Couldn’t disagree more… if you go the ZMQ you are left alone handling many things you get in Kafka for free. If you have any sort of big data problems then good luck. You are going to reinvent the wheel.
There is this theory of „adjacent possible”, that quite well explains why the technology develops the way it does. Some enabler technologies or inventions or even economy are just not just there yet for next thing to happen.
Well, there is yt-dlp, if you count that as a browser. It has hacks for downloading from nearly every website that has weak DRM. It also has a fallback for guessing how to download from arbitrary websites.
If you mean drm'd content, I think that's hopeless now, the security is at the hypervisor level nowadays. I can't even play that content on my old vga monitors. For the average youtube video, I don't see why not in principle.
The counterarguments are really weak to refuse the analogy. They actually might convince a more aware reader that the opposite is true. E.g. Voluntary participation argument asserts that everyone has choice. This is equally true as saying that an alcoholic can simply stop drinking. In the economy where the winner takes all this is not that easy…
There's also an issue that many tech savvy people miss: Most people have a very hard time using and understanding software, even if they use it regularly.
The attack surface of people who are easy to manipulate or exploit by Big Tech is shockingly large. But it's not just about personal responsibility or social pressures, but in large parts just about a lack of technical competency and internet literacy that the vast majority of people can't afford to get and maintain.
I read the book and the post. I’m glad to see the rebuttal so weak, it strengthens my conviction that Yanis is onto something and is using historical analogies appropriately.
While most arguments are just technical gotchas, there’s a fundamental topological difference: in a feudal system you have one lord (apparently, you could generally not move without permission). With the new ”cloud serfs” you maintain multiple relations with different lords. Thus, you currently have more freedom of association- and migration compared to actual serfs, to a meaningful extent.
The system is very recent though, and consolidation of power (often through acquisitions) is already massively common and in every lord’s playbook. If they could, the mega-corps would absolutely want to buy other megacorps. Overall the system looks nothing like the idealized version of ”free markets” as taught in schools.
Free markets are wonderful, but they require free agents to participate in them. That includes consumers and workers. Noam Chomsky even described Amazon as a totalitarian employer once I think.
I find it distasteful to use the ideal of free markets to defend large, oligopolistic corporations, their atrocious business practices towards consumers, workers and partners and their irresponsible treatment of the environment.
Those aren't your entrepreneurial ventures that participate in a free market. They are established institutions that can exert extreme power in economic, legal and political terms.
I really don't understand what mechanisms could exist in an ideal free market to stop monopolies. What is a monopoly other than a hyper-successful agent on the free market? What kind of a free market is one that would restrict such a monopoly? It's incoherent.
Why obsess over idealism and purity? We (most of us) don’t do that with individual liberty. Sure, we should have guiding principles for deciding how to regulate markets, just like we have for civil liberties. But for everyone except anarcho-capitalists, bikeshedding the purest philosophical interpretation is just navel-gazing.
I think the weakest of some pretty weak points by the author. The involuntary and extractive nature of the system is precisely what makes the feudal analogy strong.
It seems that today we can achieve similar functionality in fundamentally different ways (WSL, WSL2/virtualisation, Cygwin, etc.) What in your opinion is today's closest solution to colinux? and why we don't see such clever solutions today?
WSL2 is analogue to coLinux and WSL1 is analogue to Cygwin. WSL2 is definitely what you want in place of coLinux. However, both have merit in what they can achieve depending on the circumstances. There is long thread on Github about the switch between the two, with many people asking to maintain both.
Yep, the only advantage I see with using ASCII control characters is that you can save a few bytes depending on the content. To make this approach robust, escaping is still needed.
Zed is supposed to be a lightweigh and fast text editor. That was my hope when trying it. This is not the case. When I was editing some JS or HTML file I noticed that my laptop is quite warm. I checked all processes and there was some node process taking up 100% of one of CPUs. It was some language server running in the background in some non-efficient way. The problem with Zed is that its mission is to be "engineered for performance", while in the background they cut corners and run some heavy unoptimized stuff. I think this is not a right strategy, even cosindering it is still in beta.
