Frustratingly, while I sympathize with their very real plight, I also have to agree with OP’s ultimate decision.
OSS was exploited by hyperscalers to build trillion-dollar industries atop of, but without ever suitably compensating, the creators of much of those tools for their work or sharing in the profit. Before AI, the community was already at a breaking point between private enterprise spouting “supply chain” bullshit at them to demand fixes and attention, or steamrolled small devs to prop up a big corp’s trademark or product, all the while never actually paying enough for the proper development and support of those products - look at NPM (leftpad and kik) as prime examples. Now you have these same big tech ghouls scraping small sites into oblivion with hostile bots, making token predictors that are deliberately engineered to never, ever direct someone to a primary source or site except as an absolute last resort (to keep folks “in app” for engagement metrics), and openly pitching AI coding agents as replacements for human coders forever.
In that context, it’s no fucking wonder that the OSS community is becoming increasingly hostile to the very norms that have left most of them broke and increasingly destitute. Hell, for up-and-coming devs emerging from bootcamps, the mantra of “contribute to OSS” makes zero sense in a Capitalist marketplace that’s pivoting hard towards AI-as-human-replacement; as the OP points out, why bother training your own replacement?
OSS won’t die, but this is a particularly painful chapter that emphasizes it cannot support itself through the (non-existent) generosity of Capital. Alternate funding schemes and organization models are needed to prepare and support it for the future, be they government grants, Academia sponsors, or outright Gov-funded Private or Public Corporations (e.g., BBC, Corporation for Public Broadcasting (RIP), etc). Updates to OSS licensing schemes barring use-cases or with more substantial teeth for commercial use are also needed, toeing the line between empowering users of general computing and extracting reasonable payments from businesses or enterprises.
My thoughts exactly. As someone who has generally learned better and faster through labs or real world work, this is exactly how I intend to teach myself Ansible while also migrating some stuff to containers: throw at my current VMs, identify configs, and then migrate or enroll accordingly.
Guilty party, here. I feel I can explain myself though, or at least offer context about why I own about a dozen records and no way whatsoever to play them.
I’m a recovering audiophile. I got into the hobby because I enjoy technology in its myriad aspects, and had discovered that good speakers can make things sound better. As I began accruing CDs and re-ripping into lossless audio, I also began collecting vinyls via Record Store Day events of bands or artists I found interesting at the time, or the odd Collector’s Edition bundles of albums or games. The thinking was that when I finally settled into my own place, I could invest into some Hi-Fi kit to play them back.
Well, I fell out of the audiophile sphere when I got into data analysis, physics, human biology, and psychology: I had become inoculated against the bullshit that permeates the space, but still recognized the value of my album collection. I’d also pivoted into preservation, and so I began accepting relatives’ collections of older formats, like 78s. I still lacked playback mechanisms, though I now had the space and budget - just more pressing projects than a record playback setup.
And so here I am in 2025, in an apartment that transmits energy between units, with an upstairs neighbor that does somersaults and tumbles all day (thus shaking the space slightly). The cost of everything has skyrocketed, but it’s no longer a matter of a turntable and a phono stage to get going (need isolation as well, and that ain’t cheap). I’ve also - shockingly - got other, more pressing projects in front of me, one of which is a bedroom Hi-Fi setup that has physical controls for music streaming instead of smartphone apps - again, not remotely cheap.
Right now, my meager collection sits in a crate under the sofa, languishing. One day I’ll get to enjoy them, but today is sadly not that day.
>> One day I’ll get to enjoy them, but today is sadly not that day.
I've got news for you: you won't. Your post reads like you're letting perfect be the enemy of good enough. Also it's 2026, and being the first day of the new year the PERFECT time to just go ahead and do it. You could probably buy a used record player today for < $50 and be listening to a record.
> Your post reads like you're letting perfect be the enemy of good enough.
As someone with OCD: guilty!
In all seriousness though, I do have bigger, more important projects that consume the limited Capital I have first: finding new employment for one, replacing the sagging IKEA furniture and wobbly Amazon TV stands with something more resilient and long-lasting (eyeballing Salamander Designs for that), likely a new mattress for the bedroom, the list goes on.
That said, you're right in that I should be keeping a list of components updated with pricing and watching for deals. I know what I need, I just haven't chosen it yet, and that's the first step in any project build.
To second the other commenter, just go for it! Music doesn’t have to be blaring to be enjoyed. Just buy some turntable and begin enjoying your collection. Heck, you could even use headphones. I have a pair of open back headphones with a cable that is like 15 feet in length. So I can easily connect to my receiver and sit back and listen on the couch.
Other than the greenhorn (who is clearly baiting), you and skeeter did rightly call out my waffling and delaying. The kicker is that I already have 99% of the kit, and all I'm missing is a phono stage and turntable to get going. The issue remains that real life keeps jumbling my priority list, and thus I delay and delay it for other things.
At the very least, I need to sit down and choose the turntable and phono stage I want, at a price point and feature set that matches my current kit. I can then setup deal monitoring to help me reprioritize that project upward if something good emerges.
You are not a recovering audiophile at all, you are still fully in that rabbithole. Instead of enjoying music you ramble about your neighbor shaking and isolation etc.
You also didn't pivoted into preservation, it just happened because of whatever 'audiophile' thinking you think you have.
At the end you just stream music as everyone else.
I mean, yeah, but the parallels OP is drawing really kinda feel like the lingering whispers of the “gold standard” crowd rather than anything more substantial.
For the working classes, the peak was the dotcom bubble - everything after that has been repeated speculative bubbles attempting to create explosive growth from nothing of substance, as much a deliberate decision of Capital to weaken the working classes while extracting wealth as it was a desperation gambit by an increasingly stable (but not yet stagnant circa mid-2000s) western hemisphere and its governments. Gold alone isn’t an indicator of this, so much as all asset prices skyrocketing to the moon while worker wages remained relatively flat and precarity increased. Metals, securities, housing, land, all of it has appreciated faster than working wages have kept pace, reflecting a siphoning of that wealth into fewer hands.
Gold just makes the story “neater” to tell to folks lamenting the heyday of Breton Woods.
Fuck yes I love this attitude to transparency and code-based organization. This is the kind of stuff that gets me going in the morning for work, the kind of organization and utility I honestly aspire to implement someday.
As many commenters rightly point out, this doesn't run the human side of the company. It could, though, if the company took this approach seriously enough. My personal two cents, it could be done as a separate monorepo, provided the company and its staff remain disciplined in its execution and maintenance. It'd be far easier to have a CSV dictate employees and RBAC rather than bootstrapping Active Directory and fussing with its integrations/tentacles. Putting department processes into open documentation removes obfuscation and a significant degree of process politics, enabling more staff to engage in self-service rather than figuring out who wields the power to do a thing.
I really love everything about this, and I'd like to see more of it, AI or not. Less obfuscation and more transparency is how you increase velocity in any organization.
I am wary of the long-term prospects of GOG, but then again, I've always been wary of that since they launched - and they consistently prove me wrong.
GOG remains my first choice when I go looking for PC titles. I think it should be everyone's first choice, if I'm honest, even if Steam currently operates in a relatively consumer-friendly way. Having those offline patches and installers is a freedom you just cannot match on Steam or any other platform, and they're highly relevant to households like mine where game sharing is being cracked down upon by major publishers (looking at you, Nintendo).
This. Folks trying to nullify his current position based on his recent work history alone with Google are deliberately trying to undermine his credibility through distraction tactics.
Maybe its me but I had to look at the term sealioning and for context for other people
According to merriam-webster, sealioning/sealions are:
> 'Sealioning' is a form of trolling meant to exhaust the other debate participant with no intention of real discourse.
> Sealioning refers to the disingenuous action by a commenter of making an ostensible effort to engage in sincere and serious civil debate, usually by asking persistent questions of the other commenter. These questions are phrased in a way that may come off as an effort to learn and engage with the subject at hand, but are really intended to erode the goodwill of the person to whom they are replying, to get them to appear impatient or to lash out, and therefore come off as unreasonable.
A person trying to learn doesn’t constantly disagree/contradict you and never express that their understanding has improved. A person sealioning always finds a reason to erode whatever you say with every response. At some point they need to nod or at least agree with something except in the most extreme cases.
It also doesn’t help their case that they somehow have a such a starkly contradictory opinion on something they ostensibly don’t know anything/are legitimately asking questions about. They should ask a question or two and then just listen.
It’s just one of those things that falls under “I know it when I see it.”
One of the best things I read which genuinely has impact (I think) on me is the book, How to win friends and influence people.
It fundamentally changed how I viewed debates etc. from a young age so I never really sea-lioned that much hopefully.
But if I had to summarize the most useful and on topic quote from the book its that.
"I may be wrong, I usually am"
Lines like this give me a humble nature to fall back on. Even socrates said that the only thing I know is that I know nothing so if he doesn't know nothing, then chances are I can be wrong about things I know too.
Knowing that you can be wrong gives an understanding that both of you are just discussing and not debating and as such the spirit becomes cooperative and not competitive.
Although in all fairness, I should probably try to be a more keen listener but its something that I am working on too, any opinions on how to be a better listener too perhaps?
I definitely try to work on my listening every day, though I would say at best it’s been a mixed bag ha. Just something I’m always having to work on.
I like the “does it need to be said by me right now?” test a lot when I can actually remember to apply it in the moment. I forgot where I learned it but somebody basically put it like this: Before you say anything, ask yourself 3 questions
1. Does it need to be said?
2. Does it need to be said by me?
3. Does it need to be said by me right now?
You work your way down the list one at a time and if the answer is still yes by the time you hit 3, then go ahead.
Of course, it's also the opinion of someone who had expressed no interest in debate in the first place when confronted by hordes of midwits "debating" them with exaggerated civility... starting off by asking if they had a source for their claim that the pope was a Catholic and if they did have a source for the claim that the Pope was a Catholic, clearly appealing to the authority of the Vatican on the matter was simply the Argumentum ad Verecundiam logical fallacy and they've been nothing but civil in demanding a point by point refutation of a three hour YouTube video in which a raving lunatic insists that the Pope is not a Catholic, and generally "winning debates" by having more time and willingness to indulge stupidity than people who weren't even particularly interested in being opponents...
(I make no comment on the claims about Rob Pike, but look forward to people arguing I have the wrong opinion on him regardless ;)
The point isn’t that people who’ve worked for Google aren’t allowed to criticize. The point is that someone who chose to work for Google recently could not actually believe that building datacenters is “raping the planet”. He’s become a GenAI critic, and he knows GenAI critics get mad at datacenters, so he’s adopted extreme rhetoric about them without stopping to think about whether this makes sense or is consistent with his other beliefs.
> The point is that someone who chose to work for Google recently could not actually believe that building datacenters is “raping the planet”.
Of course they could. (1) People are capable of changing their minds. His opinion of data centers may have been changed recently by the rapid growth of data centers to support AI or for who knows what other reasons. (2) People are capable of cognitive dissonance. They can work for an organization that they believe to be bad or even evil.
It’s possible, yes, for someone to change their mind. But this process comes with sympathy for all the people who haven’t yet had the realization, which doesn’t seem to be in evidence.
Cognitive dissonance is, again, exactly my point. If you sat him down and asked him to describe in detail how some guy setting up a server rack is similar to a rapist, I’m pretty confident he’d admit the metaphor was overheated. But he didn’t sit himself down to ask.
I don't think he claimed that "some guy setting up a server rack" is similar to a rapist. I think he's blaming the corporations. I don't think that individuals can have that big of an effect on the environment (outliers like Thomas Midgley Jr. excepted, of course).
I think "you people" is meant to mean the corporations in general, or if any one person is culpable, the CEOs. Who are definitely not just "some guy setting up a server rack."
I will grant you that, however, it does not take much reading-between-the-lines to understand that Rob is referring to the economic conditions and corporations that exist which allow people to develop things like AI Village.
I agree that's what he's trying to refer to, but there just aren't any such conditions or corporations. Sending emails like this is neither a goal nor a common effect of corporate AI research, and a similar email (it's not exactly well written!) could easily have been generated on consumer hardware using open source models. It's like seeing someone pass out dumb flyers and cursing at Xerox for building photocopiers - he's mad at the wrong people because he's diagnosed a systemic issue that doesn't exist.
"Fuck you I hate AI" isn't exactly a deep statement needing credibility. It's the same knee jerk lacking in nuance shit we see repeated over and over and over.
If anyone were actually interested in a conversation there is probably one to be had about particular applications of gen-AI, but any flat out blanket statements like his are not worthy of any discussion. Gen-AI has plenty of uses that are very valuable to society. E.g. in science and medicine.
Also, it's not "sealioning" to point out that if you're going to be righteous about a topic, perhaps it's worth recognizing your own fucking part in the thing you now hate, even if indirect.
That still doesn't make him credible on this topic nor does it make his rant anything more than a hateful rant in the big bucket of anti-AI shit posts. The guy worked for fucking Google. You literally can't be on a high horse having worked for Google for so long.
The post is mainly just a CTA against further internet centralization and government control of core infrastructure, which is fine. We need more of these, and we need more examples of their harms for folks to draw on. HN often gets distilled down to a singular cause - EU's Chat Control, Elon's shutdown of Starlink over Ukraine, a regional outage of a public cloud provider - but generalized topics like these aren't really discussed all too often I find, or are often flagged for a variety of reasons and shutdown.
As technologists of multiple stripes and disciplines - programmers, developers, engineers, architects, designers, product managers, etcetera - we need to collaborate more on the direction of our industry as a whole, rather than just specific niches we find appealing. From my specific perspective in IT, the increasing centralization across every vendor category (three major x86 server manufacturers, two CPU vendors, two GPU makers, three global-scale public clouds, ISP mono- and duopolies, a handful of commercial operating systems, a near-monopoly EUVL supplier - the list goes on) is a dire threat to not just the open internet, but open technology in general.
We need to be better advocates for and champions of the technological future we envision, rather than just blindly celebrate startups and tech fads all the time. Mr. Schneier is merely the latest and largest canary in the proverbial coal mine.
> From my specific perspective in IT, the increasing centralization across every vendor category (three major x86 server manufacturers, two CPU vendors, two GPU makers, three global-scale public clouds, ISP mono- and duopolies, a handful of commercial operating systems, a near-monopoly EUVL supplier - the list goes on) is a dire threat to not just the open internet, but open technology in general.
Part of the reason why we have seen this absurd centralization is complexity. It used to be possible for third parties to tape out an x86-compatible CPU and in fact there were multiple vendors doing this - but it's impossible these days, mostly from a financial viewpoint (you'll probably need a few billion dollars in R&D plus the licensing cost), but also from a technological viewpoint - you'd need to have feature parity with Intel/AMD x86 CPUs and some material improvement actually enticing people to buy your new CPU.
In the end the "free market" will always lead to such concentration effects and, most importantly, to de facto standards because the dominant actor(s) will always be the cross-section of "offers the most features, is used everywhere else, is affordable".
The fix requires governmental intervention (be it anti-trust legislation, mandatory sharing of resources/access for dominant entities or whatever), but sadly we can't even do regime changes to get rid of kleptocrats like the Taliban any more...
Exactly... In fact this realisation has been the main reason why I shifted my views (in my teenage years) from libertarian to more centrist.
Having grown up in a falling communist state full of state sanctioned monopolies I thought free market will sort it out. Later I realised you need a balance between free market and interventionism, but for the latter to work you need a way to prevent corruption and a good justice system. Things that are very hard to come by in many parts of the world
It didn't help that the fall of Yugoslavia and the USSR coincided with Thatcherism/neoliberalism. People widely mistook correlation for causation, although particularly in former pseudo-communist nations that was understandable given how fast progress came in...
But the nasty awakening? That came crashing hard and painful, once the dust settled, a lot of assets got looted and progress mostly stopped.
Thank you. There are so many TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms) that they overlap significantly. Maybe the coffee hasn't kicked in yet, but I didn't know what CTA meant in this context. I thought it might be related to PSA (Public Service Announcement), so I searched "CTA announcement" and got Chicago Transit Authority and California Teacher's Association - obviously not helpful.
At the University of Michigan many moons ago CTA stood for Central Tripping Authority, a largely imaginary collective devoted to taking hallucinogens. (Regularly.) There was CTA graffiti all over East Quadrangle dormitory when I lived there. The meaning was well-understood.
No, it isn't just you. I didn't get it either. I never understood why some people use obscure acronyms and assume everyone's going to understand that. It's like complete lack of empathy for the reader.
I was really confused too so I had assumed it was related to something written in the article as I had just opened up the comments
Now that I know CTA means Call to action, its okay but lets be honest that they could have atleast said either CTA (call to action) or just skip the abbreviation itself since I assume a very significant proportion of people were confused so what's exactly the point of an abbreviation like CTA is certainly up to debate and people are definitely debating it so I am waiting for what the overall consensus on the whole thing is :)
I don't think that is necessarily the case. If you use certain words all the time, shortening them makes sense. They might just forget which abbreviations are and aren't common knowledge. You wouldn't get mad if people use PC, CPU, ATM and RAM, right? Even SSD would be fine on HN, but it probably wouldn't be fine outside HN. (neither would using "HN")
> Even SSD would be fine on HN, but it probably wouldn't be fine outside HN.
The set of people who know the term "solid state drive" is likely a strict subset of the people (mostly tech enthusiasts of some shape) who know "SSD". Same for "USB" and many other terms that have entered the mainstream primarily as an abbreviation.
So the question is not whether to use an abbreviation or spell out the full term as a matter of principle; the question is whether it's the abbreviation or the full term that's more commonly known. I'd argue that way fewer people recognize "CTA" than know the term "call to action". I personally have done some front-end development, and didn't know the abbreviation either.
It stands for "Chicago transit authority". I don't know about you, but search engines have become useless since last year, I'm talking downright unusable.
The Chicago Transit Authority has existed for only about 70 years despite transit in Chicago being around for 125+ years.
Legislation the governor signed last week all but guarantees that it won’t see its hundredth birthday except possibly as a sticker on the side of the busses and trains. Within 5 years the agency will only have the duty to plan routes within the city limits, and maybe do some of the driver hiring.
It's nice for writing to be sufficiently self-contained for the reader to get the basic meaning without research. How does it affect your sense of perspicacity when a sentence forces you to consult a dictionary just to keep up?
I'm still not sure why this is the author's problem. If a piece of writing is too challenging, you are welcome to disengage from it, and not demand more from the author.
A search engine can tell you what some people mean by the acronym. It can't tell you what this particular author meant. It's like asking an LLM where you left your car keys, or asking Google what your spouse wants for dinner.
Because... that's how communication works? Managing the understanding that readers will take away from what you've written is a pretty central definition of the author's job.
Arguably CTA isn't exactly an obscure acronym. It's multi-disciplinary - quite common in UI/UX design and marketing; and also decently common in any branched of software engineering that interact with these topics, like... web development.
CTA is very obscure. As a mobile dev I refuse to call CTA as anything other than click or tap to action in which case it should be TPA. Also many folks (esp. PMs confuse CTAs with button clicks). Anyway, CTA in this context didn’t even ring a distant bell either for call or click and I am glad it didn’t.
I think in UI design it usually is intended to refer to the main thing you want/expect a user to do in any given situation, i.e. having multiple CTAs is a bit of an oxymoron while having multiple buttons is not.
Nah, I meant to type TTA but now that I have mistyped TPA I should make that Tap Pour Action - Tap for Action (I am not trying the double meaning here, just to clarify).
I’ve worked with marketer types for over a decade and had them use the initialism “CTA” hundreds of times, understood it, and yet still in this comment I had no idea that they were referencing that term. If this was a UI diagram I’d have had no problem. This seems to me like a case where using an initialism in a different context than it usually appears confuses readers. It would kind of be like saying “I plan to GTM for a few things after work today.” You may recognize that as Go-To-Market if I said “the GTM team” at work, but it is strange outside that context. Outside a marketing or UI context I don’t think people usually initialize “CTA.”
How many industries can prosper by defining what the customer should get and have an endless stream of demand in response?
Isn’t GTM just “business 101”? I really don’t understand how people can use the term and not realize they are screaming “we’re going to do the basics of what we should have been doing all along”.
Imagine if software developers championed a “logic” based approach.
In a B2B company context, the Go-To-Market or GTM team means the whole sales team, plus everybody else who manages customer accounts. Customer Success, etc. as opposed to the product parts of the company.
If said like "let's GTM" it usually means getting on a call. Stands for Go-To-Meeting, the main business videoconference software before Zoom took over.
It's specific to marketing and it's a term I've only seen used when you are trying to sell a product. In my mind, CTA means "the button we are trying to make you click on by any means necessary because we make money when you click on it"
It might not be obscure in an environment that lives on 'social activity', but I can assure you -- and I am saying this as a person, who survives daily barrages of acronyms, CTA is not common.
The one that sticks in my craw is "ofc," especially when it's buried in a wall of text written by someone evidently capable of typing lots of characters in one sitting.
I have deduced that it means "of course," but of course since that expression could of course be sprinkled almost anywhere in a sentence without changing its meaning much, it's of course hard to be sure.
I really don't know why people refuse to look things up. And I don't understand how the parent's comment isn't off-topic and unnecessary and pedantic and mine apparently is. This place is a goddamn cesspool.
They could also write the comment in French, and by the same argument people should need to go out of their way to copy-paste that into google translate.
Thousands of people are going to read this thing. The writer could spare thousands of people spending tens of seconds (totaling days of human life), by simply spending less than a second spelling out the obscure term.
Boy are you going to be surprised when you find out that there is an entire French literary tradition that doesn't concern itself with who does and does not speak the language.
"In February 2022, two days after Russia's full-scale invasion, Ukraine requested that the American aerospace company SpaceX activate their Starlink satellite internet service in the country, to replace internet and communication networks degraded or destroyed during the war.[2][3][4] Starlink has since been used by Ukrainian civilians, government and military.[3][5] The satellite service has been employed for humanitarian purposes as well as defense and counterattacks on Russian positions.[6]"
"In 2022, Elon Musk denied a Ukrainian request to extend Starlink's coverage up to Russian-occupied Crimea during a counterattack on a Crimean port, from which Russia had been launching attacks against Ukrainian civilians; doing so would have violated US sanctions on Russia.[18] This event was widely reported in 2023, erroneously characterizing it as Musk "turning off" Starlink coverage in Crimea.[19][20]"
“ According to three people familiar with the command, Musk told a senior engineer at the California offices of SpaceX, the Musk venture that controls Starlink, to cut coverage in areas including Kherson, a strategic region north of the Black Sea that Ukraine was trying to reclaim.”
— https://www.reuters.com/investigations/musk-ordered-shutdown...
It is a fascinating thought. War being against TOS. And enforced thusly. As an abstract idea that is not connected to reality on the ground it offers a.. view into today's mind and what it can be compelled with.
If Starlink does not enforce its TOS, it is a weapon used in the war (guidance system for drones), and its satellites are legitimate targets for air defence.
West uses the same logic to bomb neutral tankers, because they may carry weapon or stuff!
My relatively mild amusement comes from war being against TOS, where war is effectively ultimate break of local level TOS. The only reason it is even discussed in this way is because, as war goes, it is contained. 'Real wars have no terms of service' is my subtle point.
edit: I accept I am a somewhat horrible person to even be able to articulate those thoughts.
It’s hard to be a better advocate without diving into the politics of why we’re in the situation we are, which also doesn’t address the amount of political power you and I have relative to the interests that want said technological consolidation to exist.
And given that the tech community trends towards political philosophies like libertarianism, which is inherently anti-organization and anti-collectivist, I’m not sure how you begin to scratch the surface of what a real solution looks like.
Politics are a factor but economics is a bigger one. With any technology, each successive generation inevitably requires larger and larger capital investments. Ideally governments should do more to preserve competition but when it costs >$10B to develop a new microchip manufacturing process that inherently limits how many players the market can support. And if one company bets on the wrong technology or gets the timing wrong that can leave them too financially weak to survive.
> when it costs >$10B to develop a new microchip manufacturing process that inherently limits how many players the market can support.
Does it though? TSMC's market cap is over a trillion dollars. Likewise Nvidia. What's $10B compared to these numbers? Less than 1%. Maybe we couldn't have a thousand of them, but why couldn't we have ten?
Not only that, this technology isn't a single invention, so why does it have to be a single company? Couldn't some companies make the fabs and other ones operate them, causing them each to require less capital and be easier to compete with on its own? Couldn't the various pieces of equipment in the fabs each be developed by a separate company?
"It costs >$10B to do this as a vertically integrated conglomerate" is bad, so maybe don't have that.
I assume it's cheaper to own the whole vertical slice at this scale, so you can control everything. Given that there's the financial incentive to do it, how would you prevent companies from growing vertically? If you declared a legal limit, how would you prevent a single entity from forming a chain of companies, effectively producing one huge vertical company as well?
> I assume it's cheaper to own the whole vertical slice at this scale, so you can control everything.
In general it's the opposite: Internal politics destroys value and a single point of failure is a business risk even if you own it because failure is rarely intentional.
As an example of the first, Kodak invented digital cameras but then failed to capitalize on them because it would have cannibalized their film business, and now their film business is dead anyway but so is the entire company. As an example of the second, Intel has vertically integrated fabs but now that their fabs are behind it's sinking the rest of the company. You could tell a similar story about AMD a decade and a half ago and spinning off their fabs is a big part of what saved them. IBM was also a big vertically integrated monster back in the day and they got out-competed by, well, everybody, and now they're a hollowed out consultancy.
The way out of this for a large conglomerate is to not take internal dependencies. So for example, Samsung makes both DRAM and devices, and they typically use their own DRAM in their own devices. But it's industry standard DRAM that they sell to anyone who is willing to pay them for it, and if Samsung's DRAM fabs all got destroyed by a natural disaster or their technology fell behind for some reason, their device units could immediately switch to a competitor until their DRAM unit got their house back in order. Likewise, if their consumer devices became uncompetitive their DRAM unit could still sell to the rest of the market because they're not fully beholden to a single internal customer. And having that serves as a canary; Intel didn't have external fab customers so it didn't notice them switching to TSMC, which would otherwise have been a red flag.
The "problem" is that you need to have some foresight. Everything's great until it isn't. If a company waits until one of the internal units has a problem before realizing that it's a single point of failure for other business units, it's too late to redesign the ship after you've already hit the iceberg.
Mostly the reason that these things are so capital intensive is due to market consolidation. If you want to do something useful and stay small, you have 2 choices: get crushed by a bigco or get absorbed.
Economics (allocation of scarce resources) is mostly defined by politics. For instance how you said that companies have to shut down if they take one bad risk and they don't get another chance - there was an explicit political decision that companies should work that way.
This piece could be infinitely long trying to address every single angle that is relevant, big or small. Or it could just cut to the heart of the matter and ask us all to fill in the rest. I’m fine with the latter, personally, as the “why” is not really what they’re debating. Whatever the cause(s), the end result is currently undesirable and necessitates action. We can unpack the “why” as we try to fix it.
Do unions work against corporate mergers? I’d imagine they do as they tend to work against corporate interests in general but I’m not that well versed in this sort of history.
Replying to myself probably breaks some sort of rule somewhere (ye olde double-posting), but I think it's warranted here given the volume of responses this comment of mine has received.
I deliberately left out specific guidance because I wanted exactly the kind of responses we've seen here: a healthy mixture of takes from different backgrounds and perspectives, as well as the opportunity for fatalists to out themselves with the well-tread "just how it is"/"nothing we can do" schtick these sorts of posts tend to encourage. The discussion was the point, and I love seeing the back-and-forth folks have engaged with here over a very broad opinion of mine.
What I'll leave everyone here with is something that's kept me afloat during my own dark times, far, far darker times than we see now:
Just because everything works that way today, doesn't mean it'll work that way tomorrow. None of today was inevitable yesterday, and none of tomorrow is written in stone today. One individual can't fix the world, but enough of us together, focused on a glut of smaller changes, targeting specific problems, acting in concert despite being individuals? That is what drives meaningful change. That is what defines tomorrow.
Don't fret that you can't overturn colossal problems alone. Stop worrying that things have grown too complicated to fix easily. Focus instead on building a community, a movement, an orchestra of change towards causes you believe in. Build more things and share them with others. Do things specifically because you find value in them, even - and especially - if "free markets" or VCs don't. The more you build that you can share, the wider the audience you can reach with your passions, the easier it is to change things for the better.
Immiseration, complexity, monopoly, centralization: they're choices, not inevitabilities.
We should require adherence to US regulatory policy at a minimum for any country that wants to connect to the US internet, and any attempt to circumvent, restrict, or infringe on that will result in a hard disconnect with that state for some period, like a weeklong blackout after each instance of overreach.
Imagine the political revolutions if the petty tyrants take away the circuses.
I wrote a really long post and pardon me for that if so may be and so I decided to have the tldr on the top of my comment rather than the bottom. I sometimes write long to give people an prospect into my thinking process so I am not sure but just read the TLDR too perhaps and if someone finds long posts enjoyful then buckle up!
TLDR: There are movements like clippy and projects like scaleway and so so many others with forums like lowendtalks etc. to give value on the fact that there are alternatives with open source softwares so we need people who have the knowledge to spark that knowledge in a way understandable by the normal people and that is okay because normal people cant be expected to be all techie like us for the same reason I or you cant be expected to know all about ping pong.
Most of these websites come from Lowendtalk culture and most/some of these cloud providers were themselves users (I talked to one owner of a vps provider) / power users
Let me try to be clear as to what I am saying here: The issue is convenience. Choosing these three global scale public scales, so if something falls down, its convenient/easy to put the blame on AWS for falling down. Nobody would get fired for picking AWS whereas something can definitely be said if they were other providers aside from these three
Now you can read my other comments where people say that there are not enough offerings and yes there are and please read those comments in sake of not repeating contents.
So basically the issues are incentives/convenience and other issues which can be fixed
If you really want you can colocate on datacenters.
This may not be the comment you might want and even now after saying this, the fact still stands that AWS contains a huge traffic and half the internet basically goes down when US-East-1 falls
But what does CTA mean? CTA in my opinion means giving business to other than these few restricted companies. To be honest, there really isn't a reason for having on them in my opinion both in terms of pricing and many other things.
I long have this opinion that your wallet decides the CTA. Who you fund etc. can be the easiest way to generate momentum and CTA. If you are referring to something like a political agitation/movement, these sound nice (and maybe we should have it) but they suffer from plethora of issues.
There are two ways of going through, either convincing the masses to have political voting and then create laws which try to protect their consumers only for nothing to quite happen on that front (germany has some of the highest protection laws but I am not sure how that prevents the fact that even now AWS exists and the triopoly of cloud for most websites)
These companies have malicious compliance and they have billions of dollars for every loophole so they always move faster than the speed of laws/ their revisions.
A personal movement where we try to shame companies is good but in the end if businesses/people still use them, then there exactly isn't a point of it then, do they?
So basically a movement where awareness is raised about corporations doing good deeds and giving them business seems the best way moving forward.
But there is a fault where I don't really want to associate with Scaleway (as the example I gave) but rather the idea of similar possibilities (hetzner,netcup,contabo,ovh,upcloud,reliablesite I can go all day long :) )
So in my opinion the best call to action is giving people the notion/possibilities that there are other options
Edit: I think that homelabbing genuinely helps, in a way I see all of these communites, VPS hosting, these hosting providers themselves and homelabbing to even homelabbing some raspberry pi's to homelabbing over that old pc that is scraping dust to even Saas providers who run on vercel all on a spectrum of varying degrees
In my opinion, there are some solid software available too and I had thought about compiling my own list of niche softwares/services/knowledge I know about but the thing is, most people aren't interested exactly per se and with the recent ram price increase, I am kind of left out so I am probably going to be hosting stuff on a VPS but the market is thinking of raising prices too so the barrier to entry in these markets might increase. One of the reasons I am unable to tinker with a rasp pi is that although its cheap, I live in third world country and I still need to genuinely think through it as an investment and so I just ran termux on an android tab lying around or even my phone for somedays but having to constantly power them
The point I am trying to make is that somehow if you want call to action, you want to convince the masses and I have seen this happen but it needs to happen effectively with the message and not have to mess with the details within which I constantly see happen here and I am guilty of it because my comment here has a high noise:signal ratio but I hope that people are able to make effective slogans/things which stick with people about it
Admittedly, the Clippy Movement by rouis lossman is the only one of such "movements" which has gotten movement and I still see clippy heads (lmao) and I have found that basically clippy heads and I and potentially you and other people reading this on hackernews too.
I don't think that we should seperate movements/spin many tho, that seems antithetical to me personally and I am an idealist in many cases so If the new movements get so detached from average person it can be hard to gain base/support in the first place so movements like clippy are good enough to spread our messages too
I was a clippy head on discord and many places but I slowly removed it from discord but I still have it on YT but I think that there are ways to really condense a lot of information for the average clippy protestor / helping them install linux and many other things
There is no catharsis of the whole situation if you want me to have. The world both looks good and bad at the same time and its mixed.
I think that the only thing we can do is be a realist and still try because we must live and trying is the only thing we can do but I (try?) but sometimes we live in our own bubbles so detached from reality and this is something I am going to work on (on how to communicate to the normal population like jeff geerling is a really good example at it too for homelab nerds, hi jeff if you are reading this)
> From my specific perspective in IT, the increasing centralization across every vendor category (three major x86 server manufacturers, two CPU vendors, two GPU makers, three global-scale public clouds, ISP mono- and duopolies, a handful of commercial operating systems, a near-monopoly EUVL supplier - the list goes on) is a dire threat to not just the open internet, but open technology in general.
> We need to be better advocates for and champions of the technological future we envision, rather than just blindly celebrate startups and tech fads all the time.
There are already groups for these things (W3C, ICANN, IEEE, etc.), so how I interpret what you’re saying is that we need to abandon large corporations and go with... what exactly?
I’m not going rally behind a government administration that seeks dictatorial power over everything. That’s much worse than power spread over FAANG.
Most of those groups were co-opted by Big Tech. I can tell from personal experience 20 years ago. In my case Microsoft and Cisco put people dedicated to the standard and we actual coders lost just out of ballooning time required for meetings and pointless complexity.
You can probably say the same for most of STEM academia. That's why I respect the Berkeley people. They are often insane far-far-left zealots, but they are the least corrupted by corporations. That's why you can see great open things like RISC-V come out of "The People's Republic of Berkeley".
Yep. For instance, the linux foundation is just a shadow of its former self, full of CV-stuffing people from global corporations.
Look no further than to corona times, when the LF wanted to develop a global digital vaccine passport. That's basically helping authoritarians, and completely against the open source and decentralization spirit.
A new foudation needs to be laid, banning global corporations from participating. If not, after a few years, due to their power, money and influence, they will have taken over (again).
> A new foudation needs to be laid, banning global corporations from participating. If not, after a few years, due to their power, money and influence, they will have taken over
No amount of ban or rules will prevent those corporations from carrying out a coup on any foundation or even the society itself. They have enough power, money and influence to find loopholes around them and exploit them.
The only way to stop them is to be eternally vigilant, actively recognize their sleazy tactics and push back together as a determined team. That can be achieved only by a smart population whose basic instincts cannot be easily predicted and manipulated by those corporations.
Take the example of the web. When the bigtech hijacked it and went on their bloat-up rampage, the rest of the community should have just forked the standards, cut out the excess fat and extended it with sane, light and orthogonal designs. Instead, we foolishly let chrome extend their monopoly in web development, market share and future designs of the web.
But the rot extends much deeper. Modern educational system teaches us just enough values and advanced knowledge to be the obedient and productive slaves to these corporations, but never enough to question their motives. It misleads us into believing that we and the world economy owe them our survival. It glorifies personal achievements and hyper-individualism to the extend that we suffer major emotional trauma as a result. Yet, are we even compensated appropriately in return for prioritizing our careers? They programmed us to sacrifice our happiness and relationships to enrich some remorseless and obscenely wealthy strangers.
Little of Russia's mass consumption internet is actual free opinion though. While I do prefer freedom, free speech and people making up their own minds, then if the state is not democratic and if it's propaganda by that it produces, perhaps there is basis to block it?
How convenient is to label opinion you do not agree with as propaganda and ban it in the name of free speech. Hypocrisy and narrow-mindedness of so called liberal crowd never ceases to amaze me.
Guess what, by large Russian media is no different to any Western media in terms of propaganda and the "us good, them bad" narrative. Russian media advances Russian interests, American media advances American interests and so on. Take any media openly hostile to the state's foreign policy and it will prosecuted no matter the country. Wikileaks, The Intercept, Junge Welt to name a few.
I don't live in the US, but do you think the government determines direction in the media the same way as it does in Russia?
I do get the free speech argument and that the line is thin, but Russian media by large is different from the West: you'll get prosecuted when you start saying the wrong thing.
Yes, this is really my opinion. And unlike yourself, I am well familiar with Russian media first hand and not the distilled version presented by Western propaganda.
Lovely site. Got curious about one of my own biases (that the perceived libertarian slant of HN would be similarly in favor of Ayn Rand), and clicked through the usual suspects to see the context they were discussed in.
Pleasantly surprised to see much of the discourse was along the lines of, "Oh yeah, read her stuff, found it fascinating [in the same vein as a train wreck can be], recommended just to understand how those folks think." Not going to pick up her stuff any time soon, but I was happy to have a bias prove unfounded.
OSS was exploited by hyperscalers to build trillion-dollar industries atop of, but without ever suitably compensating, the creators of much of those tools for their work or sharing in the profit. Before AI, the community was already at a breaking point between private enterprise spouting “supply chain” bullshit at them to demand fixes and attention, or steamrolled small devs to prop up a big corp’s trademark or product, all the while never actually paying enough for the proper development and support of those products - look at NPM (leftpad and kik) as prime examples. Now you have these same big tech ghouls scraping small sites into oblivion with hostile bots, making token predictors that are deliberately engineered to never, ever direct someone to a primary source or site except as an absolute last resort (to keep folks “in app” for engagement metrics), and openly pitching AI coding agents as replacements for human coders forever.
In that context, it’s no fucking wonder that the OSS community is becoming increasingly hostile to the very norms that have left most of them broke and increasingly destitute. Hell, for up-and-coming devs emerging from bootcamps, the mantra of “contribute to OSS” makes zero sense in a Capitalist marketplace that’s pivoting hard towards AI-as-human-replacement; as the OP points out, why bother training your own replacement?
OSS won’t die, but this is a particularly painful chapter that emphasizes it cannot support itself through the (non-existent) generosity of Capital. Alternate funding schemes and organization models are needed to prepare and support it for the future, be they government grants, Academia sponsors, or outright Gov-funded Private or Public Corporations (e.g., BBC, Corporation for Public Broadcasting (RIP), etc). Updates to OSS licensing schemes barring use-cases or with more substantial teeth for commercial use are also needed, toeing the line between empowering users of general computing and extracting reasonable payments from businesses or enterprises.
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