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Comment by gorgoiler | Hacker News Reader

With the utmost respect to you and the other commenters here, when I see positivity about the abstract, hypothetical technical merits of something with a long history of, in practice, being part of an extremely controversial power play it reminds me a lot of the comments I see promoting a widely installed piece of process management software — one which a lot of people don’t really want, whose subtle changes to layers of abstraction introduce new and unexpected bugs that can only be fixed by further coupling, and which can also be reasonably described as a single entity politically maneuvering itself to bring order to the chaos at the expense of living in, for want of a better term, a dictatorship.

Well at least under Google AMP, the pages loaded on time.

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I don't like systemd and I think it's an overengineered mess of dubious value but comparing an open source linux init system to the long game Google seems to be playing to act as a proxy for the web is absurd and doesn't make any sense at any level.

Your comment is pure flamebait without any insight.

The long game which X seems to be playing to take control of Y

Oh, exactly that: Google/AMP with the web, systemd with Linux.

The point though isn't about the technology or the tactics. It's about the seemingly-benign apologia from third parties that bit-by-bit chips away at the objectors' arguments. It's part of how X wins their long game and takes control of Y.

I don't even think the original comment to which I replied does this, but it reminded me of a pattern. The way in which AMP/web and systemd/Linux are playing out are similar enough to be worth thinking about.

(I almost certainly lack any kind of meaningful insight and – according to quite a few others here – an ability to write. It's disappointing to be accused of pure flamebait though.)

I struggle to see how comparing people who like particular technical products to supporters of dictatorships shows any of the "utmost respect" to any commenters that you claim at the start of your comment.

Is this some kind of human buffer overflow?

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23729479.

You might want to work on reducing the length of your sentences- it's very hard to get the meaning behind them.

To me all the difficulty is caused by the obscuration. Once you get to the point where he refuses to say which software he's talking about, your attention scatters to all the different things he might be referring to. If I talk about Oracle's subtle changes to layers of abstraction, you can read the sentence and decide whether that describes Oracle well or not. If I talk about "a widely installed piece of process management software" doing that, everything else I say is just a riddle trying to figure out which one.

I think thats part of the point. It makes his statement conversationally non-falsifiable because if I say something about (taking a guess here) systemd, that will say more about my own biases than what I am responding to.

My best guess was Jira, not everything made sense but it was the only thing I could think of.

Process management, not project management.

Yeah, my brain threw `OutOfMemoryBuffer` ⅔ in through several rereads.

I'm out of the loop, care to elaborate which PM software you are referring to?

I guess he was referring to systemd.

>Well at least under Google AMP, the pages loaded on time.

Yeah, because Google is cheating.

By the way, I was referring to a common English aphorism about punctuality on 20th century Italian railways:

https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2018/11/03/...

It seems I have to "register" with the Economist to read that.

It's a reference to "Say what you like about Mussolini, he made the trains run on time."

This quip is generally used sarcastically or wryly. "Say what you like about [something that's seriously bad], at least [frivolous matter] has improved."

As far as I know it’s not even true of Mussolini though.

Yes well it's not really true of AMP either (using a strict content blocker beats AMP load times.) The meme of 'Mussolini making trains run on time' is often used in cases where the trivial upside is dubious at best.

Actually it’s a joke about concentration camps and it’s in bad taste and offensive.

> Actually it’s a joke about concentration camps

No it isn't.

Gorgoiler says "a common English aphorism about punctuality on 20th century Italian railways" and links to https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2018/11/03/... Both are clearly about Mussolini making trains run on time (or rather, not actually doing so.) Wikipedia describes the origins of the quip as such:

> Mussolini was keen to take the credit for major public works in Italy, particularly the railway system.[109] His reported overhauling of the railway network led to the popular saying, "Say what you like about Mussolini, he made the trains run on time."[109] Kenneth Roberts, journalist and novelist, wrote in 1924: "The difference between the Italian railway service in 1919, 1920 and 1921 and that which obtained during the first year of the Mussolini regime was almost beyond belief. The cars were clean, the employees were snappy and courteous, and trains arrived at and left the stations on time — not fifteen minutes late, and not five minutes late; but on the minute.[110]"

The dubious premise of Mussolini being responsible for reliable trains predates the Holocaust.

As for "it’s in bad taste and offensive", I agree that comparing fascism to systemd is in bad taste.

How is providing a framework which forces greedy publisher to keep their websites light "cheating".

Chrome (at least on Android) preloads AMP sites after searching. It doesn't do it for other sites.

I would classify that as cheating.

It can't do that on other sites, it's a technical limitation. Part of the reason why they push AMP and provide every website with free CDN hosting is exactly to enable caching. If the "purpose" of AMP counts as cheating, then sure?

Once signed exchanges become a thing, that may change, but as seen in this thread, there's a lot of push back for that.

An arbitrary technical limitation. You could preload any site you want. Google wants to push AMP, so they only preload those.

Well of course it's cheating if you compare load times between pre-loaded sites vs. not preloaded ones. And then argue that "AMP is faster", which is obviously wrong because the conditions are not the same.

I enjoyed reading this comment. The way you write is fun.

That first paragraph is a single sentence... Tried understanding what you are saying a couple of times and I just can’t.

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