Idk if this is the right community for this conversation, but it’s been on my mind and I want to share it with someone.
In the 00’s every new thing we heard about the internet was exciting. There were new protocols, new ways to communicate, new ways to share files, new ways to find each other. Every time we heard anything new about the internet, it was always progress.
That lasted into the early teens and then things started changing. Things started stagnating. Now we’re well into the phase where every new piece of news we hear is negative. New legislations, new privacy intrusions, new restrictions, new technologies to lock content away and keep us from sharing, or seeing the content we were looking for. New ways to force ads.
At one point the Internet was my most favorite thing in the world. Now I don’t know if I even like it anymore. I certainly don’t look forward to hearing news about it. It’s sad, man. We’ve lost a lot. The mega corps took the internet from us, changed it from a million small sites that people created because they had big ideas, or were passionate about small ones, and turned it into a few enormous sites with no new ideas, no passion, just an insatiable desire for money.
We’re at the end of an era, and unlike the last 20 years of progress, I don’t think most of us will like what the next era brings.
Hey its not all bad, ChatGPT and midjourney have been really entertaining. We now also run on decentralised media.
Okay ChatGPT has been an exciting announcement. That’s true, thanks for reminding me. It’s somewhat of a double edged sword too though. It’s hugely beneficial for my job right now, but I’m also seriously concerned about the future of my career for the first time since entering this field. I have no delusions that ChatGPT won’t eventually replace millions of programmers. Programmers won’t completely go away, but when companies get their LLMs set up, and figure out how to integrate ChatGPT into their systems, programmers, analysts, writers, and about 80% of the careers on the planet are going to be seriously impacted.
Fortunately or unfortunately I think there is plenty of time before successful adoption starts to impact the majority of IT related careers. Just based on the rate of adoption of other useful but complicated IT frameworks like k8s.
You can thank capitalism for this, back at the dawn of the internet it was largely just regular people running sites and building organic networks. Then the internet started getting commercialized, and the tech started turning increasingly user hostile and exploitative.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
some goofball did a whole song about it
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
We need an alternative to Email
What the fuck is wrong with email now ?
It’s one of the only things that hasn’t been ruined those past few internet decades, only slightly improved, and is still decentralized and can still allow you to self host, don’t you touch it
Hard to selfhost and no E2EE by default I guess. First one can be blamed on Gmail and OutLook, second one is lack of mass PGP usage.
Hard to self host is one of those things that has now become received wisdom in tech circles. It isn’t hard to self host email. More people should do it.
PGP itself is a bit of mess.
For one thing, there’s really only one major/popular implementation of it these days, which is GPG. The codebase is arcane. Pretty major security vulnerabilities pop up constantly. It doesn’t have stable funding. Several years ago the entire project almost collapsed when the world discovered it had been maintained for several years by a single person who didn’t have any time or money to maintain it. The situation is a little bit better now, but not much.
(For this reason, people are starting to use age instead of gpg, as the code is much smaller, cleaner, forces safe defaults, and doesn’t seem to have security problems)
But the bigger problem that was never properly solved with PGP is key distribution. How do you get somebody’s key in the first place? Some people put their keys on their own personal (https) webpage, which is fine, but that’s not a solution for everyone, and doesn’t scale very well. Okay, so you might use a key server, but that has privacy implications (your identity is essentially public to the world) and centralizes everything down to a handful of small “trusted” key servers (since there would be no way to trust key servers in a decentralized way). We should probably just have email servers themselves serve keys somehow, but nobody’s put that into the email standard protocols.
The fact that keys expire amplifies all the problems with key distribution, and encourages people to do really unsafe things with keys, like just blindly trust them. You can sign other people’s keys for them, but that also does not scale very well.
The key distribution problem is something that things like Signal have “solved” with things like phone number verification, but there’s really no clear way to solve it on something totally distributed like email.
You make some valid points. I’m not a millennial, but thanks for including me. :)
I thought computers had peaked for awhile too, and then I built a new one last year so I could run Cyberpunk 2077 on ultra. The new NVMe drives are an enormous leap forward. Mine runs at 650% faster than my previous fastest SSD. They’re flat-out amazing. Graphics computation is also unbelievable these days. DDR5 is wicked fast. Basically I don’t think computer hardware is anywhere close to peaked. It’s still doubling in power every few years.
Yes, I went from a SATA 3 SSD to an m.2 NVMe drive and the difference was incredible. I also went from DDR3 to DDR5, so that was obviously mind blowing. TBH I’m fine with computers capping out, since I just built the most powerful computer I’ve ever built, and got all cutting edge, top tier components, except for the GFX card. The GFX cards were still insanely priced when I built this thing, so I had planned on continuing to use my 980 ti. But it felt like putting an old engine in a new car, so I eventually broke down and bought a Gigabyte AORUS GeForce RTX 3070 Ti 8GB. The 3080’s and 3090’s were almost unobtainable when I built this thing. Now the 4090’s are out, but I don’t see myself upgrading any time soon. I’ll probably just skip the 4 series. What’s really crazy is the cost of the cutting edge stuff. I paid $320 for my RAM and you can get the same RAM for $99 now. I paid $240 for my NVMe HDD, and you can get it for $99. Of course I knew that the prices would plummet, but since I figured this will probably be my last full computer build for a long time, I might as well get all the best stuff available.
It’s more like it’s being revealed (or more obvious) what the purpose of the Internet was really for. Remember that it was created by DARPA for military purposes. It was never for altruism.
Altruism doesn’t need to be a part of it. And while the military started the Internet, universities made it what it is today, and for a long time it was merely a medium for sharing information.
The highway system was also created by the military, yet it has connected people far more than it has facilitated war. We definitely went too far on adapting to highways, but for many years it was just a better way to get from A to B.
The problem, I think, is that the average person just wants something better than what they have now (incremental change), and they don’t want to pay for it. People preferred roads to trains because they were faster and they didn’t pay for it directly, and now we have fewer trains. Likewise, people wanted content on websites for free, so content producers introduced ads to their products.
If you want something, you need to vote with your wallet and your ballot. Just doing one isn’t enough.
It wasn’t altruistic per se, but that doesn’t make it nefarious, either. At it’s core, it was just a network connectivity design that resists node failure. It was us that used that foundation to create a virtual space that everyone could participate in. We now have outsized bad actors like Google and Microsoft and Amazon and alphabet agencies that are trying to influence that virtual space, but its culture was built by us.