Scaling

`1:24:01`

where each request has so little value, you can't afford to use a luxurious language like Ruby to program in it. You simply have to slum it with a C or a Go or some other low level language or Rust, talk about line noise there for... — It's like the thrift store of languages. — Exactly, where you need kind of just... you need a very low level to do it. You can't afford to use a luxury language to use to build it with. That's not true of Shopify. It wasn't true of Basecamp even back in 2004. It's not been true of 99% of all web applications ever created because the main cost component of 99% of web applications, it's not CPU course. It's wet course. It's human course. It's human capacity to understand and involve systems. It's their personal productivity. I did a calculation once when someone had for the 400th time said that, "Oh, if you switch from Ruby to some faster language,

`1:25:02`

you could save a bunch of money." And I calculated it out that at the time, and I think the last time I did this calculation was almost a decade ago. We were spending about 15% of our operating budget on Ruby application service. So for me to improve my cost profile of the business by seven percentage points, I'd have to pick something twice as fast. That's quite hard. Versus if Ruby and Ruby on Rails was even 10% more productive than something else, I would move the needle far more because making individual programmers more productive actually matters a lot more. This is why people are so excited about AI. This is why they're freaking out over the fact that a single programmer in Silicon Valley who makes $300,000 a year can now do the work of three or five, at least in theory. I haven't actually seen that fully in practice, but let's just assume the theory is correct if not now, then in six months. That's a huge deal. That matters so much more

`1:26:02`

than whether you can squeeze a few more cycles out of the CPU, when it comes to these kinds of business applications. If you're making unreal engine rendering stuff like Tim Sweeney you had on. Yeah, he needs to really sweat all those details. The Nanite engine can't run on Ruby. It's never going to. It would not meant for that, fine. These kinds of business applications absolutely can and everything that people are excited about AI for right now, that extra capacity to just do more. That was why we were excited about Ruby back in the early 2000s. That was be because I saw that if we could even squeeze out a 10% improvement of the human programmer, we'd be able to do so much more for so much less. — Probably argue about this, but I really like working together with AI, collaborating with AI. And I would argue that the kind of code you want AI to generate is human readable, human interpretable. If it's generating Perl golf code,