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Comment by cardanome | Hacker News Reader

A few monopolistic corporations having dictatorial power over key technologies is a dystopian nightmare.

Those projects have ultimately the interests of the corporations in mind not of the users.

Ever wonder why overcomplicated technical solutions are hyped so much? Why does everyone and their dog need to run Kubernetes? Why is it all Maschine Learning instead of good old fashioned methods that would do much better? Well those corporation have just the fitting cloud computing offering!

Sure many of them happen to be useful and are simply for increasing the prestige of the company but let's not act like it is a good thing.

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If we want to bark up this tree, a larger problem is FAANG inventing technologies that assume you have equivalent baseline competency and maturity.

Which leads to companies that do not (eg no CICD or data architecture standard) adopting tools that assume they do (k8s & tensorflow).

(And yes, I realize this is because most folks who work at the former aspire to jump ship to the latter)

Say what you want about Microsoft, but they do a much better job of meeting the customer where they are (dumpster fire) instead of where Microsoft is.

> "Ever wonder why overcomplicated technical solutions are hyped so much? Why does everyone and their dog need to run Kubernetes? Why is it all Maschine Learning instead of good old fashioned methods that would do much better? Well those corporation have just the fitting cloud computing offering! "

Simpler explanation than some nefarious plan. Software engineers love to play with the coolest new thing over working with some proven solution that might have worked well enough. I think these corporation just exploit that with cloud offering. They don't really get to pick what people like (they try but suck at it) but have the money and resources to exploit whatever ends up being the popular new thing anyway.

Debugging Kubernetes does often feel like a dystopian nightmare, but you aren't forced to use it. I think it's a really good thing that this open software is available. As frustrating as Kubernetes is, for companies with medium-size or large-size deployments, it's really nice to have this level of orchestration software, and it's far better to have the option to use open source software than to be forced to roll your own because you have no alternative.

TensorFlow and Pytorch are similar. Yeah, people end up using machine learning a lot when they don't really have to. But researchers and developers can achieve a lot more when they don't have to reinvent the wheel, and machine learning has provided some really great things.

> A few monopolistic corporations having dictatorial power over key technologies is a dystopian nightmare.

These corporations are eating the world. They need not keep their source code closed, we're all employees, generating revenue for them.

One of the only reasons to keep source code closed is to retain your competitive advantage. They need not that when there's no competition, or a very slim chance of some appearing one day.

I'm joking, but it sounds a bit more true than I expected. Also, mind you, I'd rather have them publish code than not.

> A few monopolistic corporations having dictatorial power over key technologies is a dystopian nightmare.

I think "dystopian nightmare" overstates it. Monopoly control over particular technology is also a working definition of the the patent system. Hey, wait a minute ...

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