81–90 of 365 posts
Why do people add "OS" to their product/project name when it is not an OS at all?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So you can run it off the public internet with no sneaky external dependency on cloudflare, slack etc? And it would be functionally the same? With the same performance if you put enough hardware there? If so cool, and that should have been clearly in the announcement, because as it sounded it is “I am a sucker, lock me in!”
> So you can run it off the public internet with no sneaky external dependency on cloudflare, slack etc? Yes. It even supports ollama and works decently well with some local LLMs. > And it would be functionally the same? With the same performance if you put enough hardware there? Honestly it is faster running locally. > If so cool, and that should have been clearly in the announcement, We had so many things we wanted…
Why are companies slapping "OS" in their product naming? it's stupid
Why are companies slapping "OS" in their product naming? it's stupid
I think because the idea of an "agent operating system" is starting to feel more and more inevitable. Since I can use AI to: - Pull information from external sources - Transform and/or augment that information - Publish information I almost do not need a traditional OS anymore. This obviously isn't entirely true: I still use it to interact directly with humans, and it's the way I access my LLM. For now.
Everytime I read about new things from Cloudflare they look really cool but I cannot shake the feeling of not wanting to use them for fear of lock-in, am I too paranoid?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
See my next tweet in the chain: https://x.com/KentonVarda/status/2084990302784307363 ------------- Of course, personal apps are more useful if they can connect to external services. Cloudflare OS introduces a "connector" system we call Gatekeepers. This is sort of like MCP (and MCP is supported as a kind of Gatekeeper), but with a lot more: * Instead of exposing tools, a Gatekeeper exposes a Cap'n Web RPC API. That m…
Interesting, so how does this work with regards to purposeful but naive changes? If, for example, we have a Notion integration, and a non-technical user can add a feature to it via prompt, would it be possible for them to accidentally add something that sends a bunch of internal-only proprietary data to Notion? Would this system prevent or flag that in some way?
This is what allowed us to connect Cloudflare OS to our own sensitive internal data sources, containing things like customer data, revenue info, etc. Once you connect to one of those, the system enforces no data can be shared out of it.
That said, the policies are a bit blunt right now, maybe overly restrictive. We're going to be evolving it further.
Why are companies slapping "OS" in their product naming? it's stupid
I liked Kenton's take on this: https://x.com/KentonVarda/status/2084990137180590572?s=20 Text from tweet: Today we are releasing Cloudflare OS, a chatbot with connectors, just like every other tech company is doing. Except actually, it's different. This is a remake of Sandstorm[.]io, my startup from 10 years ago, except this time built on Cloudflare Workers (the platform I've spent the last 9 years building) and deep…
Sandstorm without self hosting has no interest though. (Edit: see below, where the creator states it _can_ be run locally) Buzz looks like a more reasonable direction than this does.
I guess the lock-in is to Cloudflare Workers, which is limited to JavaScript. I would in fact look into projects that are built around MicroVMs and WebAssembly. It seems Buzz would be happy to use smolmachines, or whatever. You'd have to roll your own permission system, but smolmachines would at least take care of being able to use stuff within an app, by offering persistent, portable containers.
Actually I think now I can finally say why this sandstorm.io with Cloudflare OS has lock-in. The promise is "you can pretty much go wild" and that you can hand it off to non-technical people to do that. Much as you squint, there is not a sophisticated access control system available to self-hosted users. There's a framework for building a sophisticated access control system, but that isn't the same as having something open source that you can self-host and let non technical users go wild.
However, this is cool. I just agree with you that Buzz sounds more interesting to me as someone who was into Sandstorm.
I liked Kenton's take on this: https://x.com/KentonVarda/status/2084990137180590572?s=20 Text from tweet: Today we are releasing Cloudflare OS, a chatbot with connectors, just like every other tech company is doing. Except actually, it's different. This is a remake of Sandstorm[.]io, my startup from 10 years ago, except this time built on Cloudflare Workers (the platform I've spent the last 9 years building) and deep…
> I liked Kenton's take on this: https://x.com/KentonVarda/status/2084990137180590572