I remember back in the day Mike was building Huggingface before Huggingface was a thing. He was ahead of his time. It's a pity model depot is no longer around.
Wow this is an incredible throwback! Can't believe your memory is this good. It's quite funny and I totally agree - I met the Gradio founders in an accelerator (when they were just getting started) after we shut down ModelDepot - and they of course ended up getting acquired into Hugging Face. It's funny how things end up sometimes :)
You could easily do that with Linux. You'd just need to boot via PXE, and use an NFS root. You might even be able to just use an initramfs, and not even have a mounted root.
The main difficulty was scale and tradeoffs between power vs ease-of-use. We spent a lot of time creating "subroutine blocks" for the most commonly used functions and optimizing for UI/ease of use that we weren't doing much else. Furthermore, pretty much every integration, library etc. had to be converted into its visual equivalents for the language to be of any use and all the linear algebra/candlestick libraries were taking up so much time that the rest of the product was suffering. Stuff that often makes sense to a professional programmer had to be "simplified" so the UX is more optimal. E.g. data structures.
If you look at VPLs in production, there's a reason most of them tend to be "imperative commands only" i.e. a glue language that mainly strings together other subroutines. The concept of objects, or even structs is completely eliminated in the VPL.
Bonus tip for anyone looking to implement any: use code generators. AST -> Visual programming component conversion may save you lots of time (assuming that the language has mature enough tooling and labour is extremely expensive)
It would be really great if the general intonation can be improved to be nearer to Wavenet level. Also a lot of continental Germanic words e.g. Swedish, Dutch, Deutsch etc. and Français-derived words embedded in an English text won't be pronounced properly regardless of context.
