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> The only possible way to stop it, is to continue advancing computing power according to Moore's Law No, economies of scale will always result in some service

> The only possible way to stop it, is to continue advancing computing power according to Moore's Law No, economies of scale will always result in some services being cheaper to centralize. I think the same will happen with 3D printing and solar panels. No matter how cheap they get, it's always even cheaper for the power company to build a huge solar farm, or for me to order a printed part online and have it shipped. (For small batches anyway) Services like search and speech recognition and translation that benefit from having large datasets to work with, also need fast Internet connections to keep that data updated. So in 2020 my $100 might buy as much CPU as Google's $80, but it only buys as much network transfer as Google's $10. The ratio is probably worse if you consider that self-hosted or even federated search means all the web scraping has to be replicated to 100x or 1,000x more databases than Google has to manage even with their CDNs. Redundancy is not free. I want it to work too, but I don't think centralization is a technical problem with a technical solution. We're fighting uphill against a law of economics. Not even capitalism, either, economics itself as a law of nature.

segfaultbuserr 6y ago
>> The only possible way to stop it, is to continue advancing computing power according to Moore's Law > services being cheaper to centralize. You are talking about its relative cost, while I'm talking about the mere possibility. Back in the early 80s, having a personal workstation (not a home computer) to process private information was nearly an impossibility, not simply because it's cheaper to centralize but because it's technologically prohibitive. Even in the early 90s, I still read stories about how a hacker in a crypto community needed to import his private key every time he comes to work in the morning to read some personal messages, and to remove it again at the end of the day. The server could not be trusted and there was no alternative. And today, everyone uses Gmail and the same privacy problem is still here - the server can't be trusted, but at least, if you are personally willing to spend some money and energy on your project, it's possible to host your own. It'll never be mainstream, yes, but it's possible and Moore's Law enabled it. Maching translation, or personal assistant, on the other hand, now resembles a "personal-workstation-in-the-80s" problem. If computing power continues to advance according to Moore's Law, at least it's going to be a "Gmail-in-the-20s" problem after a decade or two. > We're fighting uphill against a law of economics. Moore's Law and personal computing, regardless of how sufficient or insufficient, is historically a balancing force. If this force continues to act upon, the level of centralization of future software applications will still be imaginable to us. But if it ceases to exist, things will become much worse. That is all I wanted to say.

segfaultbuserr 6y ago

>> The only possible way to stop it, is to continue advancing computing power according to Moore's Law > services being cheaper to centralize. You are talking about its relative cost, while I'm talking about the mere possibility. Back in the early 80s, having a personal workstation (not a home computer) to process private information was nearly an impossibility, not simply because it's cheaper to centralize but because it's technologically prohibitive. Even in the early 90s, I still read stories about how a hacker in a crypto community needed to import his private key every time he comes to work in the morning to read some personal messages, and to remove it again at the end of the day. The server could not be trusted and there was no alternative. And today, everyone uses Gmail and the same privacy problem is still here - the server can't be trusted, but at least, if you are personally willing to spend some money and energy on your project, it's possible to host your own. It'll never be mainstream, yes, but it's possible and Moore's Law enabled it. Maching translation, or personal assistant, on the other hand, now resembles a "personal-workstation-in-the-80s" problem. If computing power continues to advance according to Moore's Law, at least it's going to be a "Gmail-in-the-20s" problem after a decade or two. > We're fighting uphill against a law of economics. Moore's Law and personal computing, regardless of how sufficient or insufficient, is historically a balancing force. If this force continues to act upon, the level of centralization of future software applications will still be imaginable to us. But if it ceases to exist, things will become much worse. That is all I wanted to say.