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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

#311

Post by SlowRobotAhead »

kohanz wrote: post #261
SlowRobotAhead wrote: post #258

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? >>>Not that I know the answer, but I would have to see a source on this. Why would a device that may increase access to job postings, but a non-homeless job candidate is much more likely to have than a homeless person, increase the chances of said homeless person in getting a job? I'm…

I think both you and @lucideer are right at a certain level. I did mean in the absence of cellphones altogether, since I'm referring to the fact that the non-homeless population almost all have cell-phones now, so that's really just "table-stakes" in the job hunt market. That said, your experience provides an important data point too. I would be curious to know whether it's the phone access or the "among other things…

The among other things is haircut, shave, cloths, boots, shower, shelter, sleeping bags, getting touch with family, basic medical, training, mental health evals, etc. stuff that actually helps today as opposed to the feel good “just build more housing and give it to people for “free”” ideas.

Is the phone worth more than the sleeping bag? Depends on the temperature. But, yes for the most part the phone is helpful. I would guess a lot get sold, but in those cases they are typically going to someone that does actually want it. Let’s be honest, a Samsung whatever 5 isn’t going to be traded for a 5th of whiskey and sold eventually to some highschooler, they wouldn’t be caught dead with that phone.

People have this impression that homeless are all 60-80 year old bums harassing you for change, there are a lot that have jobs, live in their cars, and could really use a phone, even with their families, or live in other people’s houses. The invisible homeless.

Re: Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet

#312

Post by tim333 »

minblaster wrote: post #243
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... )

https://ourworldindata.org/internet Almost none of the desperately poor had internet between 1990-2000, yet poverty fell steeply.

Yeah there are a number of factors in play. I doubt though that China say would be turning out tech in the way they are for example without being able to look stuff up and order stuff on the web. And I think it will kick in in Africa too.

Re: Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet

#313

Post by codegeek »

Faark wrote: post #300
codegeek wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a fair question. I assumed based on my own experience that this is very clear but let me clarify. I am privileged to be living in the United States (richest country in the world) but I am originally an immigrant even though that was 20+ years ago. I hire people from all over the world as freelancers from time to time. Internet allows me to hire some random person from a random part of the world and in many case…

Seems like you only look at one side. I thought by now we have mostly understood that unlimited globalization also has dark sides, especially for the broader local population in richer countries. To me the sentiment of GPs post felt like "internet makes it better on average for all of us". You're "now I very easy can find even cheaper workers" doesn't support that, even though it certainly is an improvement to a sele…

I focussed mostly on the jobs thing. But Internet has brought many other great things to the world so I think it is a bit myopic to just focus on the "hire cheaper workers" thing. Just the fact that you can communicate your opinions to me while we both are sitting somewhere totally different is the power of internet. It brings plenty of good. Some bad, sure. If not for internet, I would probably never talk to you and not exchange our different perspectives.

Re: Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet

#314

Post by tim333 »

gugagore wrote: post #226
andrepd wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Even though the facts appear wrong, I think this comment does raise the interesting question of whether money is a metric that is internal to capitalism, or if capitalism is the natural consequence of using only money as a metric.

I guess money is a capitalist metric but there are others you can look at too like life expectancy or literacy that show similar improvements.

Re: Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet

#315

Post by JohnFen »

vasilipupkin wrote: post #309
vasilipupkin wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course, it is. Put it this way, there is absolutely zero evidence that it’s not net positive.

those who downvoted me, I am curious what evidence you have that it's not net positive. I've never seen any such evidence, only a list of problems, which of course exist with any human endevour.

I didn't downvote you, but I don't know what you mean by "evidence it's not a net positive".

You determine whether something is a net positive or net negative by listing all of the negatives and positives and seeing how they balance out. With the internet, there are clearly both negatives and positives. The "evidence" either way is the full list of these factors.

Do they balance out in the positive or negative direction? The answer to that depends on how you weight the various factors, and I rather suspect that different people will weight the various factors differently. In other words, this is more a judgement call than some sort of hard objective truth regardless of whether you consider the net effect to be good or bad.

Re: Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet

#316

Post by dkonofalski »

wolco wrote: post #301
dkonofalski wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The internet has been weaponized. Ugh... I can't believe that I'm saying this but... I agree with you, wholeheartedly. I am about as nerdy as you can get and a huge tech enthusiast and I'm just starting to hate the internet outside of a few sites that I visit to stay "in the know". I feel like every day I'm learning less and less valuable information and more and more pop culture, meme-ified information just because…

Where do you visit? From the darknet to using translation software to read what is going on around the world the internet... to checking out random pastebins. There is a lot of interesting stuff...just not on facebook/twitter.

I didn't say that it wasn't interesting. There's plenty of "interesting" things on the internet but the overall experience for the average person is pretty bad. Take, for instance, the proliferation of sites that once embedded YouTube videos. Those sites are now all broken because DMCA requests have taken down those videos without replacing or redirecting them.

It seems like the only care being put into the internet is into monetizing and commercializing it.

Re: Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet

#317

Post by WillPostForFood »

cartoonworld wrote: post #252
WillPostForFood wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Corporations have lobbied to take away Net Neutrality, and to institute throttling and make running a personal web site much more expensive. There is literally no impact on personal web sites. You neither pay more, nor are you throttled.

I would wager these unflintchingly ethical telcos are bideing their time on this one. The beancounters are probably salivating about ideas such as this one from a few years ago: "In Portugal, with no net neutrality, internet providers are starting to split the net into packages," he wrote. "A huge advantage for entrenched companies, but it totally ices out startups trying to get in front of people which stifles innov…

Why do we need to look at Portugal? Net Neutrality was only in effect from 2015-2017. We have decades of experience in the US without net neutrality, and it has been fine for small publishers. Do you really think the beancounters care about Mommy Bloggers, or Bob's Keto Korner? If anything, they are looking at big dogs with lots of cash that use lots of bandwidth like Netflix and upstart startups like Disney.

Re: Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet

#318

Post by The_Androctonus »

bcrosby95 wrote: post #63
workthrowaway wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

something definitely went wrong, imo. when that pizzahut website link was posted a few days ago, i felt nostalgic about old web pages. most of them were about favorite topics, shows, hobbies and links! friends (the show) had thousands of fan made websites. websites linked to other websites with similar interest. now it's all about "us" and "me". we don't even link to other websites anymore. blog rolls and guestbooks…

I always find it interesting that different people view the golden age of the internet as happening at a different time. Some say the 2000s. For me it was the late 90s. For others, "eternal september" marked the end of the golden age - 1993. And I'm sure the current crop of children will say it was the 2010s. I think the only common thread here is that the internet changes. And people don't like change. What is new i…

For each person, it seems to be the first few years of using the internet for the first time in their lives.

Re: Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet

#319

Post by The_Androctonus »

nanna wrote: post #69

We're marking the 50th anniversary at King's College London with an evening of critical reflections by the Department of Digital Humanities, next Wednesday 6 November. Open to all! https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/happy-packet-switching-ticket...

Completed my MSc at KCL in August and my topic had to do with coming up with a solution for the issues being discussed here. I think I'll be attending this!

Re: Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet

#320

Post by n0rbwah »

dudul wrote: post #108
Ygg2 wrote: post #12

I'm reminded of the Douglas Adams' quote from Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.

I've always loved this quote since war is so often presented as a failure to communicate :)

There's no incompatibility between speaking the same language and failing to communicate.

In fact, I'd go as far as to say that most failures to communicate happen between people speaking the same language.

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