Why are companies slapping "OS" in their product naming? it's stupid
Mostly to get trolls to retweet and complain about it for free advertising. It's working. ;)
Cloudflare OS: an open platform for agents, apps, and work
191–200 of 365 posts
Re: Cloudflare OS: an open platform for agents, apps, and work
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
An operating system manages access to shared hardware (disk, CPU, memory, networking, display, etc. on a single machine OS). MS-DOS mainly handled shared access to disk via a file system abstraction, hence the name. The naming of Cloudflare OS makes sense to me.
It doesn’t schedule tasks, doesn’t deal with physical memory, it doesn’t initialize hardware or interface with it on a low level. This is just an app that lives in user-space, nothing more. Calling this an OS is like calling Gmail an OS. It doesn’t make any sense. But since OSes are notoriously difficult to define [1], half of America added AI slop to diets that were already repulsive to begin with, regurgitates the…
> It doesn’t schedule tasks,
It absolutely does.
> doesn’t deal with physical memory,
Well it sort of does. It allocates sandboxes and schedules apps in them. It handles loading code from storage and turning it into running programs with state.
> it doesn’t initialize hardware or interface with it on a low level.
Instead of devices it manages interfacing with external services (Gatekeepers are like drivers).
I didn't choose the name but I do think there's a fair analogy here even on a technical level.
Re: Cloudflare OS: an open platform for agents, apps, and work
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
Random trivia (and something I learned this way myself from an internet reply, though I can't remember when): What gets buried is the "lede". It is a really unusual thing — a deliberate, engineered misspelling of "lead" that leaked into broader use: https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/bury-the-lede-versu... (Not meant as a nit-pick — it's just something that adds really fascinating historical colour to a useful…
It's spelled "lede" so as not to be confused with "lead," as in the metal with which was used to print newspapers. Since "lead" (as in beginning of a story) and "lead" (as in metal) were frequently used in print newsrooms, the spelling of one changed over time to reduce confusion. There were a number of other language convolutions in newsrooms, such as "slug" which meant a piece of hot metal, and so was useful for de…
“TK” meaning “to come” is another one. “More TK” in particular is now a blogger affectation but it seems to have been a way to communicate to an editor that a story was so far incomplete, within the text of a submission, without the editor assuming the words “to come” were part of the story. And elsewhere it indicates a placeholder that needs a fact to be confirmed and filled in before publication.
Re: Cloudflare OS: an open platform for agents, apps, and work
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or more directly: When you share a Gadget, we verify that anyone you share with also has direct permission to access each of the resources it is connected to (via the Gatekeeper system). Hence, no security bug in the Gadget itself could accidentally grant people access to things they don't already have.
But that is a problem. I have access to something deeply secret, I run a gadget, it reads that and sends it to whoever made it
No, a Gadget does not just get automatic access to your data. It only gets access to the things you grant it explicitly.
Re: Cloudflare OS: an open platform for agents, apps, and work
#195Re: Cloudflare OS: an open platform for agents, apps, and work
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is really interesting. I built a similar product (not released yet), but it uses Kubernetes as the infrastructure layer instead of Cloudflare OS. I guess all these years later I am left with the same existential question that plagued Sandstorm. What is its relevance in the context of Linux containers? This is not a rhetorical question, is there a real benefit for a Sandstorm grain over a docker style Linux conta…
Sandstorm's use of containers was just a means to an end. The real innovation was the fine-grained instances -- each document in its own container. No other container platform did that. But honestly, it didn't work well, because of cold start times and memory usage. It's bad enough when a server takes seconds to start, but if every document you open has a long startup time and uses hundreds of MB of RAM, it's really…
dumb question: is this javascript/typescript only?
can you use webassembly based languages instead?
Re: Cloudflare OS: an open platform for agents, apps, and work
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
But that is a problem. I have access to something deeply secret, I run a gadget, it reads that and sends it to whoever made it
No, a Gadget does not just get automatic access to your data. It only gets access to the things you grant it explicitly.
Just like phishing websites, which are still a problem. I’m sure I’m being overly cautious, but this sounds like a recipe for data leaks with the low barrier to entry.
And if you want real life examples, every single LLM provider has gotten insane amounts of data shared to them, even if you have to approve.
Re: Cloudflare OS: an open platform for agents, apps, and work
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
It doesn’t schedule tasks, doesn’t deal with physical memory, it doesn’t initialize hardware or interface with it on a low level. This is just an app that lives in user-space, nothing more. Calling this an OS is like calling Gmail an OS. It doesn’t make any sense. But since OSes are notoriously difficult to define [1], half of America added AI slop to diets that were already repulsive to begin with, regurgitates the…
> It doesn’t schedule tasks, It absolutely does. > doesn’t deal with physical memory, Well it sort of does. It allocates sandboxes and schedules apps in them. It handles loading code from storage and turning it into running programs with state. > it doesn’t initialize hardware or interface with it on a low level. Instead of devices it manages interfacing with external services (Gatekeepers are like drivers). I didn't…
Interesting points!
Sent from my Gmail OS
Re: Cloudflare OS: an open platform for agents, apps, and work
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sandstorm's use of containers was just a means to an end. The real innovation was the fine-grained instances -- each document in its own container. No other container platform did that. But honestly, it didn't work well, because of cold start times and memory usage. It's bad enough when a server takes seconds to start, but if every document you open has a long startup time and uses hundreds of MB of RAM, it's really…
dumb question: is this javascript/typescript only? can you use webassembly based languages instead?
In theory Wasm could be supported, but generally JS/TS is much more efficient when running inside isolates (our lightweight sandboxes) since you don't have to bundle a language runtime into the app. CFOS at present only exposes JS (with TS coming soon).