Personally though, the only action I could take, and have, is run a blog on my domain which lets me truly own my thoughts and connections to people on the Web. Maybe you could do that too. In such little corners of the Internet, there are no algorithms shaping content based on hollow likes or reposts. And no public list of followers to race for. Just humans sharing stuff and interacting at will.
The value of running a blog in an internet without intent.
Five hyperscalers now own over two-thirds of global AI compute
这个标题陈述了一个令人警醒的趋势：AI算力正以前所未有的速度向少数几个实体集中。这种集中化不仅关乎市场垄断，更可能影响AI发展方向、价值观塑造和全球技术治理格局，值得政策制定者和研究界高度关注。
biosludge, human feces, humanure... usually you process human feces in a hot compost to kill all the pathogens, plus you let it sit for two years before using it to grow food. the actual problem here is centralization, where your sick neighbors contribute their shit to the shared biosludge. in a decentralized world, you dont have sick neighbors, so also the human feces are clean.
The modern internet was born out of an epic struggled between "Bellheads" (who believed centralized powers should decide how you used networks) and "Netheads" (who believed that services should be provided and consumed "at the edge"): https://www.wired.com/1996/10/atm-3/
progressively decentralizing
Contradicting the previous point about decreasing the value of attacks, i.e. large quorums are one remedy to decrease the value of attacks because they increase governance friction, but this means that they are centralization vectors --> progressive centralization
In June, discussing Permacoin, I returned to the issue of economies of scale: increasing returns to scale (economies of scale) pose a fundamental problem for peer-to-peer networks that do gain significant participation. One necessary design goal for networks such as Bitcoin is that the protocol be incentive-compatible, or as Ittay Eyal and Emin Gun Sirer (ES) express it: the best strategy of a rational minority pool is to be honest, and a minority of colluding miners cannot earn disproportionate benefits by deviating from the protocol They show that the Bitcoin protocol was, and still is, not incentive-compatible. Even if the protocol were incentive-compatible, the implementation of each miner would, like almost all technologies, be subject to increasing returns to scale. Since then I've become convinced that this problem is indeed fundamental. The simplistic version of the problem is this: The income to a participant in a P2P network of this kind should be linear in their contribution of resources to the network. The costs a participant incurs by contributing resources to the network will be less than linear in their resource contribution, because of the economies of scale. Thus the proportional profit margin a participant obtains will increase with increasing resource contribution. Thus the effects described in Brian Arthur's Increasing Returns and Path Dependence in the Economy will apply, and the network will be dominated by a few, perhaps just one, large participant. The advantages of P2P networks arise from a diverse network of small, roughly equal resource contributors. Thus it seems that P2P networks which have the characteristics needed to succeed (by being widely adopted) also inevitably carry the seeds of their own failure (by becoming effectively centralized).
A great unbundling, resulting in a speedy rebundling into the exact same structures that existed before?
The experiments gradually meshed into a literary Rube Goldberg machine, a teetering assemblage of Scriveners and SimpleTexts that left me perpetually uncertain of which thought I’d written down where.
The most solid basis of a note taking (reading, thinking, and writing) practice is having a central repository from which all material is linked and readily available. Having separate loci, especially digital ones, is a recipe for failure for the lack of the ability to find what you need when you need it.
he market is already highly centralized.
I find the narrative around success of NFTs/DAOs as being decentralized solutions, when in reality, I believe most people think of centralization as the key to long-term success and getting to the next level of adoption.
For someone who wants to extend the platform, particularly developers, my best advice would be to ignore the hype. For now things can still be built without all the fancy tools. The difference is that I think it is safe to say few getting into WordPress development will have the next big plugin or theme. What is more likely is that new developers in WordPress will have rewarding careers working for hosts and other larger, established companies in the space.
The higher complexity also means more power will be placed in the hands of Automattic and their engineers. The previously more open platform will tend to be more closed and the cash flows will move in the direction of a much smaller group of larger corporations.
To some extent Drupal made their core product more difficult to use starting around 2015. WordPress seems to be following suit, but with a slightly different flavor.
DigiNotar was a Dutch certificate authority owned by VASCO Data Security International, Inc.[1][2] On September 3, 2011, after it had become clear that a security breach had resulted in the fraudulent issuing of certificates, the Dutch government took over operational management of DigiNotar's systems.[3]
Dutch Certificate Authority gets hacked.
Ways will be found to make communities sustainable,
Ways will also be found to legibilize the deliberately inscrutable. With biomed funding so centralized, forces can be applied to increase the adoption of practices like data sharing and open science.
Scientific work must therefore be spiritually, organizationally, and materially decoupled from the forces of science at scale. The way to achieve this is to give primacy to the organization of small groups and the space for those groups to develop their own norms.
Which is the opposite of the vision Xi Jinpeng has for science
Centola, D. (n.d.). Why Social Media Makes Us More Polarized and How to Fix It. Scientific American. Retrieved October 25, 2020, from https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-social-media-makes-us-more-polarized-and-how-to-fix-it/
Garmendia, A., & Alfonso, S. L. (2020). Popular Reactions To External Threats in Federations. https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/qyjtm
Early in the life of the Audius network, the AudiusDAO will control governance. During this bootstrap-ping phase, the Audius DAO will also have the abilityto intervene in catastrophic circumstances to x criticalissues in the Audius blockchain code, such as issues en-abling fraud or resulting in unintended loss of Audiusor Loud tokens.
欲戴皇冠，必承其重。“交易即挖矿”曾使FCoin撬动了老牌交易所的地位，不可否认它是成功的，它可以帮助新交易所快速积累用户和交易量，但FT没有实际价值支撑，则是一切崩盘最根本的原因。蜂拥而来的用户并没有忠诚度，对于交易所来说并不是健康的发展模式，人们最关心的是平台币涨跌，交易所的政策、发展、生态建设与他们毫无关系。当进度条推动到此时，和张健所说的要建立一个透明社区的理想，恐怕已经相去甚远。
<big>评：</big><br/><br/>「忠诚度」这一概念对区块链玩家来说，或许是烫手山芋。抱团取暖向来是人类偏爱的过冬方式之一，但实际上，他们需要释出的不是忠诚（loyalty），而是信任（trust）。忠诚一旦聚集，很容易又落回中心化的窠臼，后果如同勒庞在《乌合之众》一书里所言：「群体不善推理，却急于采取行动。它们目前的组织赋予它们巨大的力量。我们目睹其诞生的那些教条，很快也会具有旧式教条的威力，也就是说，不容讨论的专横武断的力量」。
The irony of GitHub’s success, however, is the open source world has returned to a central repository for all its free code. But this time, DiBona—like most other coders—is rather pleased that everything is in one place. Having one central location allows people to collaborate more easily on, well, almost anything. And because of the unique way GitHub is designed, the eggs-in-the-same-basket issue isn’t as pressing as it was with SourceForge. “GitHub matters a lot, but it’s not like you’re stuck there,” DiBona says. While keeping all code in one place, you see, GitHub also keeps it in every place. The paradox shows the beauty of open source software—and why it’s so important to the future of technology.
Well, it depends on how much meta-data you can extract from GitHub. As with so many other social software, the value is not in data (photos, code, twits) as in metadata (comments, tags, social graphs, issues), so, while having your data with you, in your phone or laptop is worthy, would be nice to know how much metadata these infrastructures generate and how it is distributed (or not).
What makes this more difficult to resolve is that GitHub is — surprise! — not open source. GitHub is closed source, meaning that only GitHub staff is able to make improvements to its platform.The irony of using a proprietary tool to manage open source projects, much like BitKeeper and Linux, has not been lost on everyone. Some developers refuse to put their code on GitHub to retain their independence. Linus Torvalds, the creator of Git himself, refuses to accept pull requests (code changes) from GitHub.
That's why I have advocated tools like Fossil to other members of our Hackerspace and other communities like Pharo or decentralized options to Mozilla Science (without much acceptation in the communities or even any reaction from Mozilla Science).
Going with the de facto and popular defaults (without caring about freedom or diversity) seems the position of open source/science communities and even digital activist, which contrast sharply with their discourse for the building of tools/data/politics, but seems invisible in the building of community/metadata/metapolitics.
The kind of disempowerment these communities are trying to fight, is the one they're suffering with GitHub, like showed here: https://hypothes.is/a/AVKjLddpvTW_3w8LyrU-
So there is a tension between the convenience and wider awareness/participation of centralized privative platforms that is wanted by these open/activist communities and a growth in the (over)use of the commons that is bigger that the growth of its sustainability/ethos, as shown here: https://hypothes.is/a/AVKjfsTRvTW_3w8LyrqI . Sacrificing growth/convenience by choosing simpler and more coherent infrastructures aligned with the commons and its ethos seems a sensible approach then.
There is also concern around using a centralized platform to manage millions of repositories: GitHub has faced several outages in recent years, including a DDoS attack last year and a network disruption just yesterday. A disruption in just one website — GitHub — affects many more.Earlier this month, a group of developers wrote an open letter to GitHub, expressing their frustration with the lack of tools to manage an ever-increasing work load, and requesting that GitHub make important changes to its product.