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On the one hand, I agree there was a different vibe on the internet 20-30 years ago. It's what I grew up with and I'm nostalgic for that period. On the other h

On the one hand, I agree there was a different vibe on the internet 20-30 years ago. It's what I grew up with and I'm nostalgic for that period. On the other hand, I feel like nostalgia blinds us to the fact that tech has always had a commercial side. The only reason the internet became accessible to people outside government and academia in the early 90s was because commercial ISPs came onto the scene. The web became a lot more useful when for-profit companies like Google started indexing it. The computers we used to access the internet were only affordable because of decades of Moore's law driven by the semiconductor, home computing, and video games industries. I don't think the thing we're nostalgic for could have existed without the profit motive. We also shouldn't take for granted the amount of creativity enabled by modern platforms. We might be nostalgic for hobbyists making their own websites and chatting on IRC. But today we have orders of magnitude more hobbyists creating videos on YouTube and collaborating on Discord. Platforms like Patreon make it possible for people to turn their hobby into a career by connecting directly with their audience. Every aspiring game developer can make a video game in Unity and publish it on Steam. I can choose any topic I want to learn about and watch free lectures from experts at MIT and Stanford, or find high quality videos made by the most interested and dedicated amateurs. None of this existed 20 years ago.

127361 3y ago
And the next big thing to look forward to is local AI. With both the models and the hardware getting better and better, that's the next big thing. And it doesn't have any of the privacy downsides that the Internet has. You can do anything you want with it, total freedom. No more law enforcement or intelligence agencies being able to monitor your every move. So you could say it's way better even than the old Internet.
- jstarfish 3y ago
  > And it doesn't have any of the privacy downsides that the Internet has. You can do anything you want with it, total freedom. No more law enforcement or intelligence agencies Don't get too complacent. LE agencies already know this and all of that can still be surveilled, just not through passive intercept. This is actually the epoch I trust the least. We've had decades to refine spyware and condition people to install random binary blobs to do most anything. Auto-update and new ownership break provenance. Netherlands recently made it legal for police to hack anyone given probable cause. AI isn't safe or private unless it's air-gapped. I suggest you start figuring that one out while you still have time.
  - 127361 3y ago
    Yes, air-gapped and the entire operating system is running off overlayfs + tmpfs, so no data persists after power off. There's also a problem with TEMPEST emanations from the computer's display - the problem is almost non-existent on mobile devices such as smartphones, which are very well shielded. So disable the modem physically, and run everything locally. Of course the risk of targeted surveillance still exists, and nothing is going to stop a hidden camera from being placed in your home. But in most cases there would be no reason to ever place the average person under such surveillance. So the bulk mass surveillance of the population would be hindered. And they won't be able to persecute people for reading or viewing certain things anymore. So that puts an end to the morality policing that has been enabled by the Internet.

127361 3y ago

And the next big thing to look forward to is local AI. With both the models and the hardware getting better and better, that's the next big thing. And it doesn't have any of the privacy downsides that the Internet has. You can do anything you want with it, total freedom. No more law enforcement or intelligence agencies being able to monitor your every move. So you could say it's way better even than the old Internet.

jstarfish 3y ago
> And it doesn't have any of the privacy downsides that the Internet has. You can do anything you want with it, total freedom. No more law enforcement or intelligence agencies Don't get too complacent. LE agencies already know this and all of that can still be surveilled, just not through passive intercept. This is actually the epoch I trust the least. We've had decades to refine spyware and condition people to install random binary blobs to do most anything. Auto-update and new ownership break provenance. Netherlands recently made it legal for police to hack anyone given probable cause. AI isn't safe or private unless it's air-gapped. I suggest you start figuring that one out while you still have time.
- 127361 3y ago
  Yes, air-gapped and the entire operating system is running off overlayfs + tmpfs, so no data persists after power off. There's also a problem with TEMPEST emanations from the computer's display - the problem is almost non-existent on mobile devices such as smartphones, which are very well shielded. So disable the modem physically, and run everything locally. Of course the risk of targeted surveillance still exists, and nothing is going to stop a hidden camera from being placed in your home. But in most cases there would be no reason to ever place the average person under such surveillance. So the bulk mass surveillance of the population would be hindered. And they won't be able to persecute people for reading or viewing certain things anymore. So that puts an end to the morality policing that has been enabled by the Internet.