因为我们共同使用 Gemini 的缘故,我有机会看到他在 Gemini 上的对话(他那边也有我的账户)。我就随手翻了下,我发现他最近让 Gemini 帮他修改审阅一篇大概五年前的论文。这篇论文当时给我看过。此外他还问过 Gemini 康德如何区分优美感和崇高感,诸如此类。问题不多,不似我这样一步步启发式地与 AI 聊天,把 AI 当做一个可以激发灵感的对话伙伴(谁让我没有真人对话伙伴呢)。他几乎只是致力于弄懂康德哲学的某些部分。
我仔细思考了我和他的不同:
(1)在研究对象方面,我研究的是问题,我想弄清楚,比如说 A 到底是不是 B;他研究的是信念,他想弄清楚,比如说,x 是不是认为 A 是 B。
(2)在研究旨趣方面,我的研究可能牵涉到康德,比如说康德到底是否认为 C 是 D。我可能会去研究这个问题,但最终会回到自己的问题。我的研究旨趣不在于弄清楚任何人的确想什么,而是我的确想什么。与我不同,当我将所牵涉的问题与他交流,他会立即为这个问题在康德研究中寻找一个定位:如果有,则他可能会感兴趣,并且只是投入对康德如何理解这个问题的问题研究当中,而且不会返回到直面问题的情形中;如果没有,则判断不是一个真正/专业的关于康德的问题。
Kanban is a simple, practical approach to visually managing processes and backlogs by moving work cards from one progress column to another. Toyota came up with it to track their production lines back in the middle of the 20th century, but it's since been applied to all sorts of industries with great effect. And Fizzy is our new fun, modern take on it in digital form.
We're certainly not the first to take a swing at this, not even for software development. Since the early 2000s, there's been a movement to use the Kanban concept to track bugs, issues, and ideas in our industry. And countless attempts to digitize the concept over the years.
But as with so much other software, good ideas can grow cumbersome and unwieldy surprisingly quickly. Fizzy is a fresh reset of an old idea.
We need more of that.
Very little software is ever the final word on solving interesting problems. Even products that start out with great promise and simplicity tend to accumulate cruft and complexity over time. A healthy ecosystem needs a recurring cycle of renewal.
We've taken this mission to heart not just with Fizzy's fun, colorful, and modern implementation of the Kanban concept, but also in its distribution.
Fizzy is available as a service we run where you get 1,000 cards for free, and then it's $20/month for unlimited usage. But we're also giving you access to the entire code base, and invite enterprising individuals and companies to run their own instance totally free of charge.
This is done under the O'Saasy License, which is basically the do-whatever-you-want-just-don't-sue MIT License, but with a carve-out that reserves the commercialization rights to run Fizzy as SaaS for us as the creators. That means it's not technically Open Source™, but the source sure is open, and you can find it on our public GitHub repository.
That open source is what we run too. So new features or bugs fixes accepted on GitHub will make it into both our Fizzy SaaS offering and what anyone can run on their own hardware. We've already had a handful of contributions go live like this!
Ultimately, it's our plan to let data flow freely between the SaaS and the local installations. You'll be able to start an account on your own instance, and then, if you'd rather we just run it for you, take that data with you into the managed setup. Or the other way around!
In an age where SaaS companies come and go, pivot one way or the other, I think it's a great reassurance that the source code is freely available, and that any work put into a SaaS account is portable to your own installation later.
I'm also just a huge fan of being able to View Source. Traditionally, that's been reserved to the front end (and even that has been disappearing due to the scourge of minimization, transpiling, and bundling), but I'm usually even more interested in seeing how things are built on the backend. Fizzy allows you full introspection into that. Including the entire history of how the product was built, pull request by pull request. It's a great way to learn how modern Rails applications are put together!
So please give Fizzy a spin. Whether you're working on software, with a need to track those bugs and feature requests, or you're in an entirely different business and need a place for your particular issues and ideas. Fizzy is a fresh, fun way to manage it all, Kanban style. Enjoy!
Black Friday is usually when ecommerce sets new records. This has certainly been true for Shopify through most of its existence. So much so that the company spends months in advance preparing for The Big Day(s). You'd think after more than twenty years, though, that things would have leveled out. But you'd be wrong.
This year, merchants sold an astounding $6.2 billion worth of wares through Shopify on Black Friday. That's up 25% from last year, when the record was ~$5 billion. Just crazy high growth on a crazy big base. The law of big numbers clearly hasn't found a way to apply itself here yet!
That volume of orders means the Shopify monolith gets put through its paces. The backend API peaked at 31 million requests per minute. The databases carried 53 million reads and 2 million writes per second. Bonkers.
Rarely do the stars align to shine so brightly that a single company is stewarded by a still-active programmer with a stellar pedigree of core contributions, saddled with such unceasing success, faced with a constant barrage of novel technical challenges, and willing to contribute everything they learn and build back into the open-source base pillars. But that's Shopify.
Ultimately, this is all downstream from being a founder-led business. Tobi Lütke not only served on the Rails core team in the early days, but continues to steer the Shopify ship with a programmer's eye for detail and exploration. The latest release of Omarchy even features his new Try tool. How many CEOs of companies worth two hundred billion dollars still program like that?
Despite all this, there's occasionally still some fringe consternation in the Ruby world about Shopify's dominance. In Rails, Shopify employs almost half the core contributors. In Ruby, they have several people on the core team too. Seeing this as anything but a blessing is silly, though.
We wouldn't have such battle-tested releases of Rails without Shopify running production on the framework's edge. We wouldn't have gotten YJIT without the years of effort they sunk into improving Ruby's core performance. And we wouldn't have seen the recent production-proving of Ractors without them either. Any programming community should be so lucky as to have a Shopify!
Now I'm obviously biased here. Not only have I been friends with Tobi for over twenty years, but I also serve on the board of directors for the company. I'm both socially and economically incentivized to cheer for this extraordinary company. But that doesn't mean it isn't all true too!
Shopify is indeed the patron saint of Ruby on Rails. Its infrastructure team is the backbone of our ecosystem, and its continued success the best case study of how far you can take this framework and language. They deserve a gawd damn parade for all they do.
So on this Cyber Monday, I say cheers to Tobi, cheers to the thousands of Shopifolk. You're killing it for merchants, shoppers, and all of us working with Ruby on Rails. Bravo.