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The Unintended Consequences of China Leapfrogging to Mobile Internet

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Re: The Unintended Consequences of China Leapfrogging to Mobile Internet

#21

Post by silicon2401 »

api wrote: post #20
Aperocky wrote: post #14

> If your writing “disappears” after a day, why invest the time to write at all This is a global problem, walled gardens may have made it a bit harder, but it isn't unique to China. Internet traffic overwhelmingly goes to fresh content everywhere. The link may still be available, sure, but just how many people eventually visit old articles? They are, by and large ignored because people want new content that might be…

This is even a problem in software. People ignore projects that have not had GitHub commits recently, as if code (which is math) somehow becomes less valid over time. Yes a "dead" project can be problematic if you need it maintained and don't have the time to DIY, but sometimes something reaches a level of stability where it does not need to be constantly fixed. Something with a lot of users and few commits might be…

The opposite could also be true. Now that I have experience working on vulnerabilities for enterprise software, I've learned there are constantly updates for mitigating software vulnerabilities that didn't exist a month or even week ago. An old java project may still use a version log4j with that major vulnerability. This may not be a big deal depending on the software, but it is a valid reason to be wary of stale code in some cases.

Re: The Unintended Consequences of China Leapfrogging to Mobile Internet

#22

Post by silicon2401 »

Shadonototra wrote: post #5

just like casual conversations are ephemeral, why the west always want things to be indexed, tracked, advertised, promoted, pumped, dumped, profited, exploited, abused etc etc etc.. china is doing it right, paying for simple things is so easy TODAY, just scan this thing and done, public transport same thing, so easy TODAY, not in 10 years, it's a thing TODAY, you scan your phone and done, no hassle, everything is smo…

> always want things to be indexed, tracked, advertised, promoted, pumped, dumped, profited, exploited, abused etc etc etc..

this is literally what China does lol

Re: The Unintended Consequences of China Leapfrogging to Mobile Internet

#23

Post by School-Cotton »

Shadonototra wrote: post #5

just like casual conversations are ephemeral, why the west always want things to be indexed, tracked, advertised, promoted, pumped, dumped, profited, exploited, abused etc etc etc.. china is doing it right, paying for simple things is so easy TODAY, just scan this thing and done, public transport same thing, so easy TODAY, not in 10 years, it's a thing TODAY, you scan your phone and done, no hassle, everything is smo…

I can buy almost anything by tapping my phone in NYC today, including public transit fare.

Re: The Unintended Consequences of China Leapfrogging to Mobile Internet

#24

Post by School-Cotton »

Mindwipe wrote: post #6
Shadonototra wrote: post #5

just like casual conversations are ephemeral, why the west always want things to be indexed, tracked, advertised, promoted, pumped, dumped, profited, exploited, abused etc etc etc.. china is doing it right, paying for simple things is so easy TODAY, just scan this thing and done, public transport same thing, so easy TODAY, not in 10 years, it's a thing TODAY, you scan your phone and done, no hassle, everything is smo…

> there is a lot to learn from china, we already copying them with contactless payments, even though our "market" doesn't want it because they want to make sure business are subscribing to service with insane fees first Contactless payments are already widespread in every Western nation that isn't the US.

They are widespread in the US too. Yes, we were slower to adopt them than others, but for the last few years we have had them.

Re: The Unintended Consequences of China Leapfrogging to Mobile Internet

#25

Post by irrational »

Mindwipe wrote: post #6
Shadonototra wrote: post #5

just like casual conversations are ephemeral, why the west always want things to be indexed, tracked, advertised, promoted, pumped, dumped, profited, exploited, abused etc etc etc.. china is doing it right, paying for simple things is so easy TODAY, just scan this thing and done, public transport same thing, so easy TODAY, not in 10 years, it's a thing TODAY, you scan your phone and done, no hassle, everything is smo…

> there is a lot to learn from china, we already copying them with contactless payments, even though our "market" doesn't want it because they want to make sure business are subscribing to service with insane fees first Contactless payments are already widespread in every Western nation that isn't the US.

Contactless payments are becoming more widespread in the US. At this point, the only store that I frequent that doesn’t accept contactless payment is Home Depot. I recently went on a week long road trip and 90+% of my transactions were contactless.

Re: The Unintended Consequences of China Leapfrogging to Mobile Internet

#26

Post by irrational »

The downgrading of email is happening in the US, in my experience. At my work we use Slack continuously, both for communicating with team members and for reaching out to other people at the company. I often go more than a week without checking my email. I can’t remember when the last time an important email came through.

As for cold-emailing, I’ve never heard this term before. I’ve certainly never established any sort of relationship through cold-emailing anyone (or being cold-emailed), and I’ve been working professionally for more than 24 years. Maybe this is peculiar to certain job types.

Re: The Unintended Consequences of China Leapfrogging to Mobile Internet

#27

Post by alisonatwork »

otoburb wrote: post #19
alisonatwork wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no doubt that the government is able to get logs of WeChat messages going back who knows how long, but I was speaking in the context of the workplace. When business decisions are made on WeChat, the longer in the past they are, the more difficult it is for other employees to scroll back and find out why they happened. This problem is exacerbated when there are dozens of informal WeChat groups that may or may n…

>> When business decisions are made on WeChat, the longer in the past they are, the more difficult it is for other employees to scroll back and find out why they happened. It's not ideal, but I thought that WeChat had a desktop client (similar to WhatsApp) that allows for slightly easier scrollback, search and export/copy-paste functionality within the group chats. It doesn't help across the wider WeChat platform as…

It's been a few years since I have used WeChat, and I suspect they might have improved their workplace features since then. The desktop app was a thing several years ago, but even then it depended on the right people being added to the right groups. I remember dozens of instances where people would say "oh, well we talked about that the other day" and then scroll back on their device to try find some conversation whose outcome was never logged anywhere else. If you were lucky they had saved a screenshot, without context, of course.

This was even more difficult when dealing with clients or third party vendors, because they would have their own WeChat groups where they discussed support issues or purchases. I remember a situation where we had to contact a former employee to find a password to a machine because it had been shared on a chat that only they were on at the time - that sort of thing.

To be fair, I do think that a lot of similar stuff happens on Slack, where private groups get created and decisions are made without always including the correct participants according to the org chart. And probably prior to the explosion of workplace chat apps people were doing this by getting together in person for lunch or drinks or golf. It does make me feel a bit cynical about organizations that claim to hold values of transparency and accountability, though. It seems to me that cliques form regardless, and quietly influence direction regardless of any alleged corporate values.

Re: The Unintended Consequences of China Leapfrogging to Mobile Internet

#28

Post by Retric »

Aperocky wrote: post #14

> If your writing “disappears” after a day, why invest the time to write at all This is a global problem, walled gardens may have made it a bit harder, but it isn't unique to China. Internet traffic overwhelmingly goes to fresh content everywhere. The link may still be available, sure, but just how many people eventually visit old articles? They are, by and large ignored because people want new content that might be…

A large part of this is simple relevance. Why would I care about a weather forecast from last year, or election coverage after the election? So much of what’s written has an exportation date of some kind that search algorithms just favor the new.

The other half is older articles are competing with everything ever written. You hardly need 1,000 different Calculus textbooks.

Re: The Unintended Consequences of China Leapfrogging to Mobile Internet

#29

Post by Shadonototra »

varispeed wrote: post #12
Shadonototra wrote: post #5

just like casual conversations are ephemeral, why the west always want things to be indexed, tracked, advertised, promoted, pumped, dumped, profited, exploited, abused etc etc etc.. china is doing it right, paying for simple things is so easy TODAY, just scan this thing and done, public transport same thing, so easy TODAY, not in 10 years, it's a thing TODAY, you scan your phone and done, no hassle, everything is smo…

What makes you think that they don't index, track, process and do whatever with these conversations? Just because users don't see it, it does not mean it doesn't happen.

i never said they don't

i said it is the addition of the steps and their expectation in the west that i find weird, replying to OP's story

wich i assume he has an agenda to push some services over there to compete with chinese ones

then i mention things they have and we don't

maybe that is the result of not always expecting what the west expect, wich allows them to be this agile and adopt things much quicker, wich allows them to go past the post industrial age quicker

we seen it already with 5G

what prevented that to happen in the west? lack of education, lack of market will to invest, they wanted their society to remain in the bronze age because more profitable, and also some of westerners believe 5G is a conspiracy

it's weird isn't it?

they do what we can't do because we built a society around profits first

Re: The Unintended Consequences of China Leapfrogging to Mobile Internet

#30

Post by JonChesterfield »

api wrote: post #20
Aperocky wrote: post #14

> If your writing “disappears” after a day, why invest the time to write at all This is a global problem, walled gardens may have made it a bit harder, but it isn't unique to China. Internet traffic overwhelmingly goes to fresh content everywhere. The link may still be available, sure, but just how many people eventually visit old articles? They are, by and large ignored because people want new content that might be…

This is even a problem in software. People ignore projects that have not had GitHub commits recently, as if code (which is math) somehow becomes less valid over time. Yes a "dead" project can be problematic if you need it maintained and don't have the time to DIY, but sometimes something reaches a level of stability where it does not need to be constantly fixed. Something with a lot of users and few commits might be…

A lot of software has dependencies that will have changed over time. Likewise a lot of software fails to pin down exact versions of said dependencies. That makes code that hasn't been committed to for a few years relatively likely to be broken.

Older C or C++ projects may be "standalone", but when built with the latest GCC or clang produce lots of warning messages and may be miscompiled courtesy of programmer vs optimiser. Older python programs may refuse to run under python3.

So while code does not rot, the GitHub project is unlikely to contain all the code for the project, and those external dependencies changing has much the same effect as rotting.

A still running CI would be a better indicator that the project works, but failing that, recent commits are the same signal.

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