alt Hacker NewsIt’s crazy what a small group of smart people can achieve if they’re not captive to conventional wisdom.
They got crushed by the commodity curve and Moore’s Law. But still a great story - and thankfully written by a real person.
The author’s idea that the commodity curve is over and that hardware is now cheap enough to make special purpose hardware viable is intriguing. Standardization used to be important because you needed to convince scarce programmers to invest in the platform, but AI has ended the scarcity of programmers so dedicated purpose hardware is more viable than ever.
There are several cycles that bring tech ideas in and out of fashion because of market conditions, intersecting tech cycles, other implications of Moore's Law, or whatever.
Another trend, for example, might be centralized vs distributed: terminals (thin clients) and mainframes gave way to fat client PCs on prem, and then back to thin clients with cloud stuff.