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• The technology can be used to improve accuracy and efficiency in applications such as language models and AI systems |
• Vector sets can be used in various domains, including text, images, and faces, and can be applied to tasks such as spam detection and automatic door opening |
• Discussion of the speaker's preference for using Claude Sonnet over Open AI's models |
• The speaker's use of AI for coding, with a focus on using it as an aid for generating ideas and exploring concepts, rather than relying solely on it for coding |
• The speaker's experience with using AI for debugging and code optimization |
• The benefits of Claude Sonnet's document generation feature, including the ability to update parts of a document in real-time |
• The speaker's concerns about the potential for AI to replace human programmers, and the need for governments to ensure that people are protected and able to pay their bills |
• The speaker's optimism about the future of AI in the tech industry, including the potential for it to be democratized and made accessible to more people |
• Existential threat of AI |
• Agentic nature of AI models and potential for extreme events |
• Complexity and uselessness of modern software systems |
• Impact of LLMs on code complexity and utility |
• Problem of complex build systems and dependencies |
• Example of Facebook's Android app having 1 million lines of code |
• Comparison of old and new software systems' memory usage and complexity |
**Jerod Santo:** Today we are catching up with Salvatore Sanfilippo. You may know him as Antirez. You may also know him as the creator of Redis. I say catching up because you have not been on the show since 2011. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Gosh... |
**Jerod Santo:** That's a long time. Welcome back. |
**Salvatore Sanfilippo:** Thank you. Thanks for inviting me. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Let's say forever ago, Jerod. It's the beginning, almost. |
**Jerod Santo:** Different times. Those were different times, for sure. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Different times, for sure. Not mainstream tech; underground tech, as you said. |
**Salvatore Sanfilippo:** We were younger, for sure. |
**Jerod Santo:** We were all much younger. Yeah, like 13 years younger. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** We were younger... |
**Salvatore Sanfilippo:** Yeah, it was a different environment. There was still the spirit -- even maybe IRC news groups were starting to fade... There was still this spirit of community, what you made, it's cool, let's collaborate about that... It was a lot of underground thing. |
I believe that, on the average, programmers are very nice to each other, are very good at communicating with each other. And in general, I believe it was a very nice environment. And in some way, I miss that, but maybe it's just that I am old. |
**Jerod Santo:** Rose-colored glasses, we all put them on from time to time, and look back at the old days. Well, we're still talking Redis, though. I mean, 15 years later, and we're still talking Redis. Had it been a few years back with you on the show, we probably would not have been talking about Redis so much. That... |
**Salvatore Sanfilippo:** Actually, thank you for using it, because if you think at Redis, even if it compiles certain ideas in new ways, they are all old ideas. So I believe that software is mainly a platform for people to communicate concepts. And without a community -- Redis was so resilient; it lasted so much time ... |
And the way it started was because -- my first days as a programmer were all about security. I worked in security for a couple of years. Then what happened in security is what is happening right now to software. It started to be cool, it started to be business, a lot of business. And security was no longer research, it... |
\[07:52\] And then I started to get a bigger project, because I was in a very bad situation in my life. I had struggles with my relationships, I had a son that was like three years ago, and I was - I could say depressed, but it's impossible for me to get depressed physiologically, because the kind of attitude I have in... |
So the first weeks I just watched Star Trek Voyager nonstop, and South Park... And then I started to work to an interpreter for the Tcl programming language, for embedded systems. And much of this code was the foundation to make Redis one year later. |
So basically, with this interpreter, which was not just a toy interpreter, it was compatible with all the Tcl programming language set, extended it in many ways... It added continuations and other stuff, and was in some way, in some things even faster, and so forth. Finally, it clicked something in my mind about how to... |
And we created two services. One was exactly like Delicious, and another one was an improved Digg, much more like Reddit now, basically. So there was complex moderation, there was a Tcl program that did the advanced filtering in order to avoid friends voting themselves. And this became popular in Italy, and so Telecom ... |
I remember when we went in Milan I was dressed so badly that they didn't want to let me at the hotel in. They're like "Are you sure that you have a reservation in this hotel?" I said, "Call this number." They said "Okay, you can enter." Because we were underground people. In Palermo we had Linux systems with cables in ... |
And so we entered the network, and from one day to the other, we had to sustain the traffic of a lot of users, all the Italy connected. And our systems were not ready. So the first thing that I did was in PHP - the system was written in PHP - to write a memoization function that basically whatever you could call inside... |
\[12:22\] And this way we had some kind of cache in order to avoid stressing MySQL too much. And this worked the first weeks, but then we created a new service that was a real-time log analyzer, and the use case was not static caching. You know, till this point I didn't know even that Memcached existed. So I could not ... |
But even if I had Memcached, that was not enough for me, because I needed a cache with data structure where I could add items and remove all the items. So I took Tcl and wrote a prototype, and they tested it, and it worked so well. And they said, "Okay, that's good, but it's not a scripting language thing. I want an ac... |
And since I in the past had background in security and low-level programming for cryptography, I studied the very in-depth the Stevens books, all the system call of Unix, the implementation of small Unix systems like Minix, provided a few patches to the TCP/IP stack of Linux... So I was a very low-level already, and I ... |
And so I started to write this Redis thing, and it took me two weeks to have the basic core in order to apply it in our system. And since I had a long story of releasing open source software, \[unintelligible 00:14:34.05\] device drivers for the Canon cameras, web log analyzers, many projects that were in Debian and in... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Morbius, yeah. |
**Salvatore Sanfilippo:** Yeah, that unfortunately now is no longer with us - he was a very smart guy, and I want to take a minute in order to remember him, because when I went the first time in San Francisco, he interviewed me and we did a talk... And basically, he realized \[unintelligible 00:15:39.29\] |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[laughs\] I've just found this recently, because I was in his office... I've just found that recently. |
**Salvatore Sanfilippo:** He was doing the operations for GitHub. So basically, Ezra said to GitHub, "You have this delayed jobs thing, but you could use Redis", and he started to talk. But for six months, one year, I continued to work to Redis just because I liked it. And also, there was the contract with Telecom Ital... |
\[16:18\] And actually, as a kind of person, I am so erratic from the point of view of doing only what I want, that it's a miracle that I was able to work so many years to Redis. And what the trick was to just focus every time in a subsystem that in a given moment interested me. So it's like if you have many projects, ... |
So thanks to this start of conversation, and I continued, and then I posted again the news... And also, one thing that I did was that every open source user that I had, I handled it as a customer. Like, it didn't matter if he or she is not paying me, I offered basically premium customer service \[unintelligible 00:17:1... |
But after like two years, it looked like it was inflating. Like, there was a very strong movement about very consistent systems, serializable systems. And I was very against it, in the sense that I thought "That's great that you have systems that have very strong form of consistencies, but not all the kinds of problems... |
But many, many followed this path. For example -- I don't want to tell names, but they failed, because they were so compelled... At same time instead, for example, MongoDB prospered, inferior initially. Now I believe they are very strong; initially, technically, infrastructure. Because sometimes people want things that... |
So basically the thing inflated, to the point that one of the people that was contributing with me back then brought me one night and said "Save yourself and run away from Redis, because it's a ship that is sinking." |
**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] You didn't listen? |
**Salvatore Sanfilippo:** No, no. I said, "Okay, I understand. It can inflate, but then I will find a new project. I will not die if Redis is no longer used." But instead, after this stage, especially in the San Francisco area, to use Redis was worse than saying "I vote for Trump", or something like that. It was imposs... |
\[20:13\] And so people that I ran away from this Redis thing... But then, for example, there were very important companies that in the wave of this feeling was switched away from Redis, and then six months again they were back to Redis, because they created a lot of issues, trying to serve with other services. And so ... |
**Jerod Santo:** So we started off talking about how times have changed, and you mentioned that when you first started it, or those first couple of years, you treated every new user like a customer, and that's part of its success story. Would you advise that today, for people who are starting open source projects, or d... |
**Salvatore Sanfilippo:** I believe it is very important to don't fall in the trap of saying "This is an open source project. I put it on GitHub, and then you don't ask me anything, because I'm already providing this work for free." But actually, the involvement of the users that try to use your system is not inferior ... |
Also, the first users are not the mass users that you have in the next years. They often are extremely bright persons, that will provide you very valuable ideas. And there is so much value in that community, in that initial community. So I absolutely will do this again. |
**Jerod Santo:** So you had a couple of jobs along the way. You mentioned VMware... There's one in between that and Redis Labs. What was the one in between? |
**Salvatore Sanfilippo:** It was VMware, Pivotal and Redis Labs. |
**Jerod Santo:** Okay, so Pivotal. And so these organizations employed you full-time to work on Redis at your discretion, or was there strings attached? And then how did you get all that going? Because back then that was pretty rare. I think it happens now and again now, but that was pretty rare. So how did that work o... |
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