8 ms·

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 w

• CodingJeebus 10mo ago
  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.
  • nradov 10mo ago
    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.
    • AnthonyMouse 10mo ago
      > 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.
      • ksclk 10mo ago
        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?
        • schubidubiduba 10mo ago
          By enforcing antitrust laws, like it has been done many times in history?
        • AnthonyMouse 10mo ago
          > 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.
  • Forgeties79 10mo ago
    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.
• rconti 10mo ago
  == Call To Action
  • tchalla 10mo ago
    Thanks. I don’t know why people use obscure abbreviations and acronyms.
    • tonyedgecombe 10mo ago
      They think it makes them sound knowledgable.
      • andruby 10mo ago
        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")
        • alberto_ol 10mo ago
          Without context ATM could be Asynchronous Transfer Mode or automated teller machine.
          • deleted 10mo ago
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          • sowbug 10mo ago
            At the moment
        • codeflo 10mo ago
          > 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.
• mxkopy 10mo ago
  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.
  • gbear605 10mo ago
    It probably depends on the corporations. If a merger would result in all of the union’s employees being laid off, of course the union would fight it.
  • kruffalon 10mo ago
    Unions tend to work for people. If you think that working for people is against corporate interests then I think we should just be dine with corporations. I like people!
  • venturecruelty 10mo ago
    Antitrust law does. That requires a government that cares to enforce the law.
  • devilbunny 10mo ago
    Depends on the union and the laws under which they operate.
• NooneAtAll3 10mo ago
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  • deleted 10mo ago
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  • viraptor 10mo ago
    One of these things is not like the others..
  • kreetx 10mo ago
    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?
    • crazybonkersai 10mo ago
      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.
      • immibis 10mo ago
        How convenient it is to label troll-farm propaganda as "opinions you do not agree with" Is it really your opinion if you're paid to pretend to hold it?
      • crazybonkersai 10mo ago
        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.
• deleted 10mo ago
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• thegrim000 10mo ago
  >> Elon's shutdown of Starlink over Ukraine "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]" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink_in_the_Russian-Ukrainian_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink_in_the_Russian-Ukrain...
  • deleted 10mo ago
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  • szundi 10mo ago
    [dead]
  • noja 10mo ago
    “ 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-starlink-satellite-service-ukraine-retook-territory-russia-2025-07-25/ https://www.reuters.com/investigations/musk-ordered-shutdown...
  • throw93039r88 10mo ago
    I am sure it is against Terms of Service to use Starlink to bomb people! Last time starlink was used to sank tanker near Turkey. It was miracle tanker was empty, and there was no ecological catastrophe!
• mschuster91 10mo ago
  > 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...
  • Roark66 10mo ago
    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
    • mschuster91 10mo ago
      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.
• vcliberal 10mo ago
  > 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.
  • alecco 10mo ago
    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".
    • abc123abc123 10mo ago
      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).
      • goku12 10mo ago
• runlaszlorun 10mo ago
  I'll admit that my early morning eyes saw "CYA". Which I'll admit had me scratching my head...
• observationist 10mo ago
  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.
• Imustaskforhelp 10mo ago
  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. https://www.scaleway.com/en/news/scaleway-launches-its-risc-v-servers-in-the-cloud-a-world-first-and-a-firm-commitment-to-technological-independence/ https://www.scaleway.com/en/news/scaleway-launches-its-risc-... > Featuring the T-HEAD TH1520 SoC, 16GB RAM and 128GB storage at a price of €15.99 per month, Elastic Metal RV1 is accessible to all budgets Scaleway :- a non three global-scale public clouds offering riscv from a custom manufacturer from a list might be something of your interest then :) Sir, I understand that the world is getting centralized since that is the fact but I have started to frequent more on https://vpspricetracker.com/ https://vpspricetracker.com/ , https://serverdeals.cc/ https://serverdeals.cc/ , https://serververify.com/ https://serververify.com/ , https://lowendtalk.com/ https://lowendtalk.com/ etc. (sorry for sending more links but I have a whole list of awesome stuff on a yopad/etherpad instance) 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)
• stego-tech 10mo ago
  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.