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Speaker 1: dot com. Hey, and welcome back to dot net rocks.
Speaker 1: I'm Carl Franklin and Amateurd Capbell, and Anthony Eden is
Speaker 1: here with us. We'll include him in the intro bits.
Speaker 1: But I'm sure you're gonna like what he has to say.
Speaker 1: But first, mister Campbell, how are you.
Speaker 2: I'm good man. It's good to be home for a
Speaker 2: few weeks. You know, it's hard to be unhappy. This
Speaker 2: is a lovely place to be in the summertime. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I'm actually in Brooklyn, New York, visiting the fam. Nice
Speaker 1: and going to a deli for lunch. Yeah, the grand
Speaker 1: baby going to kats Is Delhi for lunch.
Speaker 2: Nice. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Right after this, all about the pastromi, All about the pastrami.
Speaker 1: This is episode two thousand and eight, So I'm going
Speaker 1: to start with the you know, significant stories of that year.
Speaker 1: The big one is the global financial crisis.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I pulled together a timeline on this. Okay, you
Speaker 2: want to hear it. Yeah, sure. So in January there's
Speaker 2: a fifteen percent stock declining on the world market side,
Speaker 2: which was weird because it seemed to come out of nowhere.
Speaker 2: Later we'd find out that, you know, the US is
Speaker 2: already in recession as of December two thousand and seven,
Speaker 2: but at the time it was kind of a surprise.
Speaker 2: And then March gold hits a thousand dollars an ounce
Speaker 2: for the first time ever. And then we start getting
Speaker 2: the recession calls, and Denmark is sort of the first
Speaker 2: to cough up and go, I think we're actually in recession.
Speaker 2: Olds Minor. The big news in the US before we
Speaker 2: really get going on this thing is when suddenly the
Speaker 2: US government, this is the Bush administration, takes control of
Speaker 2: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mack because all of these subprime
Speaker 2: mortgages are starting to implode. And then Goldman Sachs and
Speaker 2: Morgan Stanley convert themselves. They stop being independent investment banks
Speaker 2: and become bank holding companies. It's really a way of
Speaker 2: limiting liability, but that really kicks off the storm because
Speaker 2: then Lehman Brothers goes down, Washington Mutual goes down the
Speaker 2: Dow and drops seven hundred and seventy seven points, the
Speaker 2: largest single day point loss ever. And then by October
Speaker 2: Bush signs the seven hundred billion dollar bailoup bill, the
Speaker 2: UK kicks sixty four billion into UK banks to stop
Speaker 2: their collapse. Then Bloody Friday, which is another ten percent
Speaker 2: market decline worldwide, the IMF kicks a billion and a
Speaker 2: half dollars over to Iceland to stop their banks from
Speaker 2: going down. And then by November the Eurozone as a
Speaker 2: whole is in recession for the first time since nineteen
Speaker 2: ninety nine, and the Dawn it's its lowest level since
Speaker 2: the nineties.
Speaker 1: So if you want a couple of media plays that
Speaker 1: really explain what happened, the big Short, of course, Phenomenal
Speaker 1: Film is a great movie.
Speaker 2: Very good, very good movie. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And also this American Life podcast and PBS or NBR
Speaker 1: show did an episode called the Giant Pool of Money,
Speaker 1: which basically said, you know all these investors were putting pressure, Well,
Speaker 1: they're always looking for places to put to hold money, right,
Speaker 1: and so the subprime mortgages answered the call and so
Speaker 1: it just everybody rushed in to buy these things which
Speaker 1: were based on nothing, and hilarity ensued. Also, the guys
Speaker 1: who did that episode of This American Life started another
Speaker 1: podcast called Planet Money, and it's a really good one
Speaker 1: if you want to just.
Speaker 2: Was it out of the subprime crisis? Is that what
Speaker 2: got me to do that show? That's really interesting?
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I didn't know that was the origin of it.
Speaker 3: That's that's pretty awesome. It makes total sense, it does.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. Well. Also, you know what else starts this
Speaker 2: year pretty much for exactly the same reason. What's that bitcoin? Yeah,
Speaker 2: that's right. Yeah, and the fall in the fall of
Speaker 2: two thousand and eight is when the pseudonym Natoshi Nakamoto
Speaker 2: publishes the bitcoin paper ticks that hole. Would it have
Speaker 2: happened without this this subcrime, this sort of crisis of
Speaker 2: banking as a whole, this you know, illusion of the
Speaker 2: we're bursting, the illusion of how finance actually works. But yeah,
Speaker 2: it's all in the same year.
Speaker 1: Good question. Yeah. Also, in two thousand and eight, Barack
Speaker 1: Obama is elected, Yeah, the first African American president of
Speaker 1: the United States, and that I thought started a really
Speaker 1: good recovery period for America, Russia and Georgia went to war.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the Russia of Georgian War, which self Osentia is
Speaker 2: the area it's a quote unquote Breakeray region. Now, to
Speaker 2: be clear, the Russians had been funding a set of
Speaker 2: dissenters in Georgia for some time, that in Advocasia as well,
Speaker 2: and this finally lit off into this little five day
Speaker 2: skirmish so to speak. Before it Ceasfars negotiated through France,
Speaker 2: although by the end of August Russia will just declare
Speaker 2: them their own countries, which is ridiculous. But you know,
Speaker 2: if you're wondering about the behavior of Ukraine, like this
Speaker 2: had been going on for some time, and this was
Speaker 2: an example of it because Georgia had become more and
Speaker 2: more EU friendly, you know, they were leaning towards we
Speaker 2: want those the same thing the Baltic States have gotten,
Speaker 2: you know, more countries that this is the year that
Speaker 2: like Malta joins the EU and so forth. So this
Speaker 2: scared the snot out of Russia and this is how
Speaker 2: they stop this. So you look at regions like you know,
Speaker 2: Southeast Centia, but also Transnistria and Moldova, they're all following
Speaker 2: the same format, which is that Russia funds dissenters to
Speaker 2: create breakaway states, no knowing that one of the NATO
Speaker 2: rules is you can't have a border conflict before you
Speaker 2: join NATO. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Also the Beijing Olympics two thousand and eight Summer Olympics
Speaker 1: in Michael Felping, Michael Phelps, Usain Bolt were the darlings
Speaker 1: of that of that contest in Mumbai, there were some
Speaker 1: terrorist attacks that were pretty bad in November, more than
Speaker 1: one hundred and sixty people killed. India and Pakistan obviously
Speaker 1: have been at each other's throats for a while, but
Speaker 1: now Iowa and Midwest flooding, severe flooding in the United States,
Speaker 1: large portions of the US Midwest. Kosovo declared independence from
Speaker 1: Serbia in February. Also interesting stuff going on there. In China,
Speaker 1: there was an earthquake disaster, terrible Sichuan earthquake, seventy thousand
Speaker 1: people or so and left millions homeless. The seventy thousand
Speaker 1: people were killed, deadliest natural disaster of the decade. Of course,
Speaker 1: you know, the financial crisis prompted sharp increases in food
Speaker 1: and fuel prices, and that was across many countries. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and concerns about inflation and global supply chains became major issues. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and of course Israel and Hamas that conflict escalated, culminating
Speaker 1: in the launch of Operation cast Lead in December or
Speaker 1: is it cast Lead, I can't remember, but yeah, so, yeah,
Speaker 1: bad year. A lot of economic woes that would later
Speaker 1: continue arguably are still echoing today. Absolutely.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Do you want some science news?
Speaker 1: Yeah? What about science and space and tech?
Speaker 2: September is when CERN powers up the large Hadron clouded
Speaker 2: for the first time. They'll do their first collisions in
Speaker 2: two thousand nine in the pursuit of the Higgs boson.
Speaker 2: On the space side, we have some awesome activity in
Speaker 2: deep space. This is when the Messenger spacecraft makes a
Speaker 2: couple of fly bys of Mercury for the first time
Speaker 2: since the seventies, both in January and in October. Out
Speaker 2: at Saturn, Cassini is doing multiple flybys of both Titan
Speaker 2: and in sedleists. And remember, and this is Rob Connery's
Speaker 2: fault because he wrote a book around this accidentally, was
Speaker 2: is really a data analytics book, The first Images of Encetalists.
Speaker 2: They caught a cryo volcano just by luck. Nobody knew
Speaker 2: that in setlist was active, it was considered an iceball.
Speaker 2: It couldn't have been interesting, too small, and yet here
Speaker 2: was this image of a cryovolcano in its first test photo.
Speaker 2: They just got lucky and literally rewrote the Cassini mission
Speaker 2: to focus on it setlists, and in two thousand and
Speaker 2: eight they will fly within twenty five kilometers of the
Speaker 2: surface of it. Settleist. Not the easiest fly by they'll do.
Speaker 2: They'll do those, some of those later, but very very
Speaker 2: close and really blew up with this idea of the
Speaker 2: Goldilock zone for where life could exist on ound other bodies. Yeah,
Speaker 2: they're steeped in heavy radiation, but underneath that ball of
Speaker 2: ice there's liquid ocean that's salty and active and warm.
Speaker 2: So exciting times, pretty amazing. On the International Space Station side,
Speaker 2: we have four missions by the Shuttle February, March, May
Speaker 2: and November, all building up different equipment. The Columbus module,
Speaker 2: which is the European laboratory, the two Japanese modules, both
Speaker 2: the pressurized section and the Kibo module, which is a
Speaker 2: sort of porch for doing vacuum experiments, and plenty of resupply,
Speaker 2: crew supply and things like that. India does their first
Speaker 2: mission to the Moon, Chendra one. We'll launch in October
Speaker 2: and reach the Moon in November, successfully putting making only
Speaker 2: the fourth nation to have gone in orbit around the Moon,
Speaker 2: after Russia or after US, Soviet Union and China. Then
Speaker 2: there's SpaceX, the third and fourth and final flight of
Speaker 2: Falcon one. Falcon the third flight in August, this flying
Speaker 2: with the Merlin one C single engine, worked perfectly right
Speaker 2: up until stage separation. There was enough residual energy coming
Speaker 2: from the lower stage that at stage separation the boost
Speaker 2: the first stage booster bumped back into the second stage,
Speaker 2: damaging it so that it's not able to go into orbit.
Speaker 2: SpaceX realizes is just a timing issue and literally just
Speaker 2: delays the separation a bit longer, so that a month
Speaker 2: later in September, they do a flight that actually fully
Speaker 2: goes into orbit, the first time a commercial company will
Speaker 2: put any kind of payload to orbit successfully. It was
Speaker 2: the fourth flight. It's the point at which so supposedly
Speaker 2: Elon was totally out of money. This was it or
Speaker 2: they were going to fail. That being said, later that year,
Speaker 2: in December, they'll get a billion and a half dollars
Speaker 2: from NASA for the for the commercial resupply of the
Speaker 2: space station and staff up to about five hundred employees.
Speaker 2: They'll skip making Falcon five, which was a five engine
Speaker 2: version of the Merlin, and go directly to the Falcon nine,
Speaker 2: which will take a little while to get built. In
Speaker 2: September the Rosetta mission, another deep space mission. This is
Speaker 2: the asteroid mission they're going to. This is the year
Speaker 2: that they make an eight hundred klimeter fly by of
Speaker 2: the asteroid Steins, and then in twenty ten they'll reach Lutilla,
Speaker 2: which is the as Main Belt asteroid for the first
Speaker 2: time ever. All right in computing. In January, get our
Speaker 2: first public draft of HTML five. Yeah, so you know
Speaker 2: that's it's still still years away from being really implemented,
Speaker 2: but this was, you know, everybody's waiting on this thing.
Speaker 2: Essentially in February, Vista SP one and the sort of
Speaker 2: commercial release of Vista. They had put out the initial
Speaker 2: versions in November of two thousand and seven, but that
Speaker 2: was only the enterprise edition. It was also the no
Speaker 2: enterprise would touch an SP zero version of anything, so
Speaker 2: the fact that was full of bugs was not a
Speaker 2: big deal. But of course all the reviewers did install it,
Speaker 2: find all the bugs and talk about them. So by
Speaker 2: February nobody wants Vista. Server two thousand and eight's also
Speaker 2: released the same time. This is also year we get
Speaker 2: dot net Framework three five one, which fixes a bunch
Speaker 2: of WPF problems that were found because of the development
Speaker 2: of silver Light. Yeah. So October the PDC two thousand
Speaker 2: and eight we get silver Light two, which is the
Speaker 2: first version of Silverlight that supports the dot net framework.
Speaker 2: Of course, that's dot net Framework three, the interim version
Speaker 2: that was made to pick up the fallout from Vista.
Speaker 2: But a reminder that that was also a version that
Speaker 2: ran a kind of the clr A runtime on the Mac,
Speaker 2: although only the Intel version of the Mac raitional silver
Speaker 2: Light one release, which didn't have any dot Net and
Speaker 2: it ran on the power Pc version of the Mac,
Speaker 2: which of course was also being based out. Remember the
Speaker 2: PDC two thousand and eight, and I think you do
Speaker 2: because we were there together. That was the one where
Speaker 2: they had the community sessions where people could submit session
Speaker 2: ideas and the community would vote on them, and the
Speaker 2: number one most voted for session was Miguel Diakazan Mono
Speaker 2: and Microsoft wasn't willing to do it, so they turned
Speaker 2: pulled it out, turned it down, and Miguel came anyway,
Speaker 2: just bought a ticket like a regular person. We just
Speaker 2: followed around, were by a lot of people. Yeah, but
Speaker 2: that was also that was an interesting time. That was
Speaker 2: an interesting time indeed. And that's also the PDC where
Speaker 2: Ray Ozzie announced Windows Azure. Because this is also the
Speaker 2: year the Gates steps down even as chairman of Microsoft,
Speaker 2: to go full time on the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Speaker 2: A couple other notable starts in two thousand and eight.
Speaker 2: This is the year that Google Market stands up. You
Speaker 2: now know it is Google Play, this is Android and
Speaker 2: the response to the app store from Iphie for the
Speaker 2: previous year. And also the year that GitHub starts with
Speaker 2: its tagline social coding. You know, there have been plenty
Speaker 2: of other code repositories out there, but this one had
Speaker 2: the social media element as well. Right, Also the year
Speaker 2: Airbnb is founded and the year that stack Overflow goes live.
Speaker 1: Airbnb was founded by two guys from Rhode Island School
Speaker 1: of Design, And when I went to Emmy's graduation there
Speaker 1: because she gt my daughter's graduated with industrial design degree.
Speaker 2: They were the.
Speaker 1: Keynote speakers interesting. How cool is that?
Speaker 2: That's pretty cool.
Speaker 1: Yeah, one more thing I want to add. In two
Speaker 1: thousand and eight, I was approximately one hundred pounds heavier
Speaker 1: than I am now, in which I lost that with
Speaker 1: the ketogenic diet. Well back back then I called it
Speaker 1: the beef and bourbon diet. I didn't really know the science,
Speaker 1: but I knew it worked.
Speaker 2: That's what I got.
Speaker 1: I guess the time then for Betano framework role music awesome?
Speaker 2: All right, man, what do you got?
Speaker 1: Okay? So I think it was episode nineteen eighty five
Speaker 1: or something like that where the Better Know a framework
Speaker 1: was a tool from Simon Crop called dB to Mermaid,
Speaker 1: which you could get a Mermaid chart of a just
Speaker 1: by pointing it to a database. Well, now he's got
Speaker 1: something a little more low level called Naiad Naiad which
Speaker 1: renders Mermaid diagrams to SVG entirely in your browser, no
Speaker 1: server round trip. Simon Crop, I don't know if you
Speaker 1: know him, Anthony, but he's an Aussie and he's very
Speaker 1: prolific and has built so many tools that he's become agular.
Speaker 1: I'd better know a framework and this is just the latest.
Speaker 4: So the name sounds failure, very very familiar.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's not the first time we've mentioned him on
Speaker 2: Donna Rock's Goodness Knows, oh good No.
Speaker 1: So anyway, check out Naiad if you're interested in Mermaid.
Speaker 1: I love Mermaid, and you can make these beautiful flow charts. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and this is just another way to render.
Speaker 2: That Niads were the nymphs of the fountains in Greek mythology.
Speaker 2: Of course, of course it is. That's awesome. Yeah.
Speaker 3: I was going to say, I was looking for how
Speaker 3: to find this thing, and it's the best place to
Speaker 3: go really is on GitHub.
Speaker 4: It looks like, and search for it. Yeah, because it's
Speaker 4: right there.
Speaker 1: And that was the voice of Anthony Eden. So that's
Speaker 1: what I got. Richard, who's talking to.
Speaker 2: Us, Grady comment off a show two thousand and seven.
Speaker 2: That's the one we did last week, the data centers
Speaker 2: in space geek out. Yeah, because why we shouldn't have
Speaker 2: a geek out in the middle of the middle of
Speaker 2: the year. Why not, it's the longest day of the year.
Speaker 2: What the heck have a geekout. Good fun in that talk.
Speaker 2: But I had a comment from Matt who said, I
Speaker 2: love your podcast as always, but I don't know how
Speaker 2: much you came out one hundred square miles to get
Speaker 2: one gig go out of solar power. That seems to
Speaker 2: be off by a couple of orders of magnitude. She
Speaker 2: abilitived that under two square miles. I haven't gone back
Speaker 2: and listened to the show to think, did I say
Speaker 2: that because that doesn't sound like I would say that
Speaker 2: because it's not correct. Matt is right about two square
Speaker 2: miles at twenty five percent efficiency should be sufficient. So
Speaker 2: I'm not sure exactly what I would say on the show. Typically,
Speaker 2: on the ground you'd go more than that, just because
Speaker 2: you have capacity factors, you know, clouds, things like that
Speaker 2: that affect the amount of power you're going to get
Speaker 2: from the solar panel in the first place. So I'm
Speaker 2: thinking of square kilometers a little, but so five square
Speaker 2: kilometers is a minimum, But often if you're going after
Speaker 2: a gig gial, do ten go. We did at the
Speaker 2: end of the show talk about building solar power and
Speaker 2: geostation in orbit, which was a previous geek out. And
Speaker 2: while you'll tend to use the more expensive solar panels
Speaker 2: that are close to thirty percent yield, and you're probably
Speaker 2: going to do concentration as well with mirrors and so
Speaker 2: forth and rather than just to all solar panels, so
Speaker 2: the math gets a little bit weirder. You also have
Speaker 2: to deal with conversion losses converting power from the electrical
Speaker 2: you get from your solo will take sales, and then
Speaker 2: you turn them into microwaves to them beam them through
Speaker 2: the atmosphere and you're going to get some attenuation there,
Speaker 2: about fifteen percent, and then convert those microwaves back into electrical.
Speaker 2: So it's a bunch of losses. So you'll probably lay
Speaker 2: up much more on that. But no, one hundred square cometers,
Speaker 2: that's crazy. It's still a lot of area. You don't
Speaker 2: need that much. Sometimes we misspeak, yeah, and things happen
Speaker 2: or things get misheard. I'm not emotional about it, so
Speaker 2: like it's good to just get the numbers out there.
Speaker 2: I just double checked all the numbers. That's what was
Speaker 2: in my notes. Maybe I said it wrong, all right, Well,
Speaker 2: so Matt, thank you so much your comment, and a
Speaker 2: copy of music Coba is on its way to you.
Speaker 2: And if you'd like a copy of music gobay right
Speaker 2: a comment on the website at dot NetRocks dot com
Speaker 2: or on the facebooks. We publish every show there. And
Speaker 2: if you comment there and then reading the show. We'll
Speaker 2: send you copy of music GOBA.
Speaker 1: And if you don't want to wait for that, you
Speaker 1: can just go to music to Code by dot net
Speaker 1: and you can get it in MP three, wave and
Speaker 1: flak formats. There's twenty two tracks. They're twenty five minutes
Speaker 1: each and they're designed to keep you in a state
Speaker 1: of flow while you're writing code. Many, many, many happy customers. Okay,
Speaker 1: let's bring on Anthony. Anthony Eden is the founder of
Speaker 1: d N Simple and the proprietor of numerous open source projects.
Speaker 1: He's also contributed to a wide variety of the open
Speaker 1: source projects over the past twenty plus years as a
Speaker 1: software developer using multiple languages including Java, Python, Ruby, Closure, Go,
Speaker 1: and Erlang. Slacker Right, I think, yeah, ye, we have
Speaker 1: a great history with Anthony, going back to a road
Speaker 1: trip that where we.
Speaker 2: Got a is such a hilarious story too.
Speaker 1: It's a great story. I got to tell it every
Speaker 1: time you come on. We got an email from somebody
Speaker 1: at a company that I won't mention by name, but
Speaker 1: it rhymes with slow Patty, and they wanted to know
Speaker 1: if they could advertise on our show. And I said, hey, Richard,
Speaker 1: these guys want to advertise, and Richard says, well, we.
Speaker 2: Don't like that, but I think I said something a
Speaker 2: lot of lines of it, but they suck.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but we do like DN Simple and we had
Speaker 1: just been turned.
Speaker 2: Well you said, you said you suggested that. You said, well,
Speaker 2: who do we like? And I'm like, I think these
Speaker 2: guys are awesome.
Speaker 1: Well, Scott Hansoman. Scott Hansman introduced me to DAN Simple
Speaker 1: and it was love at first click.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So it's a DNS management tool and domain management tool.
Speaker 2: Well, and I think you again, you just went straight
Speaker 2: at it. You found their email and you emailed them
Speaker 2: and said this is what's happened. We think you should
Speaker 2: be on our show. And as I recall, Anthony's response
Speaker 2: was interesting, tell me more.
Speaker 4: That's right, sounds right.
Speaker 2: It was a different kind of pitch, wasn't it.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So we have had you on to talk about the
Speaker 1: d N Simple apia and now talk about go Yeah,
Speaker 1: and now you've got the DN Simple c l I
Speaker 1: command line interface. So the floor is, sir, what is
Speaker 1: this all about?
Speaker 3: Well, I mean it's it's so it's something that we've
Speaker 3: tried off and on a couple times since the inception
Speaker 3: of the and Simple. In fact, the very first sort
Speaker 3: of public presentation I did of the and Simple was
Speaker 3: at a Ruby comp where I did a five minute
Speaker 3: lightning talk showing how to register a domain name from
Speaker 3: the CLI, and that was with a Ruby CLI and
Speaker 3: it really kind of kicked off sort.
Speaker 4: Of the the.
Speaker 3: Direction that we were going with Dan Simple, really wanting
Speaker 3: to build tools for developers, for engineers who were who
Speaker 3: liked to live in the command line, which would really
Speaker 3: a lot of us do that regularly. There was kind
Speaker 3: of a slowdown over the last few years, but within
Speaker 3: the last twelve to eighteen months, CLIs have really started
Speaker 3: coming back as being an important part of the toolkit
Speaker 3: for all the different environments that you work with.
Speaker 4: And we'll get to that.
Speaker 3: I think everybody knows the answer as to why they're
Speaker 3: really important. Sure, But so we went back and looked
Speaker 3: again and we didn't have one for a little while.
Speaker 3: We had tried. We had the one in Ruby, we
Speaker 3: shut that down. We had one that we tried in ALICKXIR,
Speaker 3: we shut that down. And this time around where you
Speaker 3: did it and go and it kind of stuck more.
Speaker 2: And I think.
Speaker 3: Now we were at the point where we felt okay,
Speaker 3: the APIs stable, the tooling around CLIs is becoming more
Speaker 3: and more important for the work that folks are doing,
Speaker 3: so it's time to put one together and launch it.
Speaker 3: And thus we did. Just a few weeks back we started.
Speaker 3: I guess it was over a month now that we
Speaker 3: launched the first version of it, and then we've been
Speaker 3: iterating on it fairly quickly to make it easier to use.
Speaker 3: And it works just like any traditional CLI. You know,
Speaker 3: you have all of the command line stuff that you
Speaker 3: could do. You essentially start with D and simple as
Speaker 3: the kicks off the CLI, and then you could do
Speaker 3: a high level sort of context for the command saying
Speaker 3: okay might be around domains or zones or things like that,
Speaker 3: and then the particular action you might want to be
Speaker 3: like list or create or what have you. Where it
Speaker 3: really starts to shine is when you start accessing it
Speaker 3: from agentic AI tools. Right, so for some like generative
Speaker 3: eye tools like claw for us, claud is the common
Speaker 3: thing that a lot of us use at the end
Speaker 3: simple and so when you start doing that from within Claude,
Speaker 3: it opens up a lot of really interesting sort of
Speaker 3: user interactions that would otherwise have to be exposed either
Speaker 3: at the API level, so in other words, sort of
Speaker 3: a higher level combine multiple commands together through the API
Speaker 3: or through the CLI or in a user interface. And
Speaker 3: so when you start to work with it from a
Speaker 3: more sort of textual interface like you can do from
Speaker 3: within Claude or whatever tool you might use, really the
Speaker 3: possibilities quickly open up and you start to look at
Speaker 3: and say, wow, this is a very different and comfortable
Speaker 3: way to work with the The dnsimble API is via
Speaker 3: this CLI.
Speaker 1: So I imagine you have an MCP interface then, so.
Speaker 3: Right now, essentially Claude can and most of the tools
Speaker 3: if there were running in your desktop, which is or
Speaker 3: in your in your local environment right now, can access
Speaker 3: any CLI tool as a tool. Okay, all right, So
Speaker 3: a common one that we started using months ago was
Speaker 3: the gh tool from GitHub. So Claude can just access
Speaker 3: GH straight from the command line as a normal tool.
Speaker 3: It doesn't need an MCP interface for it. You can
Speaker 3: just you can start working with it and it'll start
Speaker 3: constructing the commands that needs to construct out of the
Speaker 3: knowledge it can gain. The context it gains from usually
Speaker 3: the help documentation or like the inline help for the
Speaker 3: CLI and so we followed that same pattern with the
Speaker 3: and simple. It's literally just the CLI, so you can
Speaker 3: use it as a CLI, but the minute you're in Claude,
Speaker 3: if you authorize Claude to do certain actions with it,
Speaker 3: you can just do it with natural text from within
Speaker 3: claud and it'll still use the CLI interface. So you
Speaker 3: have sort of the limitations, which are good in many
Speaker 3: cases of what the CLI can do. Say, for example,
Speaker 3: you might want to protect yourself from doing crazy things,
Speaker 3: so you have Claude, you know, ask you before it
Speaker 3: executes any particular code, or if you're doing read items,
Speaker 3: you might do more complex things and say, just run
Speaker 3: through this patch without asking me. So yeah, it just
Speaker 3: it doesn't have an MCP interface. We do see that
Speaker 3: potentially we will have one, but that's a different use case.
Speaker 3: I can we can talk a little more about that later.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a great it's a great question of how
Speaker 2: necessary that is at this point, right, Like lms are
Speaker 2: pretting pretty good and interrogating CLIs anyway, Like what does
Speaker 2: the MCP bringing equation?
Speaker 3: I think it's your it's where you're doing that execution.
Speaker 3: So the CLI is fine when you're dealing with a
Speaker 3: local environment. So if you're using claud code locally, it's
Speaker 3: not usable if you're using Claude from a web browser,
Speaker 3: for example, And I think that's where it's that's where
Speaker 3: the MCP SERVERCE starts to be more interesting. So for example, uh,
Speaker 3: it would be nice to be and I've done this
Speaker 3: with other projects that I've worked on.
Speaker 4: It's nice to be.
Speaker 3: In say claud dot AI, so in the web and
Speaker 3: be able to actually call into something through the MCP
Speaker 3: service that you've added in and that it becomes aware
Speaker 3: of all those commands.
Speaker 4: So it's just it's.
Speaker 3: Another way of exposing the API, and it gives enough
Speaker 3: information and context to those generative AI tools so that
Speaker 3: you can they can understand and understand they can properly
Speaker 3: formulate the commands that it needs to formulate in order
Speaker 3: to do what it needs to do.
Speaker 2: Nice I just set it up via PowerShell, threw me
Speaker 2: through my authentication strategy and pop back down in the
Speaker 2: session work that could charm pulled up a list of
Speaker 2: my domains.
Speaker 3: And I've been so I've I obviously I use the
Speaker 3: insimble lot, right. I mean we're working in it every day,
Speaker 3: whether it's testing things or whether actually managing domains that
Speaker 3: we manager. I'm managing my personal domains, and I can
Speaker 3: say that being able to once I started being able
Speaker 3: to do that within Claude, within my claud environment, it's
Speaker 3: hard to go back now, right, because I describe the
Speaker 3: thing I want to do, and it can be a
Speaker 3: multi step thing. I'll give you a simple example. Right,
Speaker 3: I want to register domain. Then I want to set
Speaker 3: up an alias record so it points to my hosting
Speaker 3: that's maybe Railway or flight out io or whatever. And
Speaker 3: then I want a certificate that's automatically installed. And then
Speaker 3: I want to also set up the mail records because
Speaker 3: I'm using Google, so set everything up for me. And
Speaker 3: I can do that in a single in a single prompt,
Speaker 3: and it can execute that step by step. And if
Speaker 3: it fails along the way, if it tries to follow
Speaker 3: a path that is incorrect, so it hallucinates an incorrect
Speaker 3: path or what have you, I can have it stop.
Speaker 3: I can interrogate and see what it wants to have
Speaker 3: it introgate me. I can do vice versa. Or I
Speaker 3: can have it continue forward and have it like figure out, okay,
Speaker 3: what's the next step I should have taken. Take a
Speaker 3: step back for and that would have taken a lot
Speaker 3: of clicking through UI in order to do it, or
Speaker 3: a lot of individual CLI calls.
Speaker 2: I mean, I don't hate clicking through DN simple. I
Speaker 2: do it routinely, not every day or anything, but routinely.
Speaker 2: And it's obvious enough that I generate our problems except certificates.
Speaker 2: Everything about certificate sucks.
Speaker 4: It's you just want them to be done. There's still
Speaker 4: still there's still some interactions there even in our interface
Speaker 4: that that I want to be better.
Speaker 2: Well, you don't have control over them, right.
Speaker 3: In a lot of cases you don't write because you
Speaker 3: have it's a long process. You have part Maybe you
Speaker 3: might have control over some things.
Speaker 2: You might not.
Speaker 3: You need to have the certifigate request. You might generate it,
Speaker 3: you might not. There's a lot of different paths that
Speaker 3: you can follow, and.
Speaker 2: So getting good any command line for certificates just for repeatability,
Speaker 2: so you just write it. I mean I leave notes
Speaker 2: for myself for certificates all the time that usually start
Speaker 2: off with hate dummy. If you've got here, it's because
Speaker 2: you're screwing up. This is what you have to do.
Speaker 1: So when I register a domain for an asure web,
Speaker 1: say I go to use the free managed certificates and Azure,
Speaker 1: and I've been bitten by that a couple of times.
Speaker 1: All of a sudden, the website isn't working and I
Speaker 1: go there and the ip it, the underlying IP address
Speaker 1: has changed, certificate is not valid, and so I have
Speaker 1: to reach in those. But you know, you think you'd
Speaker 1: get an email or something.
Speaker 3: Yeah, But I mean, frankly, I think the direction we're
Speaker 3: let's say honestly acme and let's encrypt is the implementation
Speaker 3: of it kind of one. Yeah, And I think it's
Speaker 3: just there's a lot of cases where we still can't
Speaker 3: use that to automatically rotate the certificates every like they
Speaker 3: should be. But the caab SO Certificate Authority Board that
Speaker 3: manages all this stuff is reducing the amount of time
Speaker 3: any certificates allowed to live. We're already down under a year,
Speaker 3: and by I think within the next two years are
Speaker 3: supposed to be required to be down to ninety days
Speaker 3: for everybody, if I recall correct for certificates.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I've done this show on run ass radio. We
Speaker 2: should probably do it on rocks at some point. But
Speaker 2: the ultimate goes forty seven days. And this all comes
Speaker 2: back to the revocation systems just don't work, and so
Speaker 2: it's how do you get bad CERTs out of the
Speaker 2: system as quickly as possible? And so you know that
Speaker 2: sort of reality of you're going to need to renew
Speaker 2: your seerts roughly every month with a couple of weeks
Speaker 2: grace period. That's that's painful, right. You better automate that
Speaker 2: or you're going to lose your mind.
Speaker 3: It's I can't I can't see us going to a
Speaker 3: place in two years from now still manually rotating certificates.
Speaker 2: It just knows it.
Speaker 3: Doesn't make sense. But I think there's a lot of
Speaker 3: businesses that are still stuck doing that because they're in
Speaker 3: legacy systems where they don't have the ability to do
Speaker 3: that automation.
Speaker 4: And that's that's challenging for them. I know that it's
Speaker 4: still an issue.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, and we're not talking about web servers. That's easy.
Speaker 2: You know, try a firewall with a certain firewall API
Speaker 2: is different, Like it's a.
Speaker 4: Nightmare exactly if they have an API.
Speaker 2: Yeah, if there's any way to give it.
Speaker 3: All, you might have to unit might have to go
Speaker 3: into that firewall and connect out to grab the certificate to.
Speaker 4: Pull it in totally.
Speaker 3: So, Yeah, there's all kinds of craziness in the world
Speaker 3: when you deal with legacy here.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and and I'm gonna plug Todd Gardner's cirtkit right
Speaker 2: now as a tool for we should do this show
Speaker 2: because I mean, it's certainly been a big deal for
Speaker 2: SIS events, but everybody's going to be affected by anyway.
Speaker 2: We should take a break.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a good idea. We'll take a little break.
Speaker 1: We'll be right back after these very important messages don't
Speaker 1: go away.
Speaker 5: Hey Carl here. You probably know text Control is a
Speaker 5: powerful library for document editing and PDF generation, but did
Speaker 5: you know they're also a strong supporter of the developer community.
Speaker 5: It's part of their mission to build and support a
Speaker 5: strong developer community by being present, listening to users, and
Speaker 5: sharing knowledge at conferences across Europe and the United States.
Speaker 5: So if you're heading to a conference soon, check if
Speaker 5: text Control will be there and stop by to say hi.
Speaker 5: You can find their full conference calendar at dubdubdub dot
Speaker 5: textcontrol dot com and make sure you thank them for
Speaker 5: supporting dot net rocks.
Speaker 2: And we're back. It's dot Netrocksamerchard Camp. Well, let's call Franklin. Hey,
Speaker 2: talking to our friend Anthony Eden do that for a
Speaker 2: show with twenty fourteen. We've been hanging out for a while.
Speaker 3: It has it has been a journey so far, and
Speaker 3: I love the fact that we keep getting a chance
Speaker 3: to see each other.
Speaker 4: Well, you have time to time on the podcast. It's
Speaker 4: always good.
Speaker 2: Well, you wouldn't think DNS is that interesting, but it's
Speaker 2: one of those pieces of software that absolutely has to work.
Speaker 2: There's no tolerance for any failure of any kind at
Speaker 2: any time because it is plumbing.
Speaker 1: And you can't get lost in a barrage of predatory
Speaker 1: web pages that when you go to change something and
Speaker 1: they they just want to keep selling you things.
Speaker 2: Well, now I have no UI at all. It's just
Speaker 2: a command line.
Speaker 4: We've come full circle.
Speaker 1: I'm so very happy, very very happy.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's it's really interesting. I've been in this business
Speaker 3: for a long time. I've been working in domain business
Speaker 3: since nineteen ninety nine, and there are some things that
Speaker 3: stay the same, but each year something new happens. And
Speaker 3: I don't know if you all know, but the i
Speaker 3: CAN has announced this year for the new applications for
Speaker 3: the next round of new top level domains are you
Speaker 3: aware of.
Speaker 2: This, No, no, but I'll include in the show notes.
Speaker 2: But we had like dot show and there's all kinds
Speaker 2: of TLDs now.
Speaker 4: So it's happening again.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and so so there's going to be another rush
Speaker 3: for TLDs. The bad news is that the costs to
Speaker 3: the entry costs for one TLD is pretty much doubled
Speaker 3: since last time, and I think last time was around
Speaker 3: twenty fifteen actually.
Speaker 4: When they were doing this.
Speaker 1: Wow, I think the gold rush is over for those things.
Speaker 1: I mean if you think about it, Yeah, you have
Speaker 1: your major corporations that want to have their public facing stuff,
Speaker 1: but you know, for most people who have websites, they
Speaker 1: just search. I mean, yeah, you don't need to have
Speaker 1: the crazy domains anymore.
Speaker 4: I mean it's they're fun.
Speaker 3: They're fun when you can get one, and they can
Speaker 3: be they can really stand out.
Speaker 4: But yeah, there's a lot of.
Speaker 3: Choices, and I think one of the downsides is that
Speaker 3: there are some that have have kind of been overtaken
Speaker 3: by bad actors and various It's always the same challenge.
Speaker 2: I mean, this would be the argument for opening more
Speaker 2: top level domains is decreasing the scarcity. Yes, correct, make
Speaker 2: more available so that the prices go down and the
Speaker 2: backwaters can be properly backwatered.
Speaker 3: And it sounds great in the concept, but that every
Speaker 3: year the prices of TLDs keep getting going up.
Speaker 4: They're not going down.
Speaker 3: So I can tell you that for the vast majority TLDs,
Speaker 3: we see every couple of years price increases, and so
Speaker 3: it's it's from from where we sit in the middle
Speaker 3: as the registrar, and honestly, it's it's a very frustrating experience, like.
Speaker 2: People must be routinely angry at you, even though you
Speaker 2: don't set the prices.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, they're angry at us, and we're like, well,
Speaker 3: we we have literally like these tiny little margins on
Speaker 3: top of it. The registries are getting almost all of
Speaker 3: it right, and we have no say really in the
Speaker 3: cost of it because they set whatever price they're allowed
Speaker 3: to set based on their agreements with icons. And for
Speaker 3: the new TLDs it was basically a free for all.
Speaker 3: They're like, you set the prices whatever however you want.
Speaker 2: Sure.
Speaker 3: The only ones that people have ever put a stink
Speaker 3: up on is of course dot com and dot net
Speaker 3: because the initial the originals the originals, and then when
Speaker 3: dot org got bought by a private equity company or
Speaker 3: the company that runs dot org, and people were really
Speaker 3: really scared that they were going to jack the prices.
Speaker 3: And dot org has traditionally been for nonprofits and other pronunciations,
Speaker 3: and so there was a lot of fear, Oh, this
Speaker 3: is going to be the end of a TLD specifically
Speaker 3: for nonprofits. The good news is it has not really
Speaker 3: turned out that way. Dot org is still very fairly priced,
Speaker 3: I think.
Speaker 2: But the evil thing, Harry, is you know, you spend
Speaker 2: all that money promoting your domain name, and then the
Speaker 2: the TLD host hikes the price, Like, what are you
Speaker 2: going to do? Abandon it? You're stuck?
Speaker 3: You are you are at the worst one is when
Speaker 3: you get a really good name on one of the
Speaker 3: new TLDs and then they come back a couple of
Speaker 3: years later and like, you know, that's a premium domain,
Speaker 3: so you're gonna have to pay a higher renewal fee
Speaker 3: on that.
Speaker 4: That one is Wow. Has hit us a couple of times.
Speaker 1: I like, yeah, you're going to have to go ahead
Speaker 1: and pay double on that.
Speaker 2: Because you've been successful, we will be punishing you exactly.
Speaker 3: It really feels that way sometimes, and I want the
Speaker 3: industry to do well as a whole. But I think
Speaker 3: sometimes it's a little missile aligned with where the money
Speaker 3: is going. I think it's going to an environment where
Speaker 3: innovation really isn't important, Like they don't they're not really
Speaker 3: needing to innovate too much.
Speaker 2: Well, operating a tld can't be frickin' rocket science, like
Speaker 2: holy Man.
Speaker 3: Only at the largest scale, Like it's what VeriSign does
Speaker 3: with the dot com and dot net registries.
Speaker 2: Okay, it's not trivial.
Speaker 4: That is not trivial.
Speaker 3: Yeah, operating the routine name servers not trivial. But I
Speaker 3: think that there there was a lot of consolidation at
Speaker 3: the actual registry, so the operational registry level, and there
Speaker 3: are not that many providers out there, and they've gotten
Speaker 3: pretty good at it at operating TLDs, and so yeah,
Speaker 3: sometimes I feel that maybe the incentives are slightly misaligned.
Speaker 3: But we're such a small player that there's not I mean,
Speaker 3: we are we are a member of the various we're
Speaker 3: a member of I can, we go to meetings from
Speaker 3: time to time, but we're just such a small niche
Speaker 3: player that it's not it's hard for us to invest
Speaker 3: a bunch to argue that we should be doing better things.
Speaker 2: Sure. So the last time this was done was twenty twelve,
Speaker 2: it was yeah, and it was twelve hundred new global TLDs. Yeah, so,
Speaker 2: I mean that's a long time ago. It was I
Speaker 2: think about that, you know, fourteen years later, that's a
Speaker 2: big change. So, yeah, this is probably going to be
Speaker 2: very interesting.
Speaker 3: It will be another interesting one if I had if
Speaker 3: I had a massive pile of cash, I would probably
Speaker 3: go and try to apply for some of them.
Speaker 4: But they are rich. They are not cheaping, I bet
Speaker 4: at all.
Speaker 3: And if you if you get to the end of
Speaker 3: the process and you have two or more organizations that
Speaker 3: want the same tld you essentially didn't enter into a bidding.
Speaker 2: Phase bidding war.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and then who knows how high the price can go.
Speaker 3: I mean the last time around, the dot app which
Speaker 3: was one that I think Google and some others were
Speaker 3: fighting over, hit ten million.
Speaker 4: I think for it.
Speaker 2: Yeah. No, if one of the hyperscalers is in the bidding,
Speaker 2: you should bow out, like what are you thinking?
Speaker 3: Well, except that if you stick it, stick around long
Speaker 3: enough and you don't win, you get the second bidder
Speaker 3: apparently gets.
Speaker 4: A portion of the funds.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 3: So that was actually used last time around as a
Speaker 3: way of financing for what I understand really inside baseball here,
Speaker 3: but apparently one of the companies that used to be
Speaker 3: known as Donuts, I believe, if I heard correctly, with
Speaker 3: finance some of their other TLDs by trying to be
Speaker 3: competitive up to the last moment but not winning the
Speaker 3: bidding for some of those TLDs, and so they were
Speaker 3: able to actually make a profit on something they didn't
Speaker 3: end up getting and then use that to fund some
Speaker 3: of the other TLDs.
Speaker 2: They got crazy.
Speaker 1: I wanted just to take a minute to acknowledge how
Speaker 1: awesome Dan Simple is and we don't you know, this
Speaker 1: isn't an infomercial, but just the joy that I've had
Speaker 1: using it, especially compared to the other things that we
Speaker 1: were using. And I tell the story often of how
Speaker 1: I was in a security line in the airport and
Speaker 1: setting up mail records for one of my domains, you know,
Speaker 1: with one hand on my phone. Yeah, and it was
Speaker 1: it was just so easy and effortless. And it looks
Speaker 1: good too. It's like go on the back end bootstrap
Speaker 1: on the front, right.
Speaker 3: It's actually so our back end is rails for most
Speaker 3: of the web app. But the yeah, it used to
Speaker 3: be bootstrapped. Now I think we're swapping over to Tailwind
Speaker 3: because I don't think bootstraps maintained. But the look and
Speaker 3: feel is kind of the same there. And I do
Speaker 3: appreciate that you enjoy using it. From time to time,
Speaker 3: I have to go use other providers to if I'm
Speaker 3: trying to help somebody try to understand something, and sometimes
Speaker 3: it hurts pretty bad. Yeah, it really does. It's just
Speaker 3: so I appreciate the kind words, Carl, and I'm glad
Speaker 3: that you've been a customer for so long, and I
Speaker 3: hope that we can keep you for much longer as
Speaker 3: well well.
Speaker 1: And I hope we can impress on our listeners too
Speaker 1: that it's it's really a good thing to switch.
Speaker 3: If you're already I do have something special. I have
Speaker 3: something special this time around. I actually have and we
Speaker 3: can put this in the show notes after. I have
Speaker 3: a URL for you, specifically for dot net rocks that
Speaker 3: will give folks a ten dollars credit towards anything towards
Speaker 3: a domain purchase, towards their subscription and what have you. Wow,
Speaker 3: if they use that, so I'm going to I'll give
Speaker 3: that to you via a messaging or what have you
Speaker 3: via the email and you can pop that on there.
Speaker 2: Is it?
Speaker 1: Is it readable? Can you just say it?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 4: I mean it's it's slash oh slash dot net rocks. Okay,
Speaker 4: that's pretty much it.
Speaker 3: Again, it's going to be really easy to see from
Speaker 3: the sense, people should be looking at the show notes
Speaker 3: at this point, shouldn't.
Speaker 1: They That should yeah?
Speaker 4: Oh yea, absolutely that they are that engaged. They should
Speaker 4: be looking at us. So we'll hide it in there.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we'll put them in the show notes for sure.
Speaker 2: Very good. That's awesome. So okay, I, when you see
Speaker 2: l I from a straight pointed point of view, just
Speaker 2: straight commands be able to do that. But then the
Speaker 2: LM's come to play. So now you're just having conversations
Speaker 2: about making adjustments to DNS entries, doing domain registration, renewing,
Speaker 2: replacing certificates.
Speaker 4: Asking questions.
Speaker 3: So one of the first uses I did for was
Speaker 3: I said, look at all my domains and give me
Speaker 3: a list of the ones that will be expired in
Speaker 3: the next ninety days.
Speaker 2: Yep, great, and then and it query it is.
Speaker 3: It's a very straightforward one, and I and it's what
Speaker 3: it was interesting was that it gave me the list
Speaker 3: and it says all of these are actually set up
Speaker 3: to automatically renew. Right, So I said everything to auto
Speaker 3: renew on mine. But if I would have missed one,
Speaker 3: it would have actually called it out at and in
Speaker 3: fact one yeah well no, yeah, well, I mean the
Speaker 3: thing is the a P I will return this.
Speaker 4: And that's one of the.
Speaker 3: Things about I think that's an important part of using
Speaker 3: a cl I plus the l M is because the
Speaker 3: CLI provides boundaries, it provides clear limitations.
Speaker 2: So when you ask for it, well provides a mechanism
Speaker 2: of accuracy. Exactly there is a command exactly it is,
Speaker 2: It is not going to be. It's it's definitely definitive.
Speaker 2: You you asked for a list, You're going to get
Speaker 2: back a list, sure, and that list is going to
Speaker 2: have a certain set of fields. So yeah, far more
Speaker 2: subtle thing would be and that this is a question
Speaker 2: I should set up and ask is what's misconfigured on
Speaker 2: any of my domains.
Speaker 3: That's a that's a great question. And then something that
Speaker 3: you could probably it would probably start asking you questions
Speaker 3: about well, what are you using, Like common areas that
Speaker 3: are misconfigured.
Speaker 4: Might be email.
Speaker 3: I looked and I found that some of your domains
Speaker 3: have no email set up? Is that intentional? So these
Speaker 3: are actually and I think email is one of those
Speaker 3: areas that often frustrates people, so that the part where
Speaker 3: email crosses of the boundaries into DNS, you have to
Speaker 3: have the right DNS records set up to make sure
Speaker 3: deliverability works, to make sure that you're not getting sent
Speaker 3: to spam and what have you. And I think people
Speaker 3: struggle with that so much so that there are companies
Speaker 3: that are built to just deal with that problem. But
Speaker 3: there's nothing that stops you from trying it with an
Speaker 3: LLLM right checking what says.
Speaker 2: Yeah, how often do you have a domain that actually
Speaker 2: has a text field that is a token for a
Speaker 2: service somewhere? And I wonder if the tool would be
Speaker 2: clever enough. I notice the language I'm using here. I'm
Speaker 2: calling an LLM a tool for a reason. Yes, it's
Speaker 2: a tool at the best of times. I meaning a
Speaker 2: tool both as a constructive way and a derogatory way.
Speaker 2: Yes it is, let's be very clear.
Speaker 6: Uh, And the ll M comes back, what'd you call me? Yeah,
Speaker 6: it's like, go ahead, be resentful tool. It would acknowledge tool.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it acknowledge that it is a tool both for
Speaker 3: a good and bad there's look, it's the it's it's
Speaker 3: the nature of the beasts. These things are they're they're
Speaker 3: not there. They're they'll never be perfect because they're essentially
Speaker 3: just a statistic likelihood that a set of tokens are
Speaker 3: going to be aligned in a certain way based on
Speaker 3: a very large amount of data. Uh so there will
Speaker 3: be inevitable failures. It's it's not and that's why it's
Speaker 3: not intelligence, right, it's it's that's it's actually a poor
Speaker 3: misnomer for it. Yeah, it's a neat tool. Large language
Speaker 3: models are very neat tools. But there's they're not intelligent.
Speaker 2: Very clever tools. Well that's it again. Getting rid of
Speaker 2: the anthemomorphanization is about reminding yourself it's just software, and
Speaker 2: software has.
Speaker 4: Bucked absolutely absolutely.
Speaker 2: But I look at through like all the text fields
Speaker 2: in some of my DNS entries and like, what the
Speaker 2: heck was I thinking there? And I bet you the
Speaker 2: tool do a better job of identifying them and going
Speaker 2: I think this was for that and help you track
Speaker 2: down some of the stuff. It's like, do I need
Speaker 2: these things though?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 3: Just remember if if it hallucinates what it was for
Speaker 3: and then you go and just delete it willy nilly,
Speaker 3: that's on you.
Speaker 2: But in the end, I, you know, I like that
Speaker 2: I am responsible for my own activities. If I take
Speaker 2: you know, if I took bad advice from a search engine,
Speaker 2: it's on me too. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Absolutely, one of the one quick thing that I wanted
Speaker 3: to point out. I think the neat thing about having
Speaker 3: the CLI available is there certain times you don't want
Speaker 3: to use the LMS so for example, or you don't
Speaker 3: want to use any other tool other than direct to CLI,
Speaker 3: let's say, and this maybe isn't as critical with the
Speaker 3: and simple, but let's say you're using a tool where
Speaker 3: you have to set credentials or you have to put
Speaker 3: secrets in You never want to do that through if
Speaker 3: they're important secrets that you don't want to do that
Speaker 3: through any other tool, and you want to go as
Speaker 3: direct as possible.
Speaker 4: And the CLI is.
Speaker 3: Nice because you can eventually formulate up a very clear
Speaker 3: plan for how to do that without needing to have
Speaker 3: any any context or anything else, and you can execute
Speaker 3: it and nothing will have a history of it except
Speaker 3: your command line, which you can clear out so I
Speaker 3: think that there's that's important. It's nice to have the
Speaker 3: underlying tool, and it's it's a distinction between an MCP
Speaker 3: ser you couldn't do that same thing because the MCP
Speaker 3: is designed to work in the context of LM. So
Speaker 3: it's it's another maybe interesting little thing to keep aware
Speaker 3: of if you're working with these types of tools.
Speaker 2: Should I if I'm going to go down this path,
Speaker 2: and I'm very tempted to go down this path, I
Speaker 2: think I will go down this path. Can I set
Speaker 2: up a separate account to get access to my domains
Speaker 2: but not have edit privileges.
Speaker 3: You don't need to do that. You just need to
Speaker 3: create a read token. So you create a token and
Speaker 3: you just give it read only access. Yeah, and then
Speaker 3: and you'll have you can do it for all of
Speaker 3: your domains. You can do it for a subset of
Speaker 3: your domains if you want to play you know, it's.
Speaker 2: It's up to you.
Speaker 3: And then you just use that particular access token in
Speaker 3: that particular case.
Speaker 2: Nice for this for.
Speaker 3: The clib is, even though the clia lets you authenticate
Speaker 3: with a AUTH which essentially gives it a token that
Speaker 3: can do almost anything you don't, you can also set
Speaker 3: a token like do you could say, like I want
Speaker 3: to log in with this particular token in this for
Speaker 3: this account.
Speaker 2: So, because what's better in this world than an ll IM,
Speaker 2: you know, coming back to you saying you're right. I
Speaker 2: shouldn't have deleted all you accounts. That's on you.
Speaker 4: You're right, and this has happened. This has happened.
Speaker 3: There's a there's a strong argument that if you're working
Speaker 3: in a production environment, you want to slightly control the
Speaker 3: token that you're using to the least amount of access
Speaker 3: that it needs to get its shop done.
Speaker 2: Right. Yep, very very true and good to good your.
Speaker 1: Mind, sort of like ocom's razor in reverse. Yeah, do
Speaker 1: the simplest thing that works.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I would also I would also recommend that the
Speaker 3: other thing is if if you really, again you're working
Speaker 3: in production environments, another way to do this is you
Speaker 3: use the l M to create configuration is code. So
Speaker 3: it might be something like terraform or or whatever it
Speaker 3: might be that you use ants blacks, whatever answell, doesn't matter,
Speaker 3: and then that way you can verify it with a
Speaker 3: human that it's doing everything you need to end you
Speaker 3: have a history of it in your your get history
Speaker 3: that this change has made it for the by this
Speaker 3: person for these reasons. So there's a whole nother path
Speaker 3: down there. You don't have to go directly through CLI.
Speaker 3: There's certain cases where it works really well, especially when
Speaker 3: you're prototyping quickly, and certain cases where you probably don't
Speaker 3: undo it, especially if you're working in a production environment
Speaker 3: that maybe hundreds of thousands or millions of people are using.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: Right, So it's it's still even in this day and age,
Speaker 3: you can't delegate thinking to your tools because there are
Speaker 3: just tools.
Speaker 7: You know.
Speaker 3: I don't tell my hammer how to hammer yep, right like,
Speaker 3: I still have to know how to use that tool,
Speaker 3: and it's important for folks that are doing this to
Speaker 3: keep that in mind.
Speaker 2: Yeah, at the same time, the ability to tell it, okay,
Speaker 2: you know, make these changes is very tempting. I would
Speaker 2: still go down the path of Okay, what changes do
Speaker 2: I need to make? Give me the list, because it's
Speaker 2: not that much work. I mean, if I was doing
Speaker 2: hundreds of them, fine, I'll do smart. Then I would
Speaker 2: even ask and it suggest to the tool, will or
Speaker 2: tell the tool give me the commands, give me the
Speaker 2: commands I've done as well, exactly so that you're still
Speaker 2: running the script. Just not giving right privileges is a
Speaker 2: good idea.
Speaker 3: I'm very curious for the two of you. Are you
Speaker 3: using these Are you using Jenny I tools on a
Speaker 3: regular basis?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I am, but not yet for DNS. Maybe tomorrow
Speaker 1: I will be.
Speaker 2: It's interesting to think about it from from an administrator's perspective,
Speaker 2: and I could do. It's one thing to do it
Speaker 2: for dev. It's another thing to do it for data
Speaker 2: retrieval and then organizing thoughts and things. It's another thing
Speaker 2: again to start doing your administrative stuff. I routinely dip
Speaker 2: into these tools to diagnose network problems and machine behavior
Speaker 2: problems and things like that, and always to okay, what's
Speaker 2: the commands to correct?
Speaker 1: We were just talking about how codex seems to be
Speaker 1: a really good tool for diagnosing system problems. It can
Speaker 1: read logs, you know, it can figure things out that
Speaker 1: are misconfigured firewalls, something that I went through with Mark
Speaker 1: Miller just a few days ago, and it did really
Speaker 1: did a good job.
Speaker 2: You know, the terrible error message that most software spits
Speaker 2: out is trivial for an LLM to parse, and it's
Speaker 2: main in the butt for humans to party It's one
Speaker 2: of those moments like I look at the error message
Speaker 2: and I'm like, what the pace the whole thing into
Speaker 2: chatchip cold and you go, what's this and it goes, Oh,
Speaker 2: you're working on this product with these things, and you
Speaker 2: got this error. I suggest this and like, jam.
Speaker 3: As long as it doesn't hallucinate something that doesn't actually exist,
Speaker 3: because that has I've caught the.
Speaker 4: Tools to do that.
Speaker 3: And it's hilarious when it happens, because it will be
Speaker 3: certain right, this thing exists, like this API exists.
Speaker 4: I'm just gonna but for some reason I can't call it.
Speaker 2: And in the moment you indicate that does not exist,
Speaker 2: you're like, you're.
Speaker 1: Right, yeah, and then yeah, you actually it yeah, and
Speaker 1: it says you're right.
Speaker 3: I'm trying to I'm trying to all the tools a
Speaker 3: little bit more, not to use flattery, language.
Speaker 2: Of the certainty, all of the you know, all of
Speaker 2: these things are lies. I need to.
Speaker 3: But but I can't deny that it does. It does,
Speaker 3: and it's it's a dilemma because the tooling provides, UH
Speaker 3: can provide some really interesting productivity boosts for us to
Speaker 3: think at a higher level of how to build things,
Speaker 3: how to create things software wise, how to fix things,
Speaker 3: how to diagnose problems. On the other hand, that's a lot.
Speaker 3: We're depending a lot on a very small group of
Speaker 3: companies that are putting a ton of money into it.
Speaker 3: And I'm really worried that other shoe is going to drop.
Speaker 2: Here a ton of other people's money.
Speaker 3: Correct, well, a ton of I mean, yes, right now,
Speaker 3: we're not putting a ton of money in because it's
Speaker 3: being subsidized by investment dollars.
Speaker 2: They what are real cost is going to be on
Speaker 2: this thing?
Speaker 4: Yes?
Speaker 3: And and and will there be an incentive when the
Speaker 3: real costs come out to focus on cost improvements because
Speaker 3: they are operating it just they're just burning cash right now.
Speaker 2: Well, it seems like the beginning of this year was
Speaker 2: the beginning of the you need to optimize, and clearly
Speaker 2: prices are going up, the free stuff starting to diminish,
Speaker 2: like you're seeing the shaping of or getting to reality.
Speaker 2: I want to think it's a logical sequence. I just
Speaker 2: think that's very unlikely. We're just you know, they they
Speaker 2: investors have been spooked enough that now they have to
Speaker 2: make the correct gestures to keep the investors involved. But
Speaker 2: these are how bubbles deflate hopefully, and you know, I
Speaker 2: would be happy if that happened gracefully. Me too. That
Speaker 2: seems very unlikely.
Speaker 4: Me too, seem very unlikely that's going to happen.
Speaker 3: So speaking, speaking of efficiency, by the way, real quick,
Speaker 3: have you heard of the tool called RTK.
Speaker 4: No, so take a look at RTK.
Speaker 3: It's basically a tool that captures the other tool commands
Speaker 3: and tightens the requests and the response. So it's all
Speaker 3: it's not using the LM to do this, actually using
Speaker 3: uh so actual pro software to trim things down and
Speaker 3: remove unnecessary text to save tokens.
Speaker 2: So this is on GitHub r.
Speaker 3: Yes, RTK, I believe is what actually if you go
Speaker 3: to yeah.
Speaker 2: It's our RTK dash ai slash rtk Yep.
Speaker 4: It's super super interesting.
Speaker 3: We've we all use it pretty much, all use it
Speaker 3: a d and simple now great tool for sort of
Speaker 3: reducing token Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you see us all moving towards various optimization and methodology.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so what's next at dan simple? Do you guys
Speaker 1: have a backlog you're burning through at a greater pace
Speaker 1: now that you've got some agentic tools working against it, or.
Speaker 3: So we've taken we've taken a slightly different approach I
Speaker 3: think than a lot of companies are. We're not trying
Speaker 3: to do like we're not trying to be oh well
Speaker 3: produced ten times as many things, because there's a quality
Speaker 3: impact of doing that.
Speaker 4: There's there's only a.
Speaker 3: Sure our funnel still looks the way it does in
Speaker 3: terms of team members, and we want people to be
Speaker 3: paying attention to what they're doing. So instead, what we're
Speaker 3: doing is we're focusing on cleaning up some of the
Speaker 3: backlog of things that weren't like that have been frustrating
Speaker 3: for us, frustrating customers. Yes, and we're using this as
Speaker 3: an opportunity to spend some time on that before we
Speaker 3: go into the next round of Okay, now that we
Speaker 3: clean that up, what kind of functionality do people really need?
Speaker 3: What kind of new products can we look into doing
Speaker 3: that are adjacent to what we're already.
Speaker 4: Doing things like that, because we.
Speaker 3: We think that we've i mean, our api, our ui,
Speaker 3: most of this stuff has been pretty stable for quite
Speaker 3: a long time.
Speaker 4: What else could we do to do better?
Speaker 3: And the first thing is do better with what we
Speaker 3: already have and then figure out other areas where we
Speaker 3: can help do better that we haven't yet touched.
Speaker 2: Sure, that's very smart. I am talking to more organizations
Speaker 2: these days who, as they're getting through their backlogs, are
Speaker 2: kind of looking around saying like, what do we do now?
Speaker 2: And for the most part, it's how much stuff never
Speaker 2: hit the back law because it was never going to
Speaker 2: get to Yeah, and it turns out a lot Yes see,
Speaker 2: they're producing a lot more software, and I'm having a
Speaker 2: lot more software to produce. Yeah.
Speaker 3: The downside of that is that you produce a lot
Speaker 3: more software, it's going to you're producing a lot more defects,
Speaker 3: and you're producing a lot more main costs, maintenance costs,
Speaker 3: and you're and so it's it's.
Speaker 4: An interesting time for sure for software development as a whole.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think we have to take responsibility, you know,
Speaker 2: the whole. You know, roll, don't roll your own if
Speaker 2: you don't have to. It's not about I can't write
Speaker 2: this code. It's I don't want to own this code.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, indeed. So, yeah, that's what we're doing.
Speaker 3: We're focusing right now on just on cleaning up some
Speaker 3: of the things that have been sitting there for many,
Speaker 3: many years, which I was able to use Claude to
Speaker 3: look at over a period of time. I went back
Speaker 3: and used that member. I mentioned g h which is
Speaker 3: githubs tool for looking through GitHub issues and you can
Speaker 3: use it. And so I was producing analysis on okay
Speaker 3: each month by month for each year. Tell me what
Speaker 3: open issues we still have? Let's write up about are
Speaker 3: they actually still open? Because what we find is sometimes
Speaker 3: we don't close an issue out, we don't link it
Speaker 3: up properly, maybe it was fixed by something else unintentionally.
Speaker 3: And so I went back and now I have a
Speaker 3: whole long list of things which I know are still issues,
Speaker 3: and a bunch of things that are no longer issues
Speaker 3: because they were solved, that aren't cluttering up our GitHub repo,
Speaker 3: our get hub issues, which is great. So there's a
Speaker 3: lot of uses that we find that when you open
Speaker 3: up certain tooling, you can start to go, oh that
Speaker 3: I never even thought about being able to do that,
Speaker 3: and that's pretty cool.
Speaker 2: That's very powerful.
Speaker 1: Is there anything we missed in the conversation that you
Speaker 1: want to mention before we hang up?
Speaker 3: From my side, not really, just I keep thinking, one
Speaker 3: of these days I'm going to I want to be
Speaker 3: on dot neet rocks and I'm going.
Speaker 4: To interview the two of you.
Speaker 2: No, it's this.
Speaker 4: Thing that's gone through my head. Yeah, I'm gonna interview.
Speaker 3: I'm going to get deep into, like the Richard and Carl,
Speaker 3: what you're doing right now.
Speaker 1: I'm sitting in a hotel room in Brooklyn.
Speaker 2: I don't know what you're doing, but yeah, I get that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I didn't even I'm in France right now, so
Speaker 3: for the moment, I hear it. Heading back over to
Speaker 3: the US in just a bit.
Speaker 1: Yeah, great, Anthony, It's been a delight as usual to
Speaker 1: talk to you today.
Speaker 3: Carl Richard, It's always a pleasure to speak with both
Speaker 3: of you. Thanks for having me on again.
Speaker 7: You bet anytime, friend, and we'll talk to you, dear listener,
Speaker 7: next time on dot net rocks.
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