6 ms·

Any Technology Indistinguishable from Magic Is Hiding Something

104 points by jayveeone 3y ago

metabagel 3y ago
> The reason why GAMM and all its little digirati minions on social media are pushing things like crypto, then the blockchain, and now virtual reality and artificial intelligence is because those technologies require a metric fuckton of computing power to operate. Hard to take this article seriously.
- kevinsajanjames 3y ago
  [flagged]
- infotainment 3y ago
  Agreed — this reads less like a serious opinion piece and more like an unhinged rant, trying to find a conspiracy where there is likely just good old fashioned opportunism.
- ahmedfromtunis 3y ago
  I'm surprised the title wasn't enough to infer that. All joking aside, I don't like it when writers present speculation and opinions as facts to base their conclusions on. This article is a waste of time.
- potsandpans 3y ago
  Oh no not swear words on the internet
- navigate8310 3y ago
  Article definitely lacks quality, however I get the idea that GAMM bad open source good
  - seanhunter 3y ago
    Except what about the open source that google, amazon, microsoft etc sponsor? Is that bad or good? What about companies who build open source software? Are they good to start with and then become bad at some tipping point of market penetration? Are Meta sponsoring pytorch because they do a lot of machine learning in python or is it because they want to sell you on the cloud services (that they don't actually sell people)? The whole thing feels like when you sit down at a bar and the guy next to you decides to start up a conversation about their pet topic and just will not fucking shut up no matter what. Full of pat "solutions", "deep" thoughts, dumb made-up terminology ("GAMM") that he clearly feels ever so proud of, deliberate changes to the meanings of words (eg "cloud"[1]). His claim that "minions" of google, amazon, microsoft and meta are behind the whole crypto thing is one of the single stupidest and most obviously wrong claims I've ever heard anyone make. It's right up there with the face on mars, moon landing conspiracy, "turnip-shaped" earth[2] and all this other type of stuff that is so obviously wrong on its face it's hard to know where to begin. Really appalling that this sort of nonsense is getting any airtime. [1] Which really doesn't mean whatever he's saying it means in this article. The fact that Meta or Google own some undersea cables doesn't mean in any sense that they own "the cloud". Cloud means infrastructure as a service. Google offer cloud services. They actually brand them as such. Meta do not offer cloud services. THey run honking big old-school datacentres which they use for their own purposes. They need a lot of TCP/IP so it makes sense for them to pay to put in place the infra to reach their customers. [2] Sportsman Andrew Flintoff decided flat earth wasn't dumb enough for him and that the earth was actually turnip-shaped. https://www.timesnownews.com/sports/cricket/article/earth-is-not-spherical-but-a-flat-turnip-andrew-flintoff-in-bizarre-conspiracy-theory/578642 https://www.timesnownews.com/sports/cricket/article/earth-is...
mym1990 3y ago
Isn't that the beauty of magic, and of much technology...that to the end viewer it just works? How does a magician get the oohs and ahhs by revealing their secrets? Much of the world spending time on the web actually doesn't care that things aren't open, or that the magic show is just an act of misdirection...the consumer is happy to scroll, get a dopamine hit, and repeat 1000 times a night.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
lenova 3y ago
For those lamenting the writing style: I agree that this article could use some editing, but in the same way the author laments the passing of the Unique Web, I too am saddened that an off-beat tech rant like this is hard to find these days in a sea of SEO-optimized or AI-generated content. I don't necessarily agree with the author's conclusions, but I absolutely loved the writing style here: Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta (GAMM) now own most of the steel and glass that makes the internet go vroom. Google, Amazon, and Microsoft control seventy-five percent of the cloud computing market. Meta and Google own half of the fiber optic cables supplying internet services across continents. Most of our favorite productivity apps, retail websites, and social media platforms are beholden to proprietary infrastructure controlled by these four corporations. They own the most heavily trafficked server networks, all the GPUs, and gigawatts, and whatever. They call it the cloud, but really, that’s just the internet. So, what we know as the cloud doesn’t actually exist. It’s a euphemism that obfuscates the consolidation of critical infrastructure. The cloud is metaphysical porn for wild-eyed technocrats in Allbirds who say things like “I’m making a dent in the universe” without a whisper of irony. It’s bullshit. It’s fugazi. There is no spoon, Neo. The cloud is a lie.
- MrBuddyCasino 3y ago
  I‘m 14 and this is deep.
  - btreecat 3y ago
    At 14, a cup of water looks deep. It's not your fault, time educates us all.
    - Izkata 3y ago
      https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/im-14-and-this-is-deep https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/im-14-and-this-is-deep > I'm 14 And This Is Deep is a common satirical slang used to address images and comics which are presented as deep and thoughtful, but which instead are criticized for being shallow and immature.
injidup 3y ago
Sorry but this idea that the old internet is dead is just people hand wringing that nobody will read their boring blog. It's the mistake that people make about democracy. Most assume that democracy is about the right to be heard. Wrong. It's the right to be peacefully ignored. Nobody, not even GAMM ( did he make that up ) is stopping me spinning up a web server on my cheap 50MBit up/down connection, writing a blog and doing whatever. If nobody comes to read it and nobody is kicking down my door to punish me for writing it then the system is working about as best it can. That others choose to consume their content elsewhere is just a sign that I am not as interesting as I think I am. But that is most of us.
- M95D 3y ago
  How about the right to appear in the search results of those that are still interested in your blog or it's subjects?
  - injidup 3y ago
    There is no such right.
    - M95D 3y ago
      The obscure blogs can no longer be found, even by those interested in them, therefore we need to invent the right to search&find and be found.
      - nebula8804 3y ago
        Webrings are back with a vengeance! :D
      - exsomet 3y ago
        In the before times you needed to either know a webmaster with a reasonably popular web ring, or find and join a reasonably popular community forum around your interests and perform whatever archaic rituals they require to get permission to post links. Usually either of those options was wrapped up in a layer of nepotism (maybe that word is too strong?) and the upper limit to the traffic an average person could get from those activities was at most, three digits. Then we got site generators from companies like yahoo that automatically added you to a directory and that was neat for a bit, until directories became flooded with everybody’s demo of HTML’s marquee tag. Notably, find-ability did not change. Now we have companies like google that specialize in matching queries with responses. As would be expected in a profit-focused system, those responses can be influenced by the people trying to be found. I wouldn’t argue that the current system of “pay somebody some money to be found” is better or more fair (fair at all?) but it’s provided a new avenue that at least on the surface feels easier. But either way, if someone is still chasing their two or three digits of readership, the webring/forum post model is still alive and well. That’s basically what sharing this article on HN (or Reddit/Facebook/Twitter) is, no?
jansan 3y ago
Finally a good rant with lots of swear words, sarcasm and telling things as the author sees them, without thinking if any of that may hurt some companies feelings. There should be more articles like that.
austin-cheney 3y ago
The is dead in much the same the Aztecs were dead immediately prior to the arrival of the Spanish. Consolidation into proprietary closed gardens corrupted it like a cancer and mass content population via AI will kill it. It’s time for a competing format. Any will do, but we could do something superior. A superior format would look like: * Full duplex binary sockets for transmission versus HTTP or WebSockets. It shouldn’t require proprietary software to perform a video call in a browser when modern browsers fully support that capability. The web could be fast and simple but it certainly isn’t. * Markdown instead of HTML. Accessible semantic HTML is just too challenging for most people. * Most developers are too stupid and fearful to make direct use of the DOM. Embracing the DOM must be mandatory with 100% dedication without alternatives or abstractions in future software or it must be abandoned in the entirety. Provided the opportunity to get this wrong most developers will find a self-serving way to fuck this up nine times out of ten, so don’t cave to weakness on this. * No matter what the solution is it should enshrine a forced dichotomy of anonymity or privacy. It must be a choice and that choice must be clear and mandatory. If you try for both you will have neither and developers will cry about how hard life is, like with the DOM. Don’t give the whiners an excuse to whine.
torginus 3y ago
Like all conspiracy theory articles, this one has a kernel of truth, but does some massaging of the facts to get everything to line up. And for some reason in the latter part it turns into a who's-who of people the author dislikes (internet billionaires who are fashionable to scorn)
tegling 3y ago
I think this article is entertaining and needs to be taken with a grain of salt. The key takeaway for me was that some companies who's business models revolved around infrastructure and scale (web search, social media,...) went vertical and acquired most of the world's web infra and core services. This provides them with scale advantage and they try to push products that rely on that advantage, while making cost of entry prohibitive to any potential competitors. Chasing the dream of selling "50-dollar solutions to 50-cent questions". No conspiracy in sight. Just capitalism :)
skenderbeu 3y ago
I hate to keep repeating this but if I can run local LLMs or AI models in Linux why do I need Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta products? Google search, social, even shopping become obsolete. If there's an AGI equivalent model that can help me get through my day, maybe even build, cook and everything else DIY humans need.
- hbs18 3y ago
  Because they have more capable LLMs and the hardware needed to run them.
- Izkata 3y ago
  No one has created AGI. We're likely still decades from that, if it's even possible.
  - nh23423fefe 3y ago
    mammals are an existence proof
- jamesdwilson 3y ago
  because running your own locally will become illegal or cost prohibitive very soon.
  - qgin 3y ago
    Illegal?
    - jamesdwilson 3y ago
      yes. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39677525 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39677525
AlienRobot 3y ago
>if we want a true indie web, we must be prepared to fight for it. Hope is not enough. This argument would be far more convincing if I saw some gifs of dancing bananas, rainbow colored text, a main text column that spanned the entire screen width, a repeated background image right under the text, a music playing widget that autoplayed music, and it changed my cursor to a pencil or something. Right now, I'm looking at a medium post that's not on medium. This is what I see. Is it really your personal website if it doesn't contain your mixtape?
- mym1990 3y ago
  I mean I kind of felt like the website is unique, classy, and likely speaks to a part of the author's character.

104 points by jayveeone 3y ago

> The reason why GAMM and all its little digirati minions on social media are pushing things like crypto, then the blockchain, and now virtual reality and artificial intelligence is because those technologies require a metric fuckton of computing power to operate. Hard to take this article seriously.

kevinsajanjames 3y ago
[flagged]
infotainment 3y ago
Agreed — this reads less like a serious opinion piece and more like an unhinged rant, trying to find a conspiracy where there is likely just good old fashioned opportunism.
ahmedfromtunis 3y ago
I'm surprised the title wasn't enough to infer that. All joking aside, I don't like it when writers present speculation and opinions as facts to base their conclusions on. This article is a waste of time.
potsandpans 3y ago
Oh no not swear words on the internet
navigate8310 3y ago
Article definitely lacks quality, however I get the idea that GAMM bad open source good
- seanhunter 3y ago
  Except what about the open source that google, amazon, microsoft etc sponsor? Is that bad or good? What about companies who build open source software? Are they good to start with and then become bad at some tipping point of market penetration? Are Meta sponsoring pytorch because they do a lot of machine learning in python or is it because they want to sell you on the cloud services (that they don't actually sell people)? The whole thing feels like when you sit down at a bar and the guy next to you decides to start up a conversation about their pet topic and just will not fucking shut up no matter what. Full of pat "solutions", "deep" thoughts, dumb made-up terminology ("GAMM") that he clearly feels ever so proud of, deliberate changes to the meanings of words (eg "cloud"[1]). His claim that "minions" of google, amazon, microsoft and meta are behind the whole crypto thing is one of the single stupidest and most obviously wrong claims I've ever heard anyone make. It's right up there with the face on mars, moon landing conspiracy, "turnip-shaped" earth[2] and all this other type of stuff that is so obviously wrong on its face it's hard to know where to begin. Really appalling that this sort of nonsense is getting any airtime. [1] Which really doesn't mean whatever he's saying it means in this article. The fact that Meta or Google own some undersea cables doesn't mean in any sense that they own "the cloud". Cloud means infrastructure as a service. Google offer cloud services. They actually brand them as such. Meta do not offer cloud services. THey run honking big old-school datacentres which they use for their own purposes. They need a lot of TCP/IP so it makes sense for them to pay to put in place the infra to reach their customers. [2] Sportsman Andrew Flintoff decided flat earth wasn't dumb enough for him and that the earth was actually turnip-shaped. https://www.timesnownews.com/sports/cricket/article/earth-is-not-spherical-but-a-flat-turnip-andrew-flintoff-in-bizarre-conspiracy-theory/578642 https://www.timesnownews.com/sports/cricket/article/earth-is...

mym1990 3y ago

Isn't that the beauty of magic, and of much technology...that to the end viewer it just works? How does a magician get the oohs and ahhs by revealing their secrets? Much of the world spending time on the web actually doesn't care that things aren't open, or that the magic show is just an act of misdirection...the consumer is happy to scroll, get a dopamine hit, and repeat 1000 times a night.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

lenova 3y ago

For those lamenting the writing style: I agree that this article could use some editing, but in the same way the author laments the passing of the Unique Web, I too am saddened that an off-beat tech rant like this is hard to find these days in a sea of SEO-optimized or AI-generated content. I don't necessarily agree with the author's conclusions, but I absolutely loved the writing style here: Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta (GAMM) now own most of the steel and glass that makes the internet go vroom. Google, Amazon, and Microsoft control seventy-five percent of the cloud computing market. Meta and Google own half of the fiber optic cables supplying internet services across continents. Most of our favorite productivity apps, retail websites, and social media platforms are beholden to proprietary infrastructure controlled by these four corporations. They own the most heavily trafficked server networks, all the GPUs, and gigawatts, and whatever. They call it the cloud, but really, that’s just the internet. So, what we know as the cloud doesn’t actually exist. It’s a euphemism that obfuscates the consolidation of critical infrastructure. The cloud is metaphysical porn for wild-eyed technocrats in Allbirds who say things like “I’m making a dent in the universe” without a whisper of irony. It’s bullshit. It’s fugazi. There is no spoon, Neo. The cloud is a lie.

MrBuddyCasino 3y ago
I‘m 14 and this is deep.
- btreecat 3y ago
  At 14, a cup of water looks deep. It's not your fault, time educates us all.
  - Izkata 3y ago
    https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/im-14-and-this-is-deep https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/im-14-and-this-is-deep > I'm 14 And This Is Deep is a common satirical slang used to address images and comics which are presented as deep and thoughtful, but which instead are criticized for being shallow and immature.

injidup 3y ago

Sorry but this idea that the old internet is dead is just people hand wringing that nobody will read their boring blog. It's the mistake that people make about democracy. Most assume that democracy is about the right to be heard. Wrong. It's the right to be peacefully ignored. Nobody, not even GAMM ( did he make that up ) is stopping me spinning up a web server on my cheap 50MBit up/down connection, writing a blog and doing whatever. If nobody comes to read it and nobody is kicking down my door to punish me for writing it then the system is working about as best it can. That others choose to consume their content elsewhere is just a sign that I am not as interesting as I think I am. But that is most of us.

M95D 3y ago
How about the right to appear in the search results of those that are still interested in your blog or it's subjects?
- injidup 3y ago
  There is no such right.
  - M95D 3y ago
    The obscure blogs can no longer be found, even by those interested in them, therefore we need to invent the right to search&find and be found.
    - nebula8804 3y ago
      Webrings are back with a vengeance! :D
    - exsomet 3y ago
      In the before times you needed to either know a webmaster with a reasonably popular web ring, or find and join a reasonably popular community forum around your interests and perform whatever archaic rituals they require to get permission to post links. Usually either of those options was wrapped up in a layer of nepotism (maybe that word is too strong?) and the upper limit to the traffic an average person could get from those activities was at most, three digits. Then we got site generators from companies like yahoo that automatically added you to a directory and that was neat for a bit, until directories became flooded with everybody’s demo of HTML’s marquee tag. Notably, find-ability did not change. Now we have companies like google that specialize in matching queries with responses. As would be expected in a profit-focused system, those responses can be influenced by the people trying to be found. I wouldn’t argue that the current system of “pay somebody some money to be found” is better or more fair (fair at all?) but it’s provided a new avenue that at least on the surface feels easier. But either way, if someone is still chasing their two or three digits of readership, the webring/forum post model is still alive and well. That’s basically what sharing this article on HN (or Reddit/Facebook/Twitter) is, no?

jansan 3y ago

Finally a good rant with lots of swear words, sarcasm and telling things as the author sees them, without thinking if any of that may hurt some companies feelings. There should be more articles like that.

austin-cheney 3y ago

The is dead in much the same the Aztecs were dead immediately prior to the arrival of the Spanish. Consolidation into proprietary closed gardens corrupted it like a cancer and mass content population via AI will kill it. It’s time for a competing format. Any will do, but we could do something superior. A superior format would look like: * Full duplex binary sockets for transmission versus HTTP or WebSockets. It shouldn’t require proprietary software to perform a video call in a browser when modern browsers fully support that capability. The web could be fast and simple but it certainly isn’t. * Markdown instead of HTML. Accessible semantic HTML is just too challenging for most people. * Most developers are too stupid and fearful to make direct use of the DOM. Embracing the DOM must be mandatory with 100% dedication without alternatives or abstractions in future software or it must be abandoned in the entirety. Provided the opportunity to get this wrong most developers will find a self-serving way to fuck this up nine times out of ten, so don’t cave to weakness on this. * No matter what the solution is it should enshrine a forced dichotomy of anonymity or privacy. It must be a choice and that choice must be clear and mandatory. If you try for both you will have neither and developers will cry about how hard life is, like with the DOM. Don’t give the whiners an excuse to whine.

torginus 3y ago

Like all conspiracy theory articles, this one has a kernel of truth, but does some massaging of the facts to get everything to line up. And for some reason in the latter part it turns into a who's-who of people the author dislikes (internet billionaires who are fashionable to scorn)

tegling 3y ago

I think this article is entertaining and needs to be taken with a grain of salt. The key takeaway for me was that some companies who's business models revolved around infrastructure and scale (web search, social media,...) went vertical and acquired most of the world's web infra and core services. This provides them with scale advantage and they try to push products that rely on that advantage, while making cost of entry prohibitive to any potential competitors. Chasing the dream of selling "50-dollar solutions to 50-cent questions". No conspiracy in sight. Just capitalism :)

skenderbeu 3y ago

I hate to keep repeating this but if I can run local LLMs or AI models in Linux why do I need Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta products? Google search, social, even shopping become obsolete. If there's an AGI equivalent model that can help me get through my day, maybe even build, cook and everything else DIY humans need.

hbs18 3y ago
Because they have more capable LLMs and the hardware needed to run them.
Izkata 3y ago
No one has created AGI. We're likely still decades from that, if it's even possible.
- nh23423fefe 3y ago
  mammals are an existence proof
jamesdwilson 3y ago
because running your own locally will become illegal or cost prohibitive very soon.
- qgin 3y ago
  Illegal?
  - jamesdwilson 3y ago
    yes. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39677525 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39677525

AlienRobot 3y ago

>if we want a true indie web, we must be prepared to fight for it. Hope is not enough. This argument would be far more convincing if I saw some gifs of dancing bananas, rainbow colored text, a main text column that spanned the entire screen width, a repeated background image right under the text, a music playing widget that autoplayed music, and it changed my cursor to a pencil or something. Right now, I'm looking at a medium post that's not on medium. This is what I see. Is it really your personal website if it doesn't contain your mixtape?

mym1990 3y ago
I mean I kind of felt like the website is unique, classy, and likely speaks to a part of the author's character.