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With the utmost respect to you and the other commenters here, when I see positivity about the abstract, hypothetical technical merits of something with a long h
by gorgoiler 6y ago
With the utmost respect to you and the other commenters here, when I see positivity about the abstract, hypothetical technical merits of something with a long history of, in practice, being part of an extremely controversial power play it reminds me a lot of the comments I see promoting a widely installed piece of process management software — one which a lot of people don’t really want, whose subtle changes to layers of abstraction introduce new and unexpected bugs that can only be fixed by further coupling, and which can also be reasonably described as a single entity politically maneuvering itself to bring order to the chaos at the expense of living in, for want of a better term, a dictatorship.
Well at least under Google AMP, the pages loaded on time.
- Clausinho 6y agoI'm out of the loop, care to elaborate which PM software you are referring to?
- gorgoiler 6y agoEdit: it’s too controversial I think to introduce it by name. Googling “RedHat’s replacement for Linux init” would be a good start.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- izzagilani 6y agoSo systemd, right?
- wutbrodo 6y agoWhy would providing an unambiguous pointer to the name be any more controversial than just saying it? The only extra purpose doing it this way serves is being annoying. (Its systemd, for anyone who doesn't feel like googling it)
- xg15 6y agoI guess he was referring to systemd.
- jevgeni 6y agoThat first paragraph is a single sentence... Tried understanding what you are saying a couple of times and I just can’t.
- cosmodisk 6y agoYou might want to work on reducing the length of your sentences- it's very hard to get the meaning behind them.
- Noumenon72 6y agoTo me all the difficulty is caused by the obscuration. Once you get to the point where he refuses to say which software he's talking about, your attention scatters to all the different things he might be referring to. If I talk about Oracle's subtle changes to layers of abstraction, you can read the sentence and decide whether that describes Oracle well or not. If I talk about "a widely installed piece of process management software" doing that, everything else I say is just a riddle trying to figure out which one.
- afarrell 6y agoI think thats part of the point. It makes his statement conversationally non-falsifiable because if I say something about (taking a guess here) systemd, that will say more about my own biases than what I am responding to.
- 7leafer 6y agoYou might want to work on extending the span of your attention, there's pretty dismal future ahead if people have trouble extracting the meaning from a few lines of text.
- 6y ago
- gsich 6y ago>Well at least under Google AMP, the pages loaded on time. Yeah, because Google is cheating.
- gorgoiler 6y agoBy the way, I was referring to a common English aphorism about punctuality on 20th century Italian railways: https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2018/11/03/making-trains-run-on-time https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2018/11/03/...
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- yesenadam 6y agoIt seems I have to "register" with the Economist to read that.
- catalogia 6y agoIt's a reference to "Say what you like about Mussolini, he made the trains run on time." This quip is generally used sarcastically or wryly. "Say what you like about [something that's seriously bad], at least [frivolous matter] has improved."
- jolux 6y agoAs far as I know it’s not even true of Mussolini though.
- catalogia 6y agoYes well it's not really true of AMP either (using a strict content blocker beats AMP load times.) The meme of 'Mussolini making trains run on time' is often used in cases where the trivial upside is dubious at best.
- 6y ago
- 0898 6y agoIs this some kind of human buffer overflow?
- catalogia 6y agoI enjoyed reading this comment. The way you write is fun.
- simias 6y agoI don't like systemd and I think it's an overengineered mess of dubious value but comparing an open source linux init system to the long game Google seems to be playing to act as a proxy for the web is absurd and doesn't make any sense at any level. Your comment is pure flamebait without any insight.
- gorgoiler 6y agoThe long game which X seems to be playing to take control of Y Oh, exactly that: Google/AMP with the web, systemd with Linux. The point though isn't about the technology or the tactics. It's about the seemingly-benign apologia from third parties that bit-by-bit chips away at the objectors' arguments. It's part of how X wins their long game and takes control of Y. I don't even think the original comment to which I replied does this, but it reminded me of a pattern. The way in which AMP/web and systemd/Linux are playing out are similar enough to be worth thinking about. (I almost certainly lack any kind of meaningful insight and – according to quite a few others here – an ability to write. It's disappointing to be accused of pure flamebait though.)
- ElliotH 6y agoI struggle to see how comparing people who like particular technical products to supporters of dictatorships shows any of the "utmost respect" to any commenters that you claim at the start of your comment.
- dang 6y agoWe detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23729479 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23729479.