ActiveX

Yeah, look, I've seen it before.

I was in Netscape when Microsoft were putting ActiveX and their own proprietary technology-

[laughs] Yeah

... into the web browser, and they were gonna run MSN and the web and blah, blah, blah, and thank-

you've cursed me.

Well, that was my whole life for IE6 shit, was just like figuring out like, oh, JScript didn't implement memory management this way, huh? And it was usually for some ActiveX proprietary reason as to why they didn't do it.

And then we ended up coming full circle, however many years later, and Edge... doesn't do that anymore, right? They abandoned any notion of that.

I think JavaScript's an interesting example too, dovetailing in with some other things that we've been discussing because there was a time, maybe not even five years ago, when the general impression of the UI world was constant churn of JavaScript frameworks and libraries, and it was impossible to keep up.

That was not the case back in 2006.

Any of us still have PTSD from things like ActiveX controls or Silverlight? Oh, one of my commenters brought up Silverlight.

i had forgotten silverlight anyways right there was a time when microsoft came out with so we're not gonna go into it right but those were the the old days right those were the before times now we know how to build uh basically web uh applications when we want to one of the big things to understand with artificial intelligence is that the stack itself the architecture itself is still incredibly mature we are figuring out how all this stuff should be built in a decade there will be a playbook for how to build ai systems but we are not there yet and this is one of the reasons that i argue against the trillions of dollars of investment into ai data centers simply because we do not know the architecture that we're going to need for ai systems going in the future as i've talked about before right open ai sam allman really believes in intelligence being a utility, just like water or electricity or sewage or something like that, you will go to one provider or multiple providers for the intelligence for your systems.

But if you look at companies such as Google, Google is coming out with small models and building them into everything.

Just like now, there's a way to build web applications.

What I would argue is we are kind of in the ActiveX era of artificial intelligence.

And if you don't know what the fuck that means...

You're a lucky, lucky geek.

There's a few different products out there for you to choose from, depending on what your requirements are.

But if you're going to build a web application in 2026, it's a pretty trivial possibly expensive might require a lot of work but a pretty trivial task right if you if you go back to 2000 or 2001 and you're going to build a web app back in those days different web browsers interpreted HTML tags differently it was it was just a Wild West right there was shtml out there there was active remember ActiveX controls, the disaster of ActiveX controls, there is all kinds of lunacy going on.

And that was when the web app stack was relatively immature and everybody was trying to figure out how the hell to properly build web applications.

And now, again, 25 years later, we've basically figured it out.