SED News: OpenClaw Goes Viral, Mistral’s Compute Play, and the Agent Arms Race

15:54Sean Falconer:But at the same time, they also need to generate money to invest in new infrastructure to train the next generation model, which is very, very expensive to do.

16:02Gregor Vand:Yeah, exactly.

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18:44Gregor Vand:Yeah, I mean, on the subscription point, it's sort of been floated really the behind the scenes, anthropic at least, they make their money on, or they can balance the book, shall we say, on enterprise. The enterprise is paying like full whack or even over whack, shall we say, for what they're using. And that basically subsidizes personal pro plans, like a personal pro plan. There's no way that a sort of$20 a month is what it's actually costing them to run that. But that's the max, I think, that a consumer is probably willing to pay for if it's not linked directly to their employer, basically.

19:17Sean Falconer:Yeah. And I think one of the things I've heard, like Dario, the CEO of Anthropic, talked about this recently, was that at least in their world, they actually make money from a particular model. But where the cost comes from is the investment in the next model. So while we're in this phase of really essentially like an arms race between these different companies to build the next generation and the best models. There's continual, essentially, infrastructure investments that you have to make. And until all that stabilizes in some fashion or there's some other way of driving down costs there, you're going to always be in a situation where even if the current state of the model would make money in the long run, you're taking all that money and basically and then some to reinvest in generating sort of the next generation.

20:04Gregor Vand:Yeah. And I think this is a huge open question at the moment. is just like, where does the bucket load of investment, where does that start to sort of plateau so that it's a sustainable, quote, business model to produce? Because if you look at a similar version of this, it's just the chip manufacturing. Huge amounts of investment and always needing to, like Moore's Law, always producing something that's faster, half the size, half the cost. But there were applications for that. There were very clear money-driven applications, phones laptops this boom in hardware consumer hardware so yeah i think it's just like where's the constant renewal a consumer is not paying what a lot of people would pay practically per year for a new iphone for a while they're not paying that to any of these providers at the personal level so yeah this is kind of interesting and like if we look at the mechanics of these ads that are now coming in.

21:00Gregor Vand:So ChatGPT charges 60 US dollars per thousand ad impressions. Are you familiar with, how does that line up with how Google used to charge? Or have you got any?

21:12Sean Falconer:I couldn't tell you really what they're, I mean, they charge on, typically I'm like, you set a bunch of stuff around like budget, CPC, your bidding and stuff like that. Some of it's kind of hidden from you because there is like a bidding thing that goes on and certain words cost more and so forth. But I don't know. So I wouldn't be able to map that to what ChatGPT is doing here. I did read that this sort of is on par with, I think, what Netflix had launched for ads and is more expensive than Meta, obviously.

21:39Gregor Vand:Yeah, interesting. The ad space is just simply an area I've never been part of. So I'm not sure either on the pure financials of that and still want to just recurgitate somebody else's numbers. But yeah, that's an interesting$60 for a thousand impressions. So that's sort of similar to Netflix. That's interesting.

21:55Sean Falconer:I mean, another move that OpenAI is trying to do, they're certainly trying to get into the B2B space more as well. And they've made a lot of investments there. And you might be able to get to a place from like a business perspective where you can kind of subsidize the consumer model a little bit with the idea that if you have a lot of consumers using this, this also becomes the thing that they want to use in business where the business is willing to spend more money. Like, I think Zoom was very successful with that model, for example.

22:22Gregor Vand:yeah yeah that's a good reference and yeah a colleague of mine alerted me to the anthropic anti ads that were running so these were not ads within claude but you know tv ads and i believe yeah old school super bowl and it's sort of the format is like you're talking to your mother and then suddenly an ad for sort of do you want to go on a date with an older woman pops up so they're also taking kind of the extreme end of where ads could go but i think it paints exactly the picture that they wanted to paint. And as usual, it kind of always gives, like Anthropic and Claude just always have this, I think, like cooler edge to the product and sort of, oh, we're in tune with the people sort of vibe versus the sort of Sam Altman open AI, like we will tell you what you will use.

23:08Sean Falconer:Yeah, there's definitely feels like a cultural difference between the companies. And I think to me, and I wrote a post on LinkedIn about this a couple of weeks ago, like some ways Anthropic kind of reminds me of like the early days of Google, where they're collecting like a lot of, I mean, OpenAI is doing this as well. But like, I think it's obvious seems like a lot of very, very gifted, smart people are drawn to that company, maybe because of their culture or how whatever it is. And they're really collecting a lot of this talent, and this talent pool and kind of giving them somewhat of an unstructured environment akin to like Google in the early days, where it's not like overly processed.

23:47Sean Falconer:I think it's a relatively flat hierarchy and giving them the freedom to kind of just like move fast and experiment. And they seem to be thriving as a result of whatever it is. How far can they scale that? I don't know. I mean, that was something that eventually Google had to put a little bit more rigid control over and add more processes. But right now, it certainly seems like they're making a lot of smart decisions in terms of the investments they make from a product perspective, sort of their stance on trying around what's important for models and how they think about even security in this space.

24:19Gregor Vand:Yeah. And then just a sort of sidebar off this, what's happening over maybe in this side of the world in Asia, and obviously China has quite a few chatbots. And it is Lunar New Year, as we're recording, year of the horse, and not just the horse, but the fire horse. And completely separate topic, it seems to swept the internet this year, like I keep hearing or having people say, you know, happy year of the fire horse, who would never have talked to me about Lunar New Year before. So I think it's like a TikTok thing. But Alibaba, so they've got their Quen chatbot and like obviously Quen models as well.

24:51Gregor Vand:But they decided to commit$430 million to offering free bubble tea and other items to users who ordered food through the Quen chatbot. And that has actually driven more than 120 million orders through the six days. So, I mean, that's a different way to approach. I mean, you can't, I don't know, maybe we'll see something similar, like where one of the providers says like hey if you use us to do a thing you will get a physical good in return but yeah it feels like a slightly more like i see campaigns like this in asia a lot more than i maybe do say in like in europe or the us but yeah i definitely think like agentic

25:29Sean Falconer:commerce is where we're going with a lot of this stuff people already use these tools to go and ask for advice on purchases that they're making and then they go to some other place to go and make that purchase but it doesn't you know it doesn't take that much foresight to figure out okay well if we just connect the lines a little bit here and there's been investments from google in terms of standards around doing secure purchases through agents and so forth so i think that's not that far away where this is sort of the default yeah this is an interesting one because yeah as

26:01Gregor Vand:this campaign was around yeah ordering food so if you sort of play that through okay a user maybe hasn't realized or just hasn't tried to order food through the chatbot and so yeah they offer this incentive and then once the user's done it once they're like oh this is possible and you assume that maybe half at least are like oh this is actually nicer than going through my food apps i mean i can definitely see a world having just like stayed in tokyo stayed in a hotel my wife and i call it hotel hell when we basically end up on hotels.com and two hours later one of us is still on it and you know like are you making any progress and it was interesting i actually just quickly tried chat gbt today and said like tell me some hotels in tokyo because i was almost trying to see if it was going to give me ads but it did actually recommend one of the hotels that recommended was the one i stayed in so i don't know that kind of got me thinking like maybe this is where i should be going in the future to avoid hotel hell but obviously the whole booking process i don't know i'm still a bit old school i feel i just want to see the real actual booking so moving Moving on to our final headline, we have Mistral.

27:07Gregor Vand:So the French model provider, but now has Mistral Compute as well. But they've bought a company, I think you pronounce it Koyeb. So K-O-Y-E-B. And basically Koyeb provides inference. And I think there's kind of two sides to the story here. One is that Koyeb provides inference and can like bolster the compute side of the Mistral models compute. but then Koyab also provides spinning up like databases or like containerized apps and this kind of thing as I understand it behind the scenes that's actually Neon so this is not Koyab's own infra providing that but I think it looks like the Mistral still sees huge value in that even if it's based upon like you're two steps away from who's actually providing the infra but we're seeing this a lot i would say like we're seeing a lot now where there's maybe a topic for a movie next time sean but where do people like lovable go in the future if we're seeing people like mr will probably move in this direction where from the model you could spin up infra and like i.e end to end create an app i think we're going to be seeing a little bit of a step shift this

28:20Sean Falconer:year across all the players i think actually yeah yeah i mean i think that it seems like all the model providers are making steps to create more of a moat around their services by owning more of sort of the end-to-end pipeline, like making more of these things just sort of part of the model experience. Because if you just have a model, then it's kind of like, well, the switching cost is low. I can go with the best model or the one that's like the best balancing cost for whatever my workload happens to be. But if suddenly the model also has all these other things that maybe it It holds on to important contextual data for my business or for my personally, or it makes it really easy for me to just like spin up agents and run them in cloud infrastructure.

29:04Sean Falconer:And I don't have to go use some other application to do that. Then why go somewhere else, right? You're creating essentially one experience that kind of serves your end to end purposes.

29:13Gregor Vand:Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So very kind of interesting. This is probably the first, I guess, pure acquisition we've seen in this space so far. A model provider outright buying the infra provider, if you like. I mean, Lovable, we reported on Lovable buying. The name of ASEMI now, but Lovable being Swedish, they also bought a Swedish, Malnet, that's the company. They bought Malnet, who, smaller outfit, three guys there, whereas Koyab, I think, is 13. And just has like, clearly bigger customers and more sort of advanced offerings. So less of an acqui-hire here, I think, and more of a full rollout team and infrastructure, which is super interesting.

29:54Gregor Vand:So the big topic, I mean, it kind of rolls off some of the things we've been talking about already. But we've just seen such an explosion of developments and advancements in the last four to five months in agentic engineering, really. So obviously OpenClaw has kind of brought things to a huge head on that one. But, you know, if we look at Anthropics, like Opus 4.6, and, you know, we've got GPT Codex, like, basically, it's even coming back into mainstream media, like that coding is being disrupted, which I found quite amusing, because it's like, why, why suddenly are all these mainstream media, the reference I was, I was going to bring out was just my dad literally messaged me and said, like, have you seen this?

30:40Gregor Vand:that I'm like, why is my dad retired, not in tech? Why is he suddenly reading things that are telling him that coding is being disrupted? I always look for these kind of bellwethers or canary in the coal mine kind of thing. What is the thing that's suddenly making people wake up to this? And it does seem that agentic coding is why. Basically, it's showing that it's not just ask code to be produced and code comes back, but suddenly all these other tasks are being completed in the background that is suddenly taking over developers like workflow completely basically

31:13Sean Falconer:yeah yeah i mean i think that there's probably a couple things that have gone into this but definitely feels like in the last four months what the developer experience is has changed drastically and i think that's it's gotten to the point where the tools plus the models are so good that even the naysayers are starting to realize that this is like undeniable what you can do with these things. Because when you were doing kind of like one shot, like you sent a prompt to a model and you're just like, hey, generate this function for me or take this function and help me like optimize this stuff. Like that's helpful.

31:48Sean Falconer:But I think you're seeing, you know, 20, 30%, maybe efficiency improvements there or something like that. Whereas now with the agentic engineering using things like cloud code or using cursor running Codex 5.3 from OpenAI or whatever it is, you're able to take stuff that would typically might take you hours to do and do it one shot prompt, and they're just able to do it. It's really incredible having spent some time using these tools myself in the last few weeks. I think it's purely there is really a transformational shift that's happening. And then on top of that, so, you know, we went from sort of co-pilots in assistance where it's really like autocomplete, you know, you're kind of one shot to now energetic engineering.

32:38Sean Falconer:And I think the evolution of that is now like these like Ralph Wigel loops and Gastown and sort of multi-agent orchestration. And there's some debate over like how ready those are, but people are really on the bleeding edge are doing that. And to use like Steve Yegg's language, it's like agents really take chat and basically put chat in the loop. And then these things like Ralph Wiggum, Gastown, and so forth are putting like kind of agents in the loop where you have multiple agents running. And you see these people, you know, talking about their setups online where they got like six Mac minis running like on their desk all the time so they can spin up more instances of quad code so they can always have an agent running.

33:17Sean Falconer:And so I think that the combination of the model and the tools getting to the point where they're really good at managing contacts and probably the explosion of the number of MCP servers that are available and things becoming more like easier for agents to sort of navigate. Clearly, there's to me, there's just this transformational shift that's happening. And I think that puts the entire industry in a place where there's probably some uncomfortable questions we need to be kind of asking ourselves. So exactly.

33:48Gregor Vand:I mean, just to kind of, I guess, semi-summarize to this point, the fact that models can use tools at all is already sort of quite a big step change.

33:57Sean Falconer:And use them reliably.

33:59Gregor Vand:Yeah, exactly. And use them reliably. And I mean, it still depends kind of on your interface to that. Like, I've been pretty impressed with actually Notion AI recently because it just has the tooling and the access to, you know, files and Slack and all this kind of stuff. but so models i mean when we say models can use tools you know the service that is built upon a model effectively can use the tools you then got you know multi-agent orchestration so the fact you can sub agents working in parallel and like as you were kind of alluding to like we've got these frameworks like gas town now where like you know you have kind of like a lead agent effectively and i love gas towns way of like a mayor and you've got uh which other people do they have they have like well yeah the mayor the town rigs crew members i mean i think it's really cool just a great way to like add a way for sort of people to kind of get their heads around what's going on and then something i've noticed just without any thinking of this previously but you know this idea of like context compaction where you know ai can actually summarize basically his own memory and then can like keep working on things without hitting limits you know like we're beyond the stage at least i feel on any paid plan now we're like on this on the stage now where you don't really you very seldom hit like oh i've run the course of my conversation it's like you can always add to a chat that you've had previously when it's able to do things with that and then you know you start off with say a new chat within in my case claude and i did get a bit of like oh that's scary like moment when it's like i'm asking something and it's like and so based on this project to do with x that you're already working on like i was like oh no it knows it it has all the context about me so i mean it was good but it was just a slightly strange moment when i was like ah it does reference back to these other things i've been working on okay understood yeah i think like one

35:49Sean Falconer:of the big things that we get out of this is and maybe we're not a hundred percent there but i feel like it's certainly going in that way is we're really compressing this like time from idea from idea to at least like POC. And we'll get to the point where it's like, you're really compressing the timeline from idea to production as well, where essentially the cost of like experimenting, it becomes almost zero other than like the token cost. But like, I could just tell Claude to go do something and, you know, one shot or maybe a couple of shots, like it's actually able to like accomplish that thing.

36:24Sean Falconer:And I think the interesting thing from my perspective is if we are really taking this thing that, you know, historically has been an expensive part of being able to create like a product is the time it takes to write the actual code. And you could press that cycle. Now, some of that cost shifts to like testing and test harness and stuff. And I think over time, maybe that will also start to go away as the LMs are actually able to take over a lot of that work. You know, what does that do to an organization? Like, how do we have to think about like, what is the modern organizational structure? We've been And kind of using roughly the same kind of organizational structure for like engineering, product teams, TPMs and stuff like that for probably 20 years.

37:05Sean Falconer:But in this world where you don't necessarily need like as deep expertise in particular, like language or framework, and you can experiment more freely. Do we need the same sort of ratio of PM to engineers that we've had previously? Do the lines between different technical roles start to blur drastically? Do you have front end and back end? Do you have people who are expertise? I think in many ways, like the deep expertise in particular technologies starts to lose some value when you can rely on the agent to do that. So then it's like, oh, well, you need sort of more broad expertise to understand architecturally how these things fit together.

37:42Sean Falconer:there's probably other things that come to play in terms of what the value of a person starts to transform into being like the taste how many ideas they can come up with like what is that new choke point for a company if it's not sort of the laborious task of writing the code yeah exactly

37:59Gregor Vand:and yeah i think you mentioned like in passing around are we seeing the you know the end of the the 10x engineer basically you know the 10x like asshole effectively yeah like i mean we've all

38:11Sean Falconer:probably had worked on teams or been in companies where there's someone who's kind of like the jerky engineer or jerky expert, but people tolerate it because they have deep expertise in something. Like maybe they've been there for a long time and they're the only person who understands like the full breadth of this code base, or they really know the specific type of technology or something. And people kind of put up with that. But if the models are really good at that, you know, does the 10X asshole essentially, does that role have a place in the modern AI forward company versus other types of skills that are maybe higher value like interpersonal skills driving alignment you know sort of the human component of it and i mean i think looking at

38:51Gregor Vand:the actual tooling that you know has has changed we obviously talked quite a lot at the beginning about about open claw but part of i think the reason it's really then also jolted everyone first of all it's open source you know and it's not tied to one of the models specifically and you know it's come out of like as we call effectively one one guy okay very talented guy but you know one guy has has been able to kind of put this thing together and then i think it's for whatever reason it's shown a lot of people what they can actually do with agents that for some reason like claude and open ai weren't able to fully show or maybe had sort of lulled people into a sense of well no claude and chat gpt are for x and that's you know quote nothing to do with agents, which is obviously they're trying to shift the narrative on that.

39:39Gregor Vand:But we've only kind of maybe seen that narrative shift very, very recently with Opus and Codex, basically. Is that kind of what you see as well?

39:47Sean Falconer:I think that's fair. And I think there's also been this, now the shift that's happened where sort of the CLI and the desktop is becoming like the housing use for the agent. And then the agent has the ability to kind of reach out to these different systems, whether it's like local systems or could be things on the web and doing, you know, search or talking over MTP or whatever it happens to be. And I think that's an interesting shift. I don't know that that's something that would have been obvious and will it stay or not, I don't know. But it seems like people are almost like more comfortable running these things within their local environment.

40:23Sean Falconer:And part of that probably has to be probably related to the fact that so much of this is kind of tied to specifically to agentic engineering. And even though so many things exist on the web, a lot of engineers still prefer like to run an IDE locally and have the code available to them locally. And I think, you know, Claude and some of these other agentic engineering tools have done a good job of mapping to that existing like way of working that engineers are used to where you can do these things, you know, within your local environment while still giving them sort of the power to touch all these different systems.

40:55Gregor Vand:So, I mean, yeah, I think as you're kind of touching on in terms of where is engineering going i mean we almost touch on this at some point every month i think i feel we always have to because there are just always these leaps each month and something is being questioned around what is it to be a software engineer now but yeah i mean i do see that the jobs that are sticking around are the ones where you know someone has say like broad knowledge over something and it does require you know human judgment interpersonal skills you know i think the interpersonal skills is an interesting one because there's still a lot that goes on in companies where quite frankly it is just people are not agreeing on something and actually often it requires maybe a third person to come and kind of be the person to get the two experts to agree on how you're going to get a path forwards and i don't at least i don't see almost like flipping a coin i don't see that two experts are going to go oh we'll just let open claw decide for us or something like you know because because then they'll say oh well how are you prompting or how your agents set up and how so how how can we trust this so there's always going to be so long as a human is in the loop somewhere which which they very much are there's always still going to be room for humans with engineering knowledge but i think yeah perhaps more on the the softer stuff which is just a higher level judgment or negotiation effectively.

42:18Gregor Vand:Negotiation being actually a big one as well.

42:21Sean Falconer:Yeah, I mean, I think that there's engineering certainly isn't just about writing code. It's really about solving problems and operating software systems and potentially operating those things at massive scale. And I don't think that just having an agent that can code for you necessarily takes away all those problems. I think the big question that people are having right now is do you need as many engineers doing this if you take sort of the coding piece of that off the plate? Can you have one engineer that's now able to do what 10 people did before? I think that's kind of the big sort of uncomfortable question that everybody in the world of technology is kind of wrestling with.

42:59Sean Falconer:And it's just like if you see past trends, like we had the Industrial Revolution that made the labor involved with things like farming not as intense. so you didn't need as many farmers it's not like farmers went away completely but you could have essentially less of them doing more work and that led to an explosion in growth of humans around the world and all kinds of other things so there was like a ton of good things that came out of that but obviously there's like this transitional period that's you know kind of uncomfortable and

43:30Gregor Vand:not great for everybody yeah absolutely so yeah i mean i think we'll maybe kind of leave it there this week with the sort of main topic. So, and it was just, as we were saying, looking at what has happened in the last like three, four or five months that suddenly has caused, you know, the world to sort of declare that software engineering is over. Like, you know, within our own circles, we've already been posing that sort of slightly existential question of like, who are we now and where do we bring value? But, you know, we can find the pockets that make sense. It's, I think, when the sort of world declares it and, you know, stocks of SaaS companies are going down significantly because the reasoning was, oh, well, now that you have things like Codex, who needs a SaaS company?

44:14Gregor Vand:And I just found that such a classic kind of financier's way of looking at the world. It's like, oh, we've read this piece of news about Codex, and suddenly a SaaS company has no value in it anymore. I mean, it's just, yeah, it's such a knee-jerk reaction.

44:27Sean Falconer:Yeah, I mean, there's so much more that goes into those SaaS companies than even just the code. The other thing too, that I think is interesting about this is in some ways, I think that these tools bring back the like hobbyist developer, because now with like less time, you can create sort of one-off compelling as almost like applications are ephemeral. Like you can create sort of just try something, it doesn't work, or maybe you just create it for some, to solve some specific problem. You can spin that out without a lot of like cost and effort. Now it's kind of like in the 80s, there was less engineers, but a lot of people were hobbyists.

45:05Sean Falconer:They were interested in technology and they were building things. And you could actually build software that eventually sometimes got used by lots of people or games that got used by lots of people as like a single individual. And I think we're now in a similar place, like an open closet example where, you know, he was able to create basically one person, create this system that was used by a bunch of different people got a ton of attention, I think we'll see similar things start to come up more and more. There's also going to be more garbage and more noise as well. So how do you break up the noise?

45:36Sean Falconer:But I think that's one of the really powerful things. I've certainly been doing a lot more of that kind of one-off projects, things for my kids, all kinds of stuff, because the cost of actually making that thing happen is so low.

45:49Gregor Vand:Yeah, for sure. And just kind of, you know, I think it got to a stage where, at least I found this, where if I was creating something more as a hobbyist like the problem being that the level of like uix etc is that if you want to show it to anyone then just the expected level is always like just increasingly higher you know and friction barriers as low as possible etc so whilst we had obviously just to plug super base things like super base speeding up things like getting a database up and running and some auth and that kind of stuff so much was still slow slow slow before this came along and you'd still be presenting a very crappy looking, even just Tailwind, etc.

46:29Gregor Vand:It's still, someone would say, yeah, but that's just Tailwind. So like, why doesn't it look nicer? Or like, this is just a sort of hobbyist app. So yeah, it's interesting the time decrease to produce something that people like take very seriously now, which is interesting. So moving on to our final, usually best part of the show, Hacker News Highlights. So yeah, last time we only really had time for one. so we wanted to make sure we got a few more in this week. Yeah, I'll let you kick off, Sean. What's the first one that you wanted to highlight?

46:59Sean Falconer:Yeah, so the first one that I pulled was this article called Old School Visual Effects to Cloud Tank. I thought it was interesting. So he has a bunch of articles and blog posts about sort of movie special effects, and he rants a little bit about computer-generated effects. And this particular post talks about how cloud tanks work, which I'd never heard of before, But essentially, these are these large water tanks that used to be used to create atmospheric effects. So Close Encounters, Indiana Jones, like a lot of movies that were shot in like back in the 80s by Steven Spielberg and stuff. You use these big water tanks to create certain visual effects.

47:37Sean Falconer:And it goes into a lot of detail about like how those things work and how they were constructed for these particular movies. So really, really cool post.

47:44Gregor Vand:Oh, awesome. Cool. I'll check that out. I assume like we're talking sort of like a cloud tank. like if you want to be showing like oh everything's very like misty in the jungle or something i don't

47:54Sean Falconer:know is that kind of the idea yeah exactly so like close encounters they used it to i think create some of the atmospheric effects around like when the aliens were arriving on earth and things like

48:04Gregor Vand:that so yeah oh awesome yeah i love scenes like that so cool okay on my side first one it was called I converted 2D conventional flight tracking into 3D. So user Q on it, K-E-W-O-N-I-T. Thank you for posting that. So I'm already a Flightradar24 subscriber. I can't quite remember all the extra things you get when you subscribe at least at one level, but I live on a flight path in Singapore. So I find it really fun to just look out the window and be able to kind of see what flight that is that's coming in i actually live on two flight paths one is a military flight path and one is a civilian so it's kind of fun you've got a fighter jet coming in quite close to the to my building actually and then you've got like civilian just slightly further away and even when i'm in like scotland i like kind of again there are planes going from like asia over to europe because they kind of carve that arc over the top of the so yeah this is uh someone who has kind of put this into more of a 3D kind of model, which is kind of cool.

49:07Gregor Vand:So I just love when it's nothing like massively revolutionary, but at the same time, no one else has done it to my understanding where you're actually just seeing a slightly nicer way of representing these planes and they kind of show roughly the trajectory and the direction they're taking. I think also it helps with, you know, you can pan, tilt, rotate, all that stuff. So you can actually see the altitude levels more clearly, which i think is also interesting because i think many people don't realize like you will quite often have like three planes stacked actually on top of each other basically on the same flight path but like 2 000 feet apart 2 000 feet maybe yeah i probably know yeah about 2 000 feet so if you look for like on some of the key flight paths you've got like yeah three triple sevens like on top of each other and it's true but it's just that they have to take like different altitudes but like these busy flight paths that's just how they operate so pretty cool very cool very cool so yeah obviously you can just plug in whichever airport's nearest to you and it sort of zooms over there but ultimately it's like a globe thing i think so thanks to the people that put that

50:12Sean Falconer:together what was your next one sean yeah so this was pretty cool it's um guy reverse engineered sid meyers railroad tycoon for dos from 1990 so and he has a write-up about it but essentially he hit the memory you know the game money limit which i forget it's some small integer value you can imagine from like a you know dos from 1990 but in his kids also they just wanted to be able to like build railroads so he wanted to also make it like simpler for them to use it so he did a full ground up pour of the game and dug through all the assembly and rebuilt it to run natively with modern graphics i think one of the other things he wanted to do was like the original aspect ratio It's like 320 by 240 or something like that.

50:56Sean Falconer:So he wanted to make it, you know, be able to be bigger. The article goes into a lot of these things that like he discovered from like 1990s engineering, which you had to do so much like optimization because you only had so many CPU cycles. You only had so much memory cycles or so much memory and stuff like that. So the game like uses overlays that overwrite code at runtime. There's a bunch of like frame buffer color tricks going on in there. He ended up fixing the money overflow bug. He made the rendering resolution independent. He removed some of the save limits and he added like a play alone mode all to it.

51:31Sean Falconer:Really cool feat of reverse engineering of this game from the early 90s.

51:36Gregor Vand:Nice. Has he been able to like release the code for that or does he not?

51:40Sean Falconer:That's a good question. I didn't see that in the write-up I saw about it, but.

51:43Gregor Vand:Yeah, because I'm just wondering, he probably maybe can't just for like copyright reasons.

51:48Sean Falconer:Yeah, well, I don't know. I mean, at this point it's been, what 37 years so they do the copyright laws don't even apply i feel video games is the one that

51:57Gregor Vand:there's always some weird thing going on where someone somewhere has the rights to it and won't respond or like just says no and you know like golden eye being the obvious one like golden eyes from the intento 64 has cannot be re-released basically because three different companies technically own the rights to it and they won't agree on anything so never happened basically cool but very yeah very cool almost feels like such a over engineering just to like fix a money

52:23Sean Falconer:buck but i mean that's great yeah i guess he's really really liked uh yeah yeah railroad tycoon

52:29Gregor Vand:yeah my final one was just i just actually you just got very a lot of points up over a thousand graphene os so just yeah kind of plugging graphene os i guess which is kind of cool it's currently the only disappointing thing is that it's only for pixel phones right now i run a nothing that Yeah, so it's an open source OS, instead of what you would get as your base Android. So it is based on the Android open source project, but it differs quite a lot apparently, and the big piece is security and much less tracking, effectively. Android these days is just baked with so much Google tracking in it, and so they say it's distinguished by a hardening of the kernel and key components, which does make it less vulnerable to hacking but actually also that it has Google Play services running in an isolated environment so that sort of allows you can use popular applications without having to grant like the broad permissions that they mostly ask for and it's hard to reject permissions at least on Android for me they've got better like some will be auto disabled if they're not being used and that kind of thing but I think there's probably a lot more going on than we realize That's like why Graphene OS does kind of exist.

53:45Gregor Vand:So yeah, just thought that was kind of cool. Great to see still innovation in the OS space and especially on mobile devices as well.

53:54Sean Falconer:Yeah, very cool.

53:56Gregor Vand:Yeah, so we're almost at time, I guess. But yeah, just, I don't know, looking ahead, predictions. We always come back the next month and say, why didn't we think about how this could have played out? But yeah, if you had to pick something that you think we might be talking about next month, Sean, what would that be?

54:11Sean Falconer:I think there's going to be more sort of verticalized versions of things like quad code. Like there's already been like they already launched co-work for like Anthropic. There's I think they did like some sort of financial services, like quad for financial services. I'm just using Anthropic as an example. But I think that a lot of these companies are looking for other ways, I think, to bring this technology to the masses beyond just like engineering. I think the tricky part, especially with some of the agent stuff, is that engineering is set up well, I think, for these environments to be successful because there are so many things where it's kind of like a harsh environment.

54:51Sean Falconer:There's ways of checking failure conditions. And we also have a lot of things set up to help undo actions. Like if you commit something and you don't like it, well, you can branch on Git and then you can try something out in an isolated environment and so forth. Hard to do that in, I don't know, legal profession, for example. So some of these things, it's like, how are you going to translate those things over? But I think that's where we're going to get. I think we're going to have sort of more deep verticalization of some of this technology.

55:17Gregor Vand:Yeah, I mean, I think maybe mine's sort of similar. But yeah, I think just based on what we saw with the Koyab acquisition, I think things are moving pretty fast here. And I think we're going to see, yeah, someone, one of, you know, OpenAI, Anthropic, I'm trying to think who else it could be. But yeah, come out with something more towards this idea of, you know, if you're using this for code, don't run that code somewhere else, like basically run it related to us. So again, like trying to take on some of the quote vibe codes operators. And, you know, I was talking to someone in DevRel last week and they were convinced that actually like a lot of the vibe code crew had sort of moved to cursor, interestingly.

55:59Gregor Vand:so like lovable was being seen as like not pro enough or something and so cursor was actually like where they were moving to i can't substantiate that i just think it's interesting that someone in dev rel that's what they were seeing but that would suggest that like everyone's moving a little bit upstream in terms of like someone that might have started with lovable six months ago actually is like oh that's that's not enough for me now i want to take something else so yeah that was kind kind of feed into this idea of like, does Cloud Code spin up a backend for you or something?

56:32Sean Falconer:Yeah, makes sense.

56:33Gregor Vand:Cool. So yeah, we will catch up again next month. Yeah, I hope the house, are you moving this month, the next month as well?

56:40Sean Falconer:Well, we'll start the move and then be in there probably first week of merge.

56:44Gregor Vand:Yeah, nice. All right. Well, that'll be the first one from first episode, I guess we do from that place. So cool. See you there. Thanks everyone for joining. We'll catch you next time.

56:53Sean Falconer:Thanks, Aaron.

56:57Thank you.