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sigbottletoday at 10:45 AM1 replyview on HN

Centralization is the #1 solution. It works. It's "ugly", but it works.

You see even on this thread people begging for one single standard.

What actually happens with that one single standard?

- Behind it, you have a shittload of people implicitly optimizing for the general use case and hiding all the said complexity for you

- No need to worry about [semantic conflict](https://www.sigbus.info/worse-is-better)

Once you have centralization, "composition" is not so hard. You get to define all your edge cases, define how you see the real world. Everybody doesn't have their own way of doing things, you have only one way of doing things.

Of course, then comes the extension of the software. People will see the world differently. And we have not algorithmically figured out how domains themselves evolve. The centralization abstraction breaks because people disagree and have different use cases.

I don't see how you get around this fundamental limitation. Are you going to impose yet another secret standard on everybody to get the interoperability you want? If you had full control over the world, yes, things are easy.

I'm not saying this as a diss. I truly do believe centralization works. AWS? Palantir? Building the largest centralized platforms in history and having everybody go through your tooling, when executed carefully, is a dummy effective strategy. In the past, monopolies were effectively this too (though I'd say buying steel is much different than "buying" arbitrary turing-complete services to help deal with a wide variety of semantic issues, and that's what precisely makes the 'monopoly' model break in the 21st century). And hey, at least AWS is a pretty good service, insofar that it makes certain things braindead easy. Is it a "good" service, intrinsically or whatever? I don't know.


Replies

lmctoday at 10:48 AM

I'm not disagreeing but I was reminded of a counterexample: https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/29/birmingham_oracle_lat...

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