251–260 of 263 posts
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My computer from 20 years ago was a lot snappier than anything I've used today. And this is not just nostalgia, there is data to back it up: https://danluu.com/input-lag/
That's interface latency, not internet speed.
What’s not clear to me is how this will work from a data storage and access standpoint. In order to have a permissions system, you have to have permissions. For example: read:photos, write:photos, read:running_data, etc In order to do that, there are a few hurdles: - You have to define ACLs for every type of data stored in everyone’s POD. - More complex is to define what parts of what data certain ACLs give access to…
(note that URLs can't be a secure handler, since it's just a string that anyone can create. But a URL plus a cryptographic signature could be)
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Hello... you paged? It looks like Solid has progressed since the last time I really looked into it. But, from what I recall, Solid focuses on standardizing data formats and storage... but not compute. That is, all of your personal data is stored in some central location chosen by you, and then web apps can access that data (if you give them permissions). The web apps themselves still run on their own servers, control…
Reading this comment, I'm saddened again that Sandstorm failed, and that you had to abandon it to work on something that, while technically interesting, doesn't advance end-user freedom as Sandstorm tried to. And I'm ashamed that I didn't do more to get behind Sandstorm sooner. I suppose this is too little, too late, but I just signed up for the Oasis power-user plan. I suppose if a few thousand of us did that, then…
FWIW, while my current day job (Cloudflare Workers) is not immediately aiming to solve the same "political" problem as Sandstorm, it turns out we have to solve many similar technical problems, in that we are building a massively distributed platform for applications. For example, we'd like it if an application built on Cloudflare can store each user's data in the closest Cloudflare location to that user. That means applications need to be designed to treat each user's data as a separate unit that can independently migrate. If we succeed in getting applications to do that, then it becomes a much smaller technical step to say, OK, now let's store the data on the user's own machines.
It may turn out that this is a much better technical basis for what Sandstorm wanted to do, while making the "political" problem far less ocean-boiling. That's my hope, anyway.
What’s not clear to me is how this will work from a data storage and access standpoint. In order to have a permissions system, you have to have permissions. For example: read:photos, write:photos, read:running_data, etc In order to do that, there are a few hurdles: - You have to define ACLs for every type of data stored in everyone’s POD. - More complex is to define what parts of what data certain ACLs give access to…
Right, so that's one of the reasons why Solid is built on top of Linked Data and RDF, we need the power of these technologies to support those advanced use cases. The Web Access Control spec is here: https://github.com/solid/web-access-control-spec . In principle, we could support really granular data ACLs based on that spec, the ACL applies to a URL, and you can give any datapoint a URL, so problem solved. In practi…
We’ve seen this issue on mobile where users give access to certain capabilities on their phone and then are surprised at how apps use them (camera, mic, location, etc).
The challenge is how to describe these things in the way that the average user can understand and trust.
ACLs, capabilities, etc are generally easy for developers to consume but much harder for the average person to understand.
My main thought is that there will need to be some standardization of data and how it is consumed for this to take off. If a consumer is providing access to their location data in 15 different ways for 15 different apps, how are they even suppposed to keep track and understand that?
Standardization of ACLs/access has become standard on mobile and the permissions are very coarse so they aren’t overwhelming but it often leads to unwanted results. I’ve yet to see someone implement ACLs in a way that is easily consumable by the average user.
As noted, I’d love to see that happen. It’s a tough problem to solve but one that would benefit all users.
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I don't recall anything on the internet being instantaneous 20 years ago. Surely you're misremembering? I also don't find that new smartphones have much touch-based interface latency; but even so, that kind of latency doesn't have anything to do with the internet, nor the halcyon days of late 1998. To my recollection browsing the web in the late 90s was far more exciting but also far less useful than today. The moder…
Yep - I remember very carefully planning which mp3s I wanted so that I could dedicate my small window of modem time each day to download them because each one took 10-30 minutes. Sometimes I was able to get through a full game of Age of Empires before disconnecting due to lag or because my dad needed to make a phone call. I find long page loads due to excessive javascript as annoying as the next person, but I'm much…