app that uses iroh direct connections under the hood, and the app user does not have to know or care about this at all.

We keep thinking about ways to combine iroh + zeroMQ! I think these two could compose. (Not familiar with nanomsg myself)

About tailscale: It's similar, but iroh is not a VPN, so it doesn't add a TUN interface. Instead, you'd build iroh directly into your application. Using iroh you can build a VPN, and there are projects that do so (iroh-lan/iroh-vpn are some hobbyist projects). The upside of building it into your application is that it doesn't need special permissions and is easy to ship to the user.

From an economic perspective productivity is defined as the creation of value isn't it? Then if you "improve productivity" and does not create value in the end you're no improving productivity at all.

It does depend on how you define productivity. But the way it's commonly used is "I'm going faster, personally, with these tools."

The thing people I think have a hard time seeing is that "I go faster" does not mean "more features get finished".

It's a scale issue, and one scale is better than the other. People only pay for finished features, they do not pay for how much code you emit.

economists define productivity as gdp per hour worked. Like a lot of other economic measurements, its mostly a bogus number people use as an argument on why their politics are better than someone elses politics. You can have an efficient business located in a poor country making the same product and same quality as that same business in a rich country, the rich country will be more "productive" because local cost of goods is higher there (i.e. a restaurant in NYC is more "productive" than a restaurant in bangladesh).

Sure. But that's not, in my view, how most people use the word productivity when describing LLM use.

In my field - operations - productivity is usually described as some rate of production for a specific asset. 100 widgets / machine / hour - for example.

"My productivity is 3 PRs / day with the LLM as opposed to 1 PR per every three days". That's how I think people are thinking about it.

My point is that's not the same thing as value. I.e. what people will pay for.

You're correct, I just wanted to add that there is another definition that you may see used online, and it is very specific, and it's important to be aware it's NOT exactly the same thing most normal people mean when they say "productivity".

I appreciate you looking out. Thank you.

I’ve noticed more gold-plating.

“This random part of the code is slow, I used an LLM to generate a PR that speeds it up.”

Okay, you optimized the part that’s not a bottleneck, sped up nothing and cost the company $100 in tokens. Good job?

I'm quite fond of this play on "if a tree falls in the woods":

"If an LLM builds a feature, and no one uses it, did it make value?"

Productivity is defined revenue per worker hour. And we know worker hours are going down as there are fewer workers with the layoffs.

Which is why modern management thinks firing everyone in your factory and selling the inventory in your warehouse is amazingly productive.

Maybe instead of people picking up AI mannerism people will start training on what makes AI gives correct results and human communication will look like prompting.

If AI is all the thing people keep saying someone should be able to develop an Animate/Flash clone, right? Given the reaction to its discontinuation, how people seem to depend on it, and how much content is out there it seem like the incentives do exist.

I think there may be a way forward for the internet. Why isn't hacker news being strangled by SEO spam for example? I think the way forward is a much smaller internet predicated on tight-knit communities approving everything that's shared. I don't know how this could scale but maybe that's the point, it must stay small to succeed.

I think that would be the right decision, to me that makes more sense than forcing Apple to allow any app to be installed on iOS or allowing alternate stores.

Simple depends on the context. You may say programming in assembly language is simple, but it is only simple from the context of writing processor instructions; if you think high-level, like accessing fields in a struct, then programming in assembly complects (or weaves) field access with processor instructions and it turns into a complex thing (from the point of view of accessing fields in a struct).

> Imagine if you could auto scale simply by wrapping any existing app code in a

> function and have that block of code run in a temporary copy of your app.

That's interesting, sounds like what fork does but for serverless. Great work

> If that's true, why then did it take me 10 seconds yesterday to find an extremely obscure fact of 18th century history with ChatGPT 3.5?

Would you mind telling what's the fact you were searching for? (and how did you search for it?)