In a world where implementation is free, will we see a return to built for purpose systems like this where we define the inputs and outputs desired and AI builds it from the ground up, completely for purpose?
>> is almost mythological. In 1953, C.R. Smith, president of American Airlines, was seated next to R. Blair Smith, an IBM salesman, on a cross-country flight. By the time they landed, the outline of a solution had been sketched. IBM and American Airlines entered a formal development partnership in 1959.
edit: oh and then the actual system didn't actually go live another 5 years later - in 1964. Over a decade after the two of them sat next to each other.
Reminder to myself when my potential customers don't sign the deal 5 minutes after my pitch!
Closed the tab.
Either way I'm glad I read it and waiting for the other parts of the series. Really curious how to get access to this airline booking data so I can write my own bot to book my flights and deal with all the permutations and combinations to find the best deal.
"That is not coincidence — it is the market discovering the optimal solution to a specific problem. When you see that pattern in your own domain, pay attention to it."An exec made a public quote that they couldn't have done it if they hadn't used Lisp.
(Today, the programming language landscape is somewhat more powerful. Rust got some metaprogramming features informed by Lisps, for example, and the team might've been able to slog through that.)
How many banks and ERP's, how many accounting systems are still running COBOL scripts? (A lot).
Think about modern web infrastructure and how we deploy...
cpu -> hypervisor -> vm -> container -> run time -> library code -> your code
Do we really need to stack all these turtles (abstractions) just to get instructions to a CPU?
Every one of those layers has offshoots to other abstractions, tools and functionality that only adds to the complexity and convolution. Languages like Rust and Go compiling down to an executable are a step, revisiting how we deploy (the container layer) is probably on the table next... The use case for "serverless" is there (and edge compute), but the costs are still backwards because the software hasn't caught up yet.
Run time - This makes development faster. Python, Lua, and Node.js projects can typically test out small changes locally faster than Rust and C++ can recompile. (I say this as a pro Rust user - The link step is so damned slow.)
Container - This gives you a virtual instance of "apt-get". System package managers can't change, so we abstract over them and reuse working code to fit a new need. I am this very second building something in Docker that would trash my host system if I tried to install the dependencies. It's software that worked great on Ubuntu 22.04, but now I'm on Debian from 2026. Here I am reusing code that works, right?
VM - Containers aren't a security sandbox. VMs allow multiple tenants to share hardware with relative safety. I didn't panic when the Spectre hacks came out - The cloud hosts handled it at their level. Without VMs, everyone would have to run their own dedicated hardware? Would I be buying a dedicated CPU core for my proof-of-concept app? VMs are the software equivalent of the electrical grid - Instead of everyone over-provisioning with the biggest generator they might ever need, everyone shares every power station. When a transmission line drops, the lights flicker and stay on. It's awe-inspiring once you realize how much work goes into, and how much convenience comes out of, that half-second blip when you _almost_ lose power but don't.
Hypervisor - A hypervisor just manages the VMs, right?
Come on. Don't walk gaily up to fences. Most of it's here for a reason.
paulnpace•2h ago
Eat that, Bitcoin.
bombcar•1h ago
It’s nothing for even an ancient CPU - let alone our modern marvels that make a Cray 1 cry.
The key is an extremely well-thought and tested design.
buckle8017•1h ago
(For the pedantic, it's not exactly centralized nor federated since each airline treats their view of the world as absolutely correct)
arter45•8m ago
It probably doesn’t require consensus among all participants (pairwise consensus at every step should be fine), so there is very likely no voting.
It’s not even permissionless. It’s not like a random company could join this “chain” simply because they can generate a keypair.
It’s a fundamentally different problem, and it makes sense that the architecture is different.
andersmurphy•11m ago
People don't do it because it's not fashionable (the cool kids are all on AWS with hundreds of containers, hosting thousands micro services, because that's web scale).