Apple vs. Facebook is Kayfabe
19 points by dbushell
19 points by dbushell
It’s very hard to read this knowing the author works on Microsoft Edge. By the way, have you tried Edge®? Oh you uninstalled it? No worries, it’s back now. Hey let us open that link in Edge instead of your chosen default browser. Edge. Get Edged™
I am also uncomfortable about this. First to argue against you, I think pointing this out is an ad hominem, and also I know the author of the post personally and think he genuinely cares about these issues. But with that out of the way I am on your side: in this ecosystem Edge is the most abusive player by far.
I have a Windows machine I use for gaming and it is genuinely comical how desperate it is to ship my browsing data to Microsoft. To this day it still sometimes will pop up a random “finish setting up your computer” prompt that offers to opt me in to it again unless I am careful to read the fine print.
I am not pointing it out because I want to argue against the contents of the post but can’t find any actual arguments, so I don’t know if it’s an ad hominem.
The post itself is good, and those corporations are indeed awful in the ways presented. It’s just a bit strange, coming from someone who works for a corpo that’s just as bad.
He’s worked on open web stuff at a variety of companies for a couple of decades now. He’s well known to criticize his employers products and strategies.
He’s right, though.
We are now at 25% of the way through C21. Most of C21 IT today is “kayfabe”: deliberately fake, to fool the audience.
SaaS: fake corporate IT services for company directors too cheap to hire competent IT staff.
The lie: it’s OK and safe to let other companies run your IT for you.
The truth: if it matters, own it, run it yourself.
Public cloud: it’s cheaper to leave your server hosting up to specialists. The lie: no it isn’t, but worse, you lose control of core key assets. The truth: you only need this for your public website, if that.
Kubernetes: you, yes you, you could be the next viral success and you need a website that scales to 10 million visitors a second. The lie: you need a microservices cluster
Citation: https://DoINeedKubernetes.com/
Javascript: now at last the dream of “write once run anywhere” is real! Everything is a web app!
The truth: all your “local” apps have a separate 200MB dependency on an old insecure copy of Chromium. How do you update them all? You don’t. You can’t. Your web apps depend on leftpad, that one dude in Nebraska from Xkcd 2347.
And of course…
AI. Computers that write their own software! Yay!
Only they don’t. It’s the emperor’s new clothes. Everyone believes it. It’s like religion: it is unacceptably rude to tell someone their god doesn’t exist. Even if the “god in the machine” is a language model.
It’s all fake all the way down. I think the last time the industry knew what it was doing was in the 20th century. Since the dotcom boom and bust, MBAs have just been winging it and hoping they don’t get called out ’til their shares vest.
Was this awful to read for anyone else on mobile, in your real/non-IAB browser? The images didn’t fully fade in until they were halfway scrolled off the top of my screen. I gave up halfway through because it was so frustrating.