I'm writing my first book now. It's a novel aimed at teenagers and young adults, in a technical format similar to "The Phoenix Project" by Gene Kim et al., if you're familiar with it. It explores FOSS, non-proprietary file formats, digital preservation, cryptography, and the concept of freedom as a whole. I resonate with the author of the article who discusses motivation to write and the "existential crisis" that comes and goes almost every day. I've been fighting those negative feelings by adopting the mindset that I'm writing the book for myself. It's a book I've always wanted to read, which I can then lend to my teenage children so they can read it as well. Everything else (commercially speaking) will be a nice consequence of this endeavor.
Amazing: the website's index page has the book's index in it. While this makes perfect sense, it's a kind of a feature that is becoming rare in today's tech book websites which display all sorts of marketing fluff, social confirmations etc and not the structure of the book itself.
I first read about Unpoly in Stephan Schmidt's Radical Simplicity website[1], I liked it's value prop and decided to try it. I found it bit too complex just as you said. A long time later I came across htmx and decided to try it even after reading a side comment that the library was "like unpoly". 15 minutes later I had a simple to-do list running htmx ajax calls using php and mysqlite in the backend. It was so easy I could not believe such thing could exist. Then I decided to read the Hypermedia book and never stopped using htmx in my projects.
Using metaphors is dangerous, but I would dare to say that big tech AI is like cement suppliers. It's too low level of a service. In civil engineering you have the option to contract value added suppliers that will give you prefabricated pieces in concrete or steel you could be using to build your construction.
I'm seeing a lot of AI firms building value added services on top of big tech "foundational" AI offerings. Value addition can start very early at a clear plans/billing structure, going through rate limiting, documentation and extra features that will bring stability or consistency to our AI enhanced products.
Going the other way around (I tried) and building things on top of big tech AI is challenging starting at the fundamentals as the OP described well.
Openrouter is roughly at that level of value-add. With plenty of competition now, since being able to charge 5% on your AI spend just for having sane billing, spending controls (actually enforced per-api-token budget limits!) and easy sign-up is an insanely profitable business proposition
On the other hand I think it's fair to criticize the model hosts for not offering the same
(I work at OpenRouter) Certainly for individual developers / hobby projects that's the primary value prop; super easy access to all of the models.
But there's a lot more functionality that becomes relevant when building in production. We do automatic fallbacks, route between providers based on data policies, syndicate your data to agent observability tools / your logging platform of choice, user-level and api-key-level budget management and model allow/block lists, programmatic API key management, etc, etc. More good stuff shipping all the time!
I've been catching myself thinking about this idea for the last two years. Maybe it's my old obsession with PKI and "personal digital infrastructures" that were both promised to us in the early days of the commercial Internet, but never turned concrete for various reasons.
IMHO, the best we could have today in terms of digital infrastructure is a personal/family level custom Mastodon node with basic Internet services like email, posts, tasks, chat, IM etc. but implemented in a way that all data would be portable to other services (open standards) and its storage would be "bottomless", meaning that users wouldn't have to worry about storage limitation for photos/videos for instance, as they would be sharing resources with other nodes worldwide. There would have to be some monetary incentive(s), of course, but they would be secondary to the bigger cause of keeping a true cyber interconnected community outside big tech.
I agree with a lot of that. I think the hard part is, who runs the nodes. If you hand a piece of hardware that people run in their house that's one thing. But if you expect them to run it themselves in the cloud it never goes well unless you have an engineer in the family. Maybe automation can allow the ability to spin up these nodes but ultimately it might be easier to support multitenancy and let a group of people run it e.g like every other saas service. But I guess the difference is the values on which it's founded. Every commercial or VC funded product goes the same way. Whereas stuff like Let's Encrypt has gone in a different direction. I'm not saying I have all the answers but some of these things we always seem to struggle to overcome. One thing I will say, the people who run it matter. Their motivations and their morale flexibility affects direction e.g ChatGPT has led OpenAI in a very different direction than first intended. Why is that?
A question to the community: would it be a (legal) problem if I decided to download digital copies of the physical books I already have in my bookshelf? I was thinking on using Anna's Archive for that. Hobby project.
17 USC 106 gives copyright holders exclusive rights to reproduce and distribute copies; no exemption exists for downloading digital copies because you own the physical book, and fair use (17 USC 107) is unlikely to apply when commercial alternatives exist and you’re copying entire works from unauthorized distributors.
> you’re copying entire works from unauthorized distributors
Yep, this sounds like an issue. So the idea from MP3 early days of "let me download these files as a backup before I lend my CD collection to my cousin" is not a real option.
As far as my extremely poor understanding of the law goes: this depends on where you live but generally you are not allowed to download a digital copy of a physical book you own, but you are allowed to create your own [1].
It may also be worth noting that most jurisdictions are only interested in distribution, not downloading, so the chances of prosecution are slim. A small company you may have heard of called Meta is currently using a similar argument in US court [2].
I like this website. It's very entertaining to me, and a bit nostalgic too. And those minimalist websites also help us remember the importance of building things to last the effects of time. Most of them are good candidates to stay online for the next 15 or 20 Internet years to come (almost like eternity in human terms).
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