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Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet

latimes.com

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Re: Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet

#231

Post by criley2 »

pwthornton wrote: post #215
adim86 wrote: post #103

I find this post quite disappointing. I don't mean to come off harsh but it is quite naive and utopian and I cannot take the call to arms seriously. Saying the internet went wrong is like saying the invention of cars went wrong cause we still have car accidents. For every powerful force in the world, it will be a source of good and bad things. The internet has changed the world, increased communication, allowed peopl…

The Internet is not as bad as cars. That's harsh! Cars kill more than 1 million people a year, and are actively cooking our planet. On balance, cars -- at least our ability to use them -- has been a huge negative. The Internet is a lot more balanced, but both show how a lack of foresight and system design can lead to a lot of negative consequences. We could drastically cut down on the number of road deaths if we took…

Might be more accurate to say "contribute to cooking our planet" because if there were 0 cars, we'd still be cooking this planet, since all of transportation including planes, boats and cars is only 29% of total carbon emissions (US 2017 data)

Even in transportation, only 60% is due to light duty vehicle, the other 40% being trucks and planes mostly.

https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...

https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/fast-facts-transportation-...

Re: Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet

#232

Post by generalpass »

lucideer wrote: post #122
mrlala wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, a homeless person with a smartphone has a hell of a lot better chance of getting a job than they did pre-smartphone, right? Maybe this can count as more of a smartphone thing an internet thing.. but it's still largely an internet thing that would allow someone in a rough spot to still be able to connect with people online and look/apply for jobs.

> Well, a homeless person with a smartphone has a hell of a lot better chance of getting a job than they did pre-smartphone, right? Do they? How? Are you suggesting that online jobs website make it easier to find a job? A homeless person with a smartphone isn't the only one with access to the jobs website. Nor does the existence of such a website intrinsically create the jobs behind the ads on it. A sibling commenter…

A homeless person desiring to gain some employable skills has an easier time doing such with the Internet and an access device, such as a phone - even if the phone has no cell service but can use free WiFi- than prior to the existence of the Internet and those devices.

There is a silent class of homeless people whom I am not clear you are including when you state "homeless", and that is people living on cars and/or "couch-surfing". On the occasion I've seen it mentioned in articles, it seems that it is nearly impossible to come up with reliable numbers on the actual population of homeless people living under such conditions due to their transitory nature.

It is likely true that the genuinely destitute homeless people, which is comprised in large part of people who suffer severe psychological and mental disorders, are only minimally aided by cell phones. I suspect the way they actually benefit is they carry on their persons a means for those trying aid them to find them as well as a life line they can tug, should they so choose.

"Inequality" is a divisive term with no genuine academic definition. Another correlation is that as "inequality" has risen, so has the greatest reduction in people living in subsistence farming and abject poverty in history of mankind, a conclusion that would suggest that "inequality" positively correlates with greater human flourishing, but the real purpose of my mentioning this is to demonstrate that "inequality" is a largely meaningless metric, by itself, used for manipulating people not familiar with broader understanding of what has occurred for so many billions of people on the planet.

Re: Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet

#233

Post by dxbydt »

adim86 wrote: post #103

I find this post quite disappointing. I don't mean to come off harsh but it is quite naive and utopian and I cannot take the call to arms seriously. Saying the internet went wrong is like saying the invention of cars went wrong cause we still have car accidents. For every powerful force in the world, it will be a source of good and bad things. The internet has changed the world, increased communication, allowed peopl…

It’s a particular point of view that obviously won’t find resonance in this HN audience. Were the author’s view to prevail, you would be out of a job. Vast majority of people here owe their livelihood either directly or indirectly to the democratization of the internet. But that doesn’t mean the author the author is naive. There are certainly (unvoiced) masses largely sympathetic to his point of view.

Take the example you mentioned- cars. The Magnificent Ambersons garnered 4 Oscar nominations debating that very topic - should the automobile have replaced horses, and is it a net positive? Even at that time when the benefits of cars were clear, the audience found the film very compelling.

Similarly, Robert Redford starred as a barnstormer in Great Waldo Pepper, which made a strong case against the Air Commerce Act, the sole reason we even have airplanes carrying passengers & goods in the air. Redford’s character is like Linus, feels airplanes are a hobby for having fun doing stunts. But the government spots the potential for a quick buck, shuts him down for good & soon airplane “industry” becomes a real thing, with mail carriers & passenger planes. Redford has a line in that film where the commerce regulator asks him to stop the stunts & just take a job as a airplane mailman - I’m not a fucking courier, I’m a pilot! William Goldman, who studied that period & wrote the film, felt it was his best work & should have gotten the Oscar.

I am sure a decade down the line you will see a film about scientists harking back to the days when the internet was a curious lab experiment, not the giant teats of FAANGs from which the majority of this audience sucks it’s daily fill of milk while blissfully hawking knickknacks for the masses they would rather do without. Nigerian teaching himself Hindi, indeed.

Re: Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet

#234

Post by jimmies »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #102
codegeek wrote: post #41

Personally, I think the internet has changed millions if not billions of lives for the better. Yes, it has introduced quite a few bad things like spam, malware, surveillance etc. but with most good things, comes a few bad things. Overall though, Internet has been tremendous in lifting so many people out of poverty AND creating jobs that otherwise people could not dream of before the internet. I can work for anyone ov…

I don't understand your theory of how the internet has "lifted so many people out of poverty". I'm not saying I disagree with it necessarily, I don't even understand what you're suggesting enough to disagree or agree with it. It's definitely not _obvious_ to me that the internet has somehow lifted so many people out of poverty, I just don't understand what you mean.

I am one of those people. I was a poor boy in a remote village in a third world country. The Internet brought me opportunities to know and connect to people far far away. The Internet has shaped my thought process, education, job opportunities. Just about everything I have today was due to the advance of computers and the Internet.

Re: Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet

#235

Post by ineptech »

jefftk wrote: post #126
ineptech wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we don't even link to other websites anymore. blog rolls and guestbooks have gone extinct. I've felt this too. Example: I made a pointless little humor website that got mentioned on HN once. I got a bunch of nice replies, and a few thousand visits that day. Since that day, none. Zero other than robots, literally. I'm not complaining that it didn't go viral, I'm saying, in the old days, a brief spurt of popularity t…

Alternate explanation: the competition is better now. In the early days of the web if you put some time into making a funny site there just weren't all that many other funny things to link to. You were one in 1k or in 10k. But now there are so many other options, many of which publish new funny things every day, that you're one in 100k or in 1M. A link to a neat site your friends haven't seen yet it still a valuable…

You've misunderstood. I'm not saying "my site is so awesome that you should be surprised no one goes to it!". The thing I'm saying is surprising is the disparity between the reaction on day 1 and on day N.

I know it sounds like I'm whining, I'm really not. All I can say is, if you weren't there, it's hard to describe how much "I found a neat site" was part of the currency of social interaction online twenty years ago. To get a dozen positive comments and emails but no shares or links was just not a thing that happened. People shared the urls to weird/funny/awesome things the way they share memes today. And I guess that change is not surprising - memes don't have ads, don't have google analytics, don't beg to put you on a mailing list, etc.

Re: Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet

#236

Post by malvosenior »

pwthornton wrote: post #215
adim86 wrote: post #103

I find this post quite disappointing. I don't mean to come off harsh but it is quite naive and utopian and I cannot take the call to arms seriously. Saying the internet went wrong is like saying the invention of cars went wrong cause we still have car accidents. For every powerful force in the world, it will be a source of good and bad things. The internet has changed the world, increased communication, allowed peopl…

The Internet is not as bad as cars. That's harsh! Cars kill more than 1 million people a year, and are actively cooking our planet. On balance, cars -- at least our ability to use them -- has been a huge negative. The Internet is a lot more balanced, but both show how a lack of foresight and system design can lead to a lot of negative consequences. We could drastically cut down on the number of road deaths if we took…

> On balance, cars -- at least our ability to use them -- has been a huge negative.

Honestly there's no way this is true. How many people would die if they couldn't use an ambulance? How many people are surviving on goods shipped to them via trucks?

Of course things can be improved, but there's no way the automobile was a net negative on humanity.

Re: Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet

#237

Post by wutbrodo »

andrepd wrote: post #180
tim333 wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The number of people in extreme poverty globally have dropped roughly 650m since 1990. Some part of that is probably due to the internet though I'm not sure you could say how much exactly. (Our World in Data graph https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2019/04/Extreme-Poverty-p... )

The often-repeated trope, touted as an achievement of capitalism, relies on defining "not poor" as earning 2$ PPP per day, or 60 bucks a month, or 700$ = 0.7k per year. Not to mention, ignoring any other measures of quality of life or progress besides raw dollars. It's judging capitalism via a metric internal to capitalism. Pure circular reasoning. E.g. subsistence farmers in rural areas made 0$ and were "poor" by th…

There's plenty of ignorance to go around on HN, but this is shockingly so. Global poverty statistics don't count subsistence farming as zero income, which would render the entire exercise meaningless. Two dollars a day isn't an objectively high number, but the point is that passing that bar is a threshold that means you're not _below_ $2/day. The kind of poor we're talking about deal with starvation, easily-preventable diseases, dying from indoor wood burning for lack of better heating systems,etc. Projecting your privileged, first-world notion that none of that matters because they aren't self-actualized and the resource level that helps you avoid that "isn't that much" is just sheer idiocy.

Re: Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet

#238

Post by mcv »

masswerk wrote: post #203
mcv wrote: post #35

> "Citizen-users need to hold websites more accountable. When was the last time a website asked what privacy policy you would like applied to you? My guess is never." Wrong guess. This happens multiple times per day, thanks to the GDPR legislation in the EU. Annoying, but also correct. I take great effort to disable everything I don't like (ad tracking in particular), and like the article says I should: > "You should…

Regarding GDPR, this is true for the EU, but the article was published in the LA Times, though… It would be nice, if those properties, which can be applied globally, were already integrated in the browser as a preferences setting (and enforced by law). Meaning, privacy concerns must become part of the protocol. (What about some kind of 451 response by the browser?)

I would certainly prefer to have my browser handle my GDPR preferences and not have to worry about all these popups.

Re: Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet

#239

Post by ThomPete »

smolder wrote: post #178
ThomPete wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Created jobs, increased global trade, allowed for people to teach themselves, new types of products available, higher awareness about what is going on around you, technology share, open source, free products etc.

Creating jobs isn't good by itself if the work being done is to a bad end. Despite how much promise the internet has for free information, lots of people have been paid to pollute it with garbage that is the opposite of helpful. Or to spy on people so that knowledge can be used against them. The internet is a great thing technology wise, but it has enabled bad actors as much as enabling humble and well intentioned pe…

I answered a specific question which was about pulling people out of poverty.

Everything has consequences. I am pretty sure you would prefer the life you live now than what even kings live 300 years ago.

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