Recently upgraded my iPhone 11 to 16 (mostly because battery was not great anymore). I've turned off all of the gen AI stuff and enjoy the longer battery life and a better camera. I'm not an gen AI skeptic - I use it in other contexts (e.g. CoPilot, chatGPT). I just don't find Apple's current AI experiments that appealing really (e.g. emojis?? really?). I guess gradually they'll find the natural fit of these technologies in places where they actually bring value. At the moment it just feels like a salespitch to justify the over spec-ed phones we keep buying.
We like creating decentralised technologies to then graviate around centralised services built on top. The Internet was meant to be decentralised (it still is in terms of the protocols that make it work), but then we ended up consuming very much centralised services. Bitcoin's decentralised in terms of technology, but then we are centralising in terms of exchanges, wallets etc.
I guess the decentralisation aspects of a given technology just means it's a resilient building block. And since the only way we make sense of things nowadays is through markets, it's inevitable we starting building and consuming centralised services.
I'm not saying centralisation is good or bad btw, but I do share the irony in your reply, mostly because I find it funny when a new tech is being sold as new way of doing something in a decentralised way.
Decentralization mainly grants
flexibility/customization/freedom, but generally you don’t really care about this — freedom only really matters when you can’t do the thing you’re trying to do.
If everything is already covered without such freedom, or you don’t care about what’s not covered (or failed to conceive it), then you don’t really mind having the freedom or not. It doesn’t change much.
Gmail is a good email client — email being decentralized is only relevant to me if I wanted to get off gmail to go to say fastmail. But if I didn’t, what do I care whether the underlying protocol is centralized or not?
> freedom only really matters when you can’t do the thing you’re trying to do.
Disagree, or at least think there’s a need to clarify. This makes it look like a freedom is only occasionally relevant.
This kind of freedom derived from decentralization also exists as a persistent threat against bad behavior. If users can leave and bring their stuff with them, that constrains the choices that the platform can even consider.
Attempts to centralize should be seen as strategic attempts to change the landscape in a way that makes it easier to exploit users.
At the BBC a few years ago we completely replaced our Chaos Monkey setup with a "chaos-lambda". It's extremely simple to setup and saves us a chunk of cash in terms of compute and maintenance. I'm sure Chaos Monkey is more featureful, but a lot of times you don't really need these features. If you just need something that ticks on a cron and kills instances at random across your estate and you have a good amount AWS accounts, have a look.
It's always good to see this "chaos culture" being promoted as it drives best engineering practices in terms of architecting, testing and monitoring resilient systems. However it's also interesting to see how at times this space gets inflated, packaged and sold as this big complicated thing that requires "chaos engineers" to implement (almost like "agile" got inflated into a stand alone industry :)). It's just a set of good practices that engineers can do to improve critical systems.
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