139 mentions · 21 chunks · 16 episodes
...atures of OpenClaw but seems underwhelming. Part of it is that it's owned by an aggregator. "How is this service tricking me into taking myself hostage?" is the undercurrent. If that same service were open source and fully local you might b...
...e niche that only needs a pinprick of context. The systems of records grow into aggregators. For consumers, there's no real drive for the aggregators to add features. Once you're caught in their web, you'll get more and more caught in it by...
You aren't stuck in traffic, you are traffic. When you use an aggregator, you're lending your energy to a thing you don't think is good for society.
Your personal use case is likely an edge case for the aggregator.
One of the reasons cloud wins is because the aggregators can get more bang out of a flop than you can. This is because of the pooled data. A noisy but broad data stream with consistent bias. The broader th...
We're in the context gold rush. A race by the aggregators to capture as much of users' context as they can. They're all trying to build a walled garden larger than any that ever came before.
To aggregators, each user is a statistic. Mass-produced software operates at a scale where there's no other way.
There's a modern faustian bargain we all make without thinking. Give the aggregators our most precious context and they give us free features that make our lizard brains happy.
We're in the dark ages for tech. The aggregators have sucked up all the oxygen. They control the distribution and the attention. Anything that challenges them doesn't even get to take its first bre...
...uld even be done with software. Software can be built to make so much more than aggregators and apps. But we forgot about its potential!
The ecosystem itself should be the aggregator. The problem with aggregators is not the gravity well, it's the "single entity in control." That's required due to our default privacy model, the eas...
Aggregators can't allow turing complete things within themselves. One of Gordon's classics: Aggregators aren't open ended. If they allowed turing-complete thing...
The power to create an aggregator is not an absolute thing. It's a relative thing. You have to stand out prominently from all the other options to be the obvious schelling point. If y...
Aggregators are the best situated to do cross-silo spanning use cases, but also the least capable of doing it. Eric Beinhocker in The Origin of Wealth captures ...
...are a lot of people who don't trust tech. They are intrinsically distrustful of aggregators, even if they don't know that word. The tech industry, in a nutshell, to them: a massive aggregation of power combined with a "go fast by not thinki...
The aggregators are winning because they already do the algorithmic "comes to you" of content in their feeds. That is, it's not like the web model of "surf anywhere...
Today only the aggregators have the accumulated user context to make truly assistive features. This is because the easiest way today to have access to the context is for the s...
The app and the aggregator are related phenomena. Apps are harder than websites to distribute. This accentuates aggregation. We're in the app/agg era.
An upside of aggregators is convenience, a downside (for the ecosystem) is control. It's possible to get the upside without the downside.
...on is a game everyone is forced to play. If there is an ecological niche for an aggregator, and you don't take it, someone else will take it. It's not that you're betting on being an aggregator, you just want to inoculate yourself against b...