this article is about how and why four of the world’s largest corporations are intentionally centralizing the internet and selling us horseshit. it’s a fun and depressing read about crypto, the metaverse, AI, and the pattern of behavior that led to all of those being pushed in spite of their utter worthlessness. here’s some pull quotes:

Web 3.0 probably won’t involve the blockchain or NFTs in any meaningful way. We all may or may not one day join the metaverse and wear clunky goggles on our faces for the rest of our lives. And it feels increasingly unlikely that our graphic designers, artists, and illustrators will suddenly change their job titles to "prompt artist” anytime soon.

I can’t stress this point enough. 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. That fact may be devastating for the earth, indeed it is for our mental health, but it’s wonderful news for the four storefronts selling all the juice.

The presumptive beneficiaries of this new land of milk and honey are so drunk with speculative power that they’ll promise us anything to win our hearts and minds. That anything includes magical virtual reality universes and robots with human-like intelligence. It’s the same faux-passionate anything that proclaimed crypto as the savior of the marginalized. The utter bullshit anything that would have us believe that the meek shall inherit the earth, and the powerful won’t do anything to stop it.

  • David Gerard@awful.systemsM
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    3 months ago

    One of said engineers here, and YMMV.

    • All software sucks, all hardware sucks and all clouds suck
    • AWS works well enough
    • There is basically no such thing as multicloud in the real world, I look for it every year and don’t find it

    I would probably pick AWS over the others for most practical things as long as I had a reasonable support contract.

    • corbin@awful.systems
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      2 months ago

      Fully agreed, but also I was doing multicloud in 2017. Managed k8s is not just a meme; I was able to use the same YAML on four different providers (Azure, Bluemix, DigitalOcean, Google Cloud) to get my N+2. Indeed, YMMV.