81–90 of 137 posts
https://battlepenguin.com/tech/the-death-of-the-mom-and-pop-...
There are fewer and fewer websites with things for sale. Everyone puts their stuff on an Amazon, eBay, Newegg, Etsy or Reverb store. The big carriers are the store-of-stores.
Some people setup a Shopify or other site as well, but it's usually secondary, or it's to sell merch for another thing like webcomic or blog.
It's sort of an ongoing hobby of mine to study the forces of decentralization vs centralization. This article about decentralization does what many other evangelism articles do: talk about the ideals and benefits . However, I believed what's rarely discussed but more important is the economic forces that prevent decentralization from fulfilling the idealists' vision. Yes, decentralization will be in effect for niche…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nature and Biology gives us a very strong counterexample to this. If centralization was the stable form you would expect to see an overwhelming preponderance of it. Instead you will almost always see a blend of centralized and decentralized forms, with a bias towards decentralization wherever it's a good fit. The vascular system is centralized; the nervous system is mostly federated; most of the rest is highly decent…
Yes, exactly. Is the human body centralized or decentralized? The ego could be said to be the central "pivot" of the system, but then you have the phenomenon of "multiple personalities", and so on. Once you start to think of biology as the study of billion-year-old self-optimizing nanotechnology it makes sense to look to life for models for designing the structure of our own artificial systems. There's the question o…
I think you make a good (and very underappreciated) point about the relevance of the ideas in this article to geopolitics, or how humanity ~chooses (or so we think) to organize itself.
[didericis] also makes some good points that are relevant to this perspective:
> Decentralized solutions are not saddled with the same need to appease everyone at once. You can have local solutions extremely well adapted for local situations that know more details about the context than a large company trying to deal with everyone ever could.
> I’d argue centralized solutions are only as stable as the problem is uniform. If the problem differs even slightly between actors looking for solutions, those actors are either settling for a less than perfect fit when adopting a centralized solution, or the centralized solution is complex enough to handle those differences. As differences increase, the tradeoffs become unacceptable and/or the complexity becomes too much to handle, and the centralized solution falls apart.
The dangerous part imho when it comes to a geopolitical application is, while most of us can recognize the complexities and tradeoffs in a computer system, at least when they're pointed out to us, very few seem to be able to see similar complexities in geopolitics (a massively more complex system), even when it's pointed out. It's as if we've developed an intuition that passionately rejects the very suggestion, a behavior which in itself highlights the complexity involved.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nature and Biology gives us a very strong counterexample to this. If centralization was the stable form you would expect to see an overwhelming preponderance of it. Instead you will almost always see a blend of centralized and decentralized forms, with a bias towards decentralization wherever it's a good fit. The vascular system is centralized; the nervous system is mostly federated; most of the rest is highly decent…
>Nature and Biology gives us a very strong counterexample to this. If centralization was the stable form The context of my claim was about computer information systems becoming centralized. Yes, I understand we do have decentralized washer & dryer machines at home instead of everyone going to centralized laundromat. And building residential houses is still a very local business that resists a hypothetical giant natio…
I'm not saying that your claim is wrong, rather the opposite I believe it's holds true in the present. Computer Information Systems are reliant on larger economic forces. In many cases centralized systems are not better on a purely technical basis, but rather are better at attracting capital. However there are undoubtably systems of human organization and resource management that would change the fundamentals assumptions behind this.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Nature and Biology gives us a very strong counterexample to this. If centralization was the stable form The context of my claim was about computer information systems becoming centralized. Yes, I understand we do have decentralized washer & dryer machines at home instead of everyone going to centralized laundromat. And building residential houses is still a very local business that resists a hypothetical giant natio…
I made/make no claim about the relative moral merits of capitalism or a hierarchal society at all. However you only need to look closely at your stated claim to see why Conway's Law is relevant here: your claim about "technology" rely on our concept of money / funding staying the same. Given that our concept of money has been evolving non-stop over the past centuries it seems unlikely that it won't further evolve. I'…
Sorry for the misunderstanding. My reference to capitalists was a general point and not related to anything specific you wrote. Others in the thread mention capitalists so I just added it to my reply for color.
>However there are undoubtably systems of human organization and resource management that would change the fundamentals assumptions behind this.
I appreciate you bringing up Conway's Law as an explanation but I'm not fully convinced. I think there's an even more fundamental force than any artificial human organization such as Conway: if a bunch of humans don't want to do something , it creates an opening in the market for another group to do it instead. If that "something" is information technology related, it tends to create centralization.
A bunch of us don't want to set up a personal git server (for whatever reasons), and therefore, it creates an opening in the marketplace for Github to exist. At this primal level of desires, I don't think we have to bring in Conway's Law.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nature and Biology gives us a very strong counterexample to this. If centralization was the stable form you would expect to see an overwhelming preponderance of it. Instead you will almost always see a blend of centralized and decentralized forms, with a bias towards decentralization wherever it's a good fit. The vascular system is centralized; the nervous system is mostly federated; most of the rest is highly decent…
>Nature and Biology gives us a very strong counterexample to this. If centralization was the stable form The context of my claim was about computer information systems becoming centralized. Yes, I understand we do have decentralized washer & dryer machines at home instead of everyone going to centralized laundromat. And building residential houses is still a very local business that resists a hypothetical giant natio…
There is no "decentralized protocol" in git. Changes to history are local. You then convince a remote to accept your development history as truth. I feel that you must miss the point of git's distributed and decentralized nature to say that a popular service like GitHub is detrimental to its ideals.
The sense in which git is decentralized is that in order to develop, you need a a full copy of the development history up until the point at which you want to contribute. You then create a history that is unique to you and maybe you push this to a remote at some point. Insofar that your history is shared, there is no difference between the repository at a remote (or an archive etc.) and the repository you and other developers have. Insofar that your history isn't shared, the workflow is entirely decentralized, enabling a distributed development process. Git isn't decentralized to satisfy some lofty ideal, but because this enables a convenient workflow.
A side effect of this is of course that GitHub going down forever isn't the end of the world in terms of git, because anyone interested in the code probably has an somewhat up-to-date copy of the development history that they can push to another remote or continue working on for their own intents uninterrupted by such an event. But that's a side effect IMO and not the most valuable sense in which git is decentralized. The loss will primarily be in git non-goals like discoverability, issue tracking and facilitation of the pull request workflow that GitHub offers. As far as I'm concerned, those are the only things I'm placing bets on that may result in a loss to me if GitHub dies.
It's sort of an ongoing hobby of mine to study the forces of decentralization vs centralization. This article about decentralization does what many other evangelism articles do: talk about the ideals and benefits . However, I believed what's rarely discussed but more important is the economic forces that prevent decentralization from fulfilling the idealists' vision. Yes, decentralization will be in effect for niche…
Perhaps we could agree that centralisation in this context is inherently easier than decentralisation to begin with. If true, then what I see is enormous effort to make it even easier. "Frictionless".
Recent history has shown that centralisation in this context is a proven path toward making money, directly or indirectly, at users' expense. As such, decentralisation (DIY) is the path toward helping users save money or avoiding sacraficing other things of value (privacy, control, etc.).
Perhaps time spent on making DIY easier is worth the investment.
[1] https://www.inkandswitch.com/local-first.html
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19804478 (6 months ago)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Love the challenge. Let me start by replying to your DMZ comment: with IPv6, you actually have to rethink and with it you can organise the Internet very different from today. I agree with you that people don't want to maintain complex systems. But then again, running a git server or even cgit, is a matter of little minutes spent, especially if you use ready to deploy toolchains. I also think you have a point in terms…
Re IPv6, I don’t expect connectivity to suddenly appear. The NATs will be gone, but I bet you that every single home router will get a firewall with a default “block incoming” policy. A new network protocol does not make all the security bugs disappear overnight. And for users, it does not really matter if they have to visit router admin page to set up NAT port forwarding or open up the port in firewall.
Setup a raspberry pi with an IPTable rule to log and black hole all incoming traffic, then open it up entirely to the internet through your router.
I did this and, after about 48 hours, had a nice long log of bots hammering the server scanning for vulnerabilities on open ports.
I imagine non-technical users (the ones at a high risk of getting malware just browsing online) and wonder if they are truly better off if we open up their computers to the world without first rethinking the security model.
It's sort of an ongoing hobby of mine to study the forces of decentralization vs centralization. This article about decentralization does what many other evangelism articles do: talk about the ideals and benefits . However, I believed what's rarely discussed but more important is the economic forces that prevent decentralization from fulfilling the idealists' vision. Yes, decentralization will be in effect for niche…
It started around early 2000's, while working in market research. Got me thinking about all the money dumped into it being a waste... if people could just exchange information freely in some organized fashion.
During 2000s - 2015s the corporations worked hard to form the scaffolding of, and then solidify this organization as they envisioned it.
They too saw the opportunity I was seeing. However, their incentivized profits over morals. The temptation to harness control over this exchange information was to great to overcome. They started off innocently enough. They were just "gardens" without the walls at first. In general, the public was free to admire, as well as take part in, what felt like cultivating meaningful dialogue that theoretically should only enhance life for everyone.
Fast forward 15 years, the novelty of the garden has worn off. We want to go explore something new. But as the time wore on, the garden slowly evolved into something more akin to a maze. Now we are looking for a way out, but cannot even distinguish the walls of the maze from the exterior walls of the garden.
At this point, I probably don't have to say it. But this "walled garden" is a really just a euphemism for intellectual slavery.
I have ideas on what needs to be done, but they seem to fly in the face of conventional wisdom. Especially when it comes to privacy issues.
To me this tells me I am on the right track, because as hard as I look for other answers, I still end up back with decentralization. This problem is hard. It requires faithful means to accurately identify and attribute data to its source creator.
I believe all the tech we need to make it work is readily available. The missing ingredient is incentive. But it's a chicken/egg problem. Until a majority of people want to faithfully cooperate together, it'll not happen. And no single person will agree to work on something that needs cooperation of the majority if they don't believe in it.
Enough ranting... I'm looking further for people to have discussions along these lines. I have ventured out into meetups and whatnot, but I just cannot make connections with like enough minded people to take my ideas further. I know they aren't unique, but they are worthless without others to share with...
can email at [s/.//("L.O.O.M.I.S.5.3")] at google's mail dot com
Even if you can manage to navigate this maze, there is really no way out. The perimeter