I tune out at this "what Steve Jobs would have done" talk. A thing needs to stand on its own without borrowing Steve Jobs (or Jeff Dean as I saw someone do the other day).
For something so complex like a PC or desktop experience, having a bunch of oppositional goals (like ad pop ups) do not serve the user well enough. Often times a committee releases a product, but there is no real consensus or accessibility in mind.
That sounds like a false dichotomy. You want opinionated software? Great, so do I. Design the software, own your decisions yourself, and explain your thinking without shortcuts.
Also, steve jobs made utterly stupid decisions in a lot of areas. If you're trying to revolutionize something, try not to use someone who was clearly flawed in many aspects. Otherwise it sounds like you're just building a facade.
Yes, and Seward also made a Folly. I suppose he missed out on some things, but his success rate at predicting features that are now standard was higher than most in that era.
Yeah, reading his biography was interesting. He had the problem of tech not quite being where he wanted it to be over and over. But eventually things really hit.
It's all of the above, integrated with a maximum latency for each tier level. Not a new protocol, but adopting the best of the best, like QUIC over UDP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUIC#Client_support
Apple is a vertically integrated company, so the idea is that a mobile carrier/ISP could help ensure the middle trunk from server to client arrive in a timely fashion. Often that involves good QoS and limiting streaming to 720p. But there are a lot of other things that can be done to limit slow page loading. For example, I tried loading Reuters on a slow data connection, and it took much longer than BBC. https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm
Core idea from this: we do need something that discourages web page bloat. The last try at this was Google AMP, which didn't go over well with either site operators or users. Any better ideas?
To be honest, one thing I've been interested in is a totally markdown-only web. You leave everything the same, you just use a Markweb browser as the only thing and it only accesses text/markdown. Then I build Yet Another Protocol Bridge for my blog and no one visits it ever again. That sounds like fun.
The trouble is, people keep extending Markdown to add HTML features. There's even Javascript embedded in Markdown.[1]
You'd just create churn, not a fix.
The coordination and discipline required to build it is quite simply not there (or here, or anywhere). We will sooner have multi-gigabit space internet or 7G.
That would be high bandwidth and high latency, which might be the opposite of what's being proposed in the article. (It's difficult to be certain what's being proposed in the article. I'm fairly sure the article is about internet, beyond that point all is guesswork.)
I've sort of been thinking about this as well. Personally, I'd like to re-capture the era of personal blogs and niche knowledge discovery of the earlier web I experienced - crossed with something easy to host/publish and not requiring a browser.
I don't really have any coherent picture but I would like to see these ideas I think:
- Anti-commercial/anti-tracking: maybe requiring some sort of open-source license for all published content that makes it harder to commercially exploit the information, ideally this would be by and for the community, especially in light of recent aggressive LLM-training crawling. I would also like to exclude advertisement and tracking.
- Browser-less: The idea would be to do away with the complexity of the modern web (as people say, browsers are basically operating systems), back to more of its hyper-text roots. Simple documents, mostly textual information. I could imagine a mix of basic markdown and some pre-wired complex/interactive views like "forum" or "blog" and so on (differences in how data is loaded, presented, ...) - the idea would be to implement the "app" part in the browser-replacement and not in the web-page itself if that makes sense. This would lead to more uniformity but that might be a good thing. I'm not even sure if/how images would fit in or videos.
- Peer-to-peer?: Hosting should be as simple as hitting a "publish" button on an article. I like the idea of decentralization, so maybe there could be some sort of peer-to-peer federation where users could "host" content that they've read, liked or general content that's part of a certain (sub-) community. This might require some ranking like HN or a similar mechanism to (unfortunately) censor certain content if the community would not believe it to match their values - so not ultimate freedom. P2P would be more about decentralization, and maybe anti-tracking than pure censorship-resistance.
A session might look like opening the "non-browser" app - it would be fast and require very little memory. Then you'd select or type a community/site and you view of all the content with filters and sorts, depending on the community/site's "template" (again, this is not JS/HTML - basically a native form rendered directly if you will). When you feel like it, you click the "create" button, a text-area + preview pops up and you write your post or article in markdown. When happy, you "publish" and it gets slowly disseminated through all the P2P nodes of your community. This could encompass communities like HN or reddit even if the voting mechanics are worked out, personal blogs, ... but would probably exclude e-commerce stores or video sites because the engine would be potentially too simplistic - and that's fine by me.
I've been thinking more lately about how to get "Basic Web" - just like normal HTML and maybe a little bit of CSS (No Service Workers, Background Sync, DRM, etc.) and make it work over a LORA/Meshtastic rig somehow.
Modern smartphones could implement more Data Saver features, but websites could opt-in by using less data. For example, https://marcusb.org/hacks/tinyblog.html
Personally, I think Reticulum is the parallel Internet. It could even replace the Internet Protocol, and whatever the IP protocol connects is in my view the Internet.
I tune out at this "what Steve Jobs would have done" talk. A thing needs to stand on its own without borrowing Steve Jobs (or Jeff Dean as I saw someone do the other day).
I get that, but a lot of design decisions today are https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_by_committee
For something so complex like a PC or desktop experience, having a bunch of oppositional goals (like ad pop ups) do not serve the user well enough. Often times a committee releases a product, but there is no real consensus or accessibility in mind.
That sounds like a false dichotomy. You want opinionated software? Great, so do I. Design the software, own your decisions yourself, and explain your thinking without shortcuts.
Also, steve jobs made utterly stupid decisions in a lot of areas. If you're trying to revolutionize something, try not to use someone who was clearly flawed in many aspects. Otherwise it sounds like you're just building a facade.
Yes, and Seward also made a Folly. I suppose he missed out on some things, but his success rate at predicting features that are now standard was higher than most in that era.
Yeah, reading his biography was interesting. He had the problem of tech not quite being where he wanted it to be over and over. But eventually things really hit.
I mean can't get a more incestous tech cliche! There is a world out there too folks.
The VC Approved™ Software Validation Lifecycle:
You're listening to WWSJD, the Los Altos FM station where Apple pilgrims tune in to the station that Steve Jobs did!
I'm struggling to understand what the concrete proposal here is.
> So what is Thinnernet? Imagine a fiber optic bundle of undersea cables- maybe a hundred or so 10Gbps cables comprising....
and the question goes unanswered. is it a protocol? physical layer? guideline? no idea.
It's all of the above, integrated with a maximum latency for each tier level. Not a new protocol, but adopting the best of the best, like QUIC over UDP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUIC#Client_support Apple is a vertically integrated company, so the idea is that a mobile carrier/ISP could help ensure the middle trunk from server to client arrive in a timely fashion. Often that involves good QoS and limiting streaming to 720p. But there are a lot of other things that can be done to limit slow page loading. For example, I tried loading Reuters on a slow data connection, and it took much longer than BBC. https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm
Core idea from this: we do need something that discourages web page bloat. The last try at this was Google AMP, which didn't go over well with either site operators or users. Any better ideas?
To be honest, one thing I've been interested in is a totally markdown-only web. You leave everything the same, you just use a Markweb browser as the only thing and it only accesses text/markdown. Then I build Yet Another Protocol Bridge for my blog and no one visits it ever again. That sounds like fun.
The trouble is, people keep extending Markdown to add HTML features. There's even Javascript embedded in Markdown.[1] You'd just create churn, not a fix.
[1] https://www.markdownlang.com/advanced/javascript.html
There is no "adding HTML features" to Markdown. Markdown is a superset of HTML. You can simply put HTML tags (including script tags) in your Markdown.
Check out the gemini:// protocal. There are browsers, search engines, and the whole thing is basically markdown.
its a cool idea, but lacks content. Discoverability is kinda bad as well. All fixable problems. I think it could take off given some good content.
Adblockers. On a lot of sites a significant portion of the bloat is from third party ads and tracking.
gemini gave it the old college try
The coordination and discipline required to build it is quite simply not there (or here, or anywhere). We will sooner have multi-gigabit space internet or 7G.
Agree with many of your points (especially on how Steve jobs would have obsessed on this topic), but how do you think it reaches the masses?
Through a series of tubes.
by train. The internet train. :)
That would be high bandwidth and high latency, which might be the opposite of what's being proposed in the article. (It's difficult to be certain what's being proposed in the article. I'm fairly sure the article is about internet, beyond that point all is guesswork.)
I'm waiting at the station. Tell me when you arrive.
I've sort of been thinking about this as well. Personally, I'd like to re-capture the era of personal blogs and niche knowledge discovery of the earlier web I experienced - crossed with something easy to host/publish and not requiring a browser.
I don't really have any coherent picture but I would like to see these ideas I think:
- Anti-commercial/anti-tracking: maybe requiring some sort of open-source license for all published content that makes it harder to commercially exploit the information, ideally this would be by and for the community, especially in light of recent aggressive LLM-training crawling. I would also like to exclude advertisement and tracking.
- Browser-less: The idea would be to do away with the complexity of the modern web (as people say, browsers are basically operating systems), back to more of its hyper-text roots. Simple documents, mostly textual information. I could imagine a mix of basic markdown and some pre-wired complex/interactive views like "forum" or "blog" and so on (differences in how data is loaded, presented, ...) - the idea would be to implement the "app" part in the browser-replacement and not in the web-page itself if that makes sense. This would lead to more uniformity but that might be a good thing. I'm not even sure if/how images would fit in or videos.
- Peer-to-peer?: Hosting should be as simple as hitting a "publish" button on an article. I like the idea of decentralization, so maybe there could be some sort of peer-to-peer federation where users could "host" content that they've read, liked or general content that's part of a certain (sub-) community. This might require some ranking like HN or a similar mechanism to (unfortunately) censor certain content if the community would not believe it to match their values - so not ultimate freedom. P2P would be more about decentralization, and maybe anti-tracking than pure censorship-resistance.
A session might look like opening the "non-browser" app - it would be fast and require very little memory. Then you'd select or type a community/site and you view of all the content with filters and sorts, depending on the community/site's "template" (again, this is not JS/HTML - basically a native form rendered directly if you will). When you feel like it, you click the "create" button, a text-area + preview pops up and you write your post or article in markdown. When happy, you "publish" and it gets slowly disseminated through all the P2P nodes of your community. This could encompass communities like HN or reddit even if the voting mechanics are worked out, personal blogs, ... but would probably exclude e-commerce stores or video sites because the engine would be potentially too simplistic - and that's fine by me.
I've been thinking more lately about how to get "Basic Web" - just like normal HTML and maybe a little bit of CSS (No Service Workers, Background Sync, DRM, etc.) and make it work over a LORA/Meshtastic rig somehow.
You have the right ideas, and there are protocols that do this, some more isolationist than others: https://yesterweb.org/zine/issue-05/08/ "The Web Outside the Net" and https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/SmolNet
Modern smartphones could implement more Data Saver features, but websites could opt-in by using less data. For example, https://marcusb.org/hacks/tinyblog.html
...may I suggest "Intelligent Software-Defined Network" as an acronym for the sake of giving it one
Personally, I think Reticulum is the parallel Internet. It could even replace the Internet Protocol, and whatever the IP protocol connects is in my view the Internet.
https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/standards.pngs