HN user
Absolutely agree. There are powerful politicians promising all sort of ideologies. There are weak politicians promising all sorts of ideologies.
In the end the powerful remain powerful, and the weak remain weak. IMO much of democracy is a smokescreen. With apologies to Marx, the opiate of the masses is democracy.
Sure, but do we want to optimize for creating trillion-dollar companies? They can hardly even find ways to spend their fortunes; we could tax quite a bit from them before anyone except accountants notices. And that money could be used for social good.
I agree that there are things that are possible only from a giant organization.
However, IMO both Apple and Microsoft are at best indifferent to their customers. Not fixing bad UIs even when people complain, putting ads in products you paid for, requiring centralized accounts just to install free apps. You've heard it all before.
I wouldn't enjoy an iPhone made by my local electrician, but I want software to respect me. Linux DEs have genuine flaws and yet I truly miss nothing and gain everything when I move from my work Macbook or my gaming Windows partition to my Linux desktop.
I don't think the decision is between a vertically-integrated big-corp device and a vertically-integrated small-corp device. Even just the current iPhone hardware (which is absolutely incredible engineering) with free software would be a big improvement.
On a related note, I run noscript on my browser and overall it's not a bad experience. The conveniences IMO outweigh the inconveniences.
However, Cloudfront, JSDeliver, etc are a pain. I understand the benefits of caching javascript locally to me, but I want to see companies start hosting their scripts all from their own servers.
If FontAwesome isn't already a tracking company, it's only a matter of time. Cringy-cool name, tentacles throughout the web, all for _fonts_. I'm a senior fullstack dev and I get tradeoffs, but the technical-societal-tradeoffs of the web are bewildering.
Hey, thanks for engaging and challenging my thought experiment. I think I could probably come up with a solution to that, but your point is made: this system will get arbitrarily complex very quickly. And require cryptography experts.
I definitely wouldn't do this for a Real Web App.
My thoughts around that are to have all authorization and ownership encoded in database relations. I was thinking of a read-append-only table. This is a bit kooky maybe, but I experimented once with trying to make database constraints that verify a public key signature of the content of the record. One field containts signature of the user against the rest of the content of the record.
It was weird and ultimately at least Postgres couldn't support a cryptographic operation within a constraint, but it was fun to play with.
I make no claim any of this is practical right now, but I think there's at least theoeretical room to grow for that approach.
I'll look more into Phoenix! Thanks.