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.

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lmc 3 hours ago | parent [-]

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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sigbottle an hour ago | parent | next [-]

No I mean like, centralization is unfortunately the thing that just works.

I work at a company that thinks extremely deeply about interoperability issues and everybody is on the opposite side: it can be said that we were made as a response to xkcd 927, to try and solve the issue.

I think the company is right in that semantic decentralization with interoperability would be a good end goal, but I think just plain darwinism explains the necessity of the opposite.

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adammarples 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Although the council had planned to implement Oracle "out-of-the-box," it created several customizations including a banking reconciliation system that failed to function properly. The council struggled to understand its cash position and was unable to produce auditable accounts. It has spent more than £5 million on manual workaround labor.

Not a great example of a single centralised system. The errors came from trying to write custom reconciliation code between two systems, the ERP and the bank - perfect example of the problems OP raises.

	▲	lmc 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Fair point but AWS is also highly extensible, and i'm not sure about Palantir but i guess it must be too to a point? Maybe it's a classic case of good abstractions vs bad ones