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Why the Web Won't Be Nirvana (1995)

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Re: Why the Web Won't Be Nirvana (1995)

#31

Post by SilasX »

n7c3c1 wrote: post #8

I wonder what the equivalent of this is today. What are people saying will NEVER happen? Maybe self-driving cars?

Passing the Turing Test. Understanding consciousness.[1] Communicating human values to a computer so that it doesn't produce absurd judgments. VR simulations indistinguishable from reality.

[1] Edit: people have different standards for this, of course, but something like, "where have a global, working model of a large domain in which predictions of consciousness aren't a special case, and in which people who study it feel like it makes sense and is less mysterious".

Re: Why the Web Won't Be Nirvana (1995)

#32

Post by rhino369 »

wvenable wrote: post #20
api wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He was right about at least once major thing: tele-presence is largely a failure. It's 2015 and most of the Internet industry is concentrated within the Bay Area because people need to be near one another to interact richly. This is a direct demonstration of the failure of the Internet to permit truly rich long range human communication; the very people who build it can't use it to escape their local rent bubble desp…

I don't think it's a failure, it's just not ubiquitous. We have huge tele-presense units in most of our offices to facilitate meetings that used to require plane rides and hotels.

Telepresence in those situations are mostly just replacing vanilla conference calls. Now it's a telephone call with awkward video.

Whether society will view that as good enough to replace business trips remains to be seen.

Though email and VPN do allow more telework than has ever occurred before.

Re: Why the Web Won't Be Nirvana (1995)

#33

Post by dragonwriter »

SilasX wrote: post #30

Semi-OT: Kind of an odd metaphor to use, the year after the band Nirvana "ended" with the death of the lead. The web won't end with a shock to its head? I see this problem a lot: even if you know what a metaphor refers to, it can be unclear how its use is intended: arms-length transaction: so wait, within arms length, or beyond arms length? (The term is used for the latter.) sanguine: sang ... blood? So you feel bloo…

> arms-length transaction: so wait, within arms length, or beyond arms length? (The term is used for the latter.)

Actually, its usually used to mean at arms-length, neither closer nor farther: maintaining a distance that is close enough for the contact necessary to perform the transaction, but no closer.

Re: Why the Web Won't Be Nirvana (1995)

#34

Post by adrianmacneil »

RexRollman wrote: post #13
api wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cryptocurrency for real-world mainstream commerce would get my vote. That will NEVER happen. It's only for buying pot, right?

My viewpoint is that things like Bitcoin are little more than cryptographically engineered Monopoly Money. That said, I do believe that eventually, paper money will go away (if for no other reason than to track every purpose for government surveillance).

This viewpoint comes up a lot on HN, but it's missing the point. Don't think about bitcoin as an alternate currency, think of of it as a distributed protocol, like TCP/IP or bittorrent, which supports arbitrary value transfer. The media tends to focus a lot on the price of bitcoin, but in the long run the price is irrelevant.

Re: Why the Web Won't Be Nirvana (1995)

#35

Post by empath75 »

rhino369 wrote: post #26
gnaritas wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My viewpoint is that things like Bitcoin are little more than cryptographically engineered Monopoly Money. Exactly like USD and all other first world currencies. Bitcoin is simply the next step in money.

It's not a next step because the US dollar is monopoly money forced on you by the government. Also it's supply is controlled to keep the value steady. Bitcoin has nobody forcing you into using it and nobody controls the price. Bitcoins are just bits on a ledger that maybe someone will buy from you tomorrow, maybe. Even in the niche roles where bitcoin is superior to bank accounts, credit cards, and cash, there is not…

I wouldn't discount network effects. I think a lot of people are going to build more and more services on top of the bitcoin blockchain rather than creating their own blockchain, just because it's convenient in terms of adoption and development and so on. And once those services are there, it's going to be hard to migrate them off. And that will eventually create some sustainable value to the coins.

As to what that value will be, I have no fucking idea. I don't imagine that it will be a major currency. But it'll always have some use cases, imo.

I mean your argument is essentially like saying: TCP/IP is just a protocol and anybody can switch to a different protocol any time. Well, sure. But they haven't. And they won't unless it breaks completely.

Re: Why the Web Won't Be Nirvana (1995)

#36

Post by knieveltech »

bobbyi_settv wrote: post #6
Nadya wrote: post #2

Amazing how much everything has changed in 20 years as to make nearly every single sentence of this article wrong to a hilarious extent. Thank you for sharing this. It didn't tickle my intellectual curiosity, but it's a nice reminder of how bad humans can be at predicting even short-term changes. :)

Most people considered Cliff Stoll to be a hilariously wrong luddite in 1995.

True. And he was roundly vindicated at the time by the dot com implosion.

Re: Why the Web Won't Be Nirvana (1995)

#37

Post by ghaff »

n7c3c1 wrote: post #8

I wonder what the equivalent of this is today. What are people saying will NEVER happen? Maybe self-driving cars?

I'm not sure anyone is saying we'll never have self-driving cars (in the sense of summon a car from an app). The debate is whether it's 10 years or 50+ years.

Re: Why the Web Won't Be Nirvana (1995)

#38

Post by Frondo »

gnaritas wrote: post #14
RexRollman wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My viewpoint is that things like Bitcoin are little more than cryptographically engineered Monopoly Money. That said, I do believe that eventually, paper money will go away (if for no other reason than to track every purpose for government surveillance).

> My viewpoint is that things like Bitcoin are little more than cryptographically engineered Monopoly Money. Exactly like USD and all other first world currencies. Bitcoin is simply the next step in money.

It's not the next step because it's anti-democratic. It's a step away from democratic government engagement in the money of a country.

Bitcoin encodes a lot of economic assumptions and values into its design, but there's no practical way for the people affected by those decisions to work to change them, unlike money backed by a democratic government.

I don't need to know how to code to vote in the regular elections that decide how the Fed operates, all I need is to be a registered voter.

The next thing after USD and other first world currencies will be something that gives more power to the people, not less.

Re: Why the Web Won't Be Nirvana (1995)

#39

Post by rhino369 »

empath75 wrote: post #35
rhino369 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a next step because the US dollar is monopoly money forced on you by the government. Also it's supply is controlled to keep the value steady. Bitcoin has nobody forcing you into using it and nobody controls the price. Bitcoins are just bits on a ledger that maybe someone will buy from you tomorrow, maybe. Even in the niche roles where bitcoin is superior to bank accounts, credit cards, and cash, there is not…

I wouldn't discount network effects. I think a lot of people are going to build more and more services on top of the bitcoin blockchain rather than creating their own blockchain, just because it's convenient in terms of adoption and development and so on. And once those services are there, it's going to be hard to migrate them off. And that will eventually create some sustainable value to the coins. As to what that v…

Switching from bitcoin to litecoin seems trivial. I don't think the networking effects are that strong for bitcoin, especially since the current number of big users is pretty small. It seems like 99% of businesses who actually accept it are just using a payment processor, which could migrate to a new system overnight.

You can point to TCP/IP, but we've seen other protocols come and go. Back in the late 90/early 2000s's AOL messenger was dominate. Now nobody uses it. And that had very strong network effects, it was a messenger system.

Re: Why the Web Won't Be Nirvana (1995)

#40

Post by zeckalpha »

SilasX wrote: post #30

Semi-OT: Kind of an odd metaphor to use, the year after the band Nirvana "ended" with the death of the lead. The web won't end with a shock to its head? I see this problem a lot: even if you know what a metaphor refers to, it can be unclear how its use is intended: arms-length transaction: so wait, within arms length, or beyond arms length? (The term is used for the latter.) sanguine: sang ... blood? So you feel bloo…

Nirvana was a thing before the band.
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