> I swear. What happened here? Like why do things feel sluggish than software over 20 years ago? I just can't wrap my mind around it. We have SSDs and infinite CPU and RAM now compared to those days, yet there is always this feeling the computer is doing something more than I asked for behind the scenes. Even on websites, you can feel when you click on a link, it is doing something more. It's a very uncomfortable feeling.
Keep in mind, "free" pairs with greed. The Market even pre-internet gravitated to free. I'm certainly not defending greed, but the general lack of market pushback doesn't discourage it either.
There is no market pushback because free services hide negative externalities. So when users choose something that’s free over something they’d have to pay for, I’d say they’re generally unaware of the negative consequences (either to them or to the rest of society) because by claiming a service is free of charge, the provider is effectively hiding those negative effects, and making their revenue in some opaque way (e.g. advertising)
There will never be market pushback as long as those externalities aren’t priced in. And Imho the only for that to happen is for governments to introduce regulation, e.g. by taxing the externalities so that “free” service providers are forced to be more upfront about the actual cost of their service.
This is why libraries are amazing - they are objectively funded so that “free” really means “so essential it’s funded for you.” In the case of vulnerable populations that are driven to free services (like the socioeconomically disadvantaged or especially kids), it relieves the pressure to engage in selling one’s self to receive some “free” service. This was more widely accepted in the past when services like NPR and PBS were publicly funded. You know, when we cared about education.
First, haven't we learned already that any government regulation always ends up favoring the status quo? FAANG will be able to eat those costs right away and make it impossible for any competitor to rise up
Second, what happened with personal responsibility? We can still choose to patronize companies that do not rely on ads, we can still promote/fund the development of Libre Software that is focused on the users' welfare and not the corporations' bottom line. Most of us here on HN can even help other less tech-savvy people to avoid falling into those traps and educate them about less invasive alternatives.
When you say "the government should do X", you imply that we can not do it ourselves. And we pretty much can.
> First, haven't we learned already that any government regulation always ends up favoring the status quo?
That premise is wrong. Government regulation has lately been mostly done on account of corporations which want to protect their monopolies and strengthen their position, but that doesn't make it inherently so.
If by lately, you mean "basically always", then I'd agree. I'd be hard pressed to think of any regulation that was successfully enacted and led to actual distress and disruption in the big corporations.
> that doesn't make it inherently so
Why would it be different this time? Can you think of any kind of policy that has any slim chance of passing and would get us rid of Big Tech? And by "Big Tech", I mean all of it, not just the ones that you don't like.
I'm not sure anyone wants to get rid of big tech. Just reign it in. And just enforcing anticompetitive regulations help. The GDPR helps. The EU regulations requiring federated messaging help. The laws in favor net neutrality help.
> I'm not sure anyone wants to get rid of big tech.
Yes, I do. The FSF does. The IndieWeb does.
> Just reign it in.
To think that this is possible without any type of damaging side-effect is a huge delusion.
Trusting more power to Big Government to try to control Big Tech is like saying "Look at all the destruction that Godzilla is making, we need to unleash King Kong to fight it".
The only stable solution to avoid global systemic catastrophe is by removing centralized power and redistributing it to local communities.
GDPR does not help, quite the opposite. It gave people some illusion of control but did nothing but scare smaller players into compliance.
Messaging standardization might actually turn out to be good, but only because none of the dominant companies are from Europe.
What are their options for search? I know DDG is an option, but even it seems to rely on Big Tech.
> Trusting more power to Big Government to try to control Big Tech
But it's definitely worked in the past. Government successfully reigned in a ton of industry. Sure, it hasn't reigned in Big Tech, but so much other stuff.
Did it really? To me it looks like the Auto Industry is still pretty much doing whatever they want, Big Oil continues to expand on their emissions, Big Pharma profited quite a bit even despite being partly responsible for an opioid crisis...
They're not doing whatever they want, because then they'd utilize slave labor with no safety regards (and some actually continue to do so too, just not in the developed world - which just proves the point that they'd jump on it as soon as could)
They're however doing whatever they can get away with, which is arguably way too much
The point is not about what the regulation stopped them from doing locally, the point is that no regulation that came into existence ever broke the power structure. It was never a threat to the ones connected to the elites.
Any regulation that does get approve ends up weaponized in favor of the big companies.
To illustrate: look at Dieselgate. If the regulations were actually meant to be serious, any scrappy company from Poland, Portugal or Bulgaria would have been absolutely dismantled out of existence. But VW got what? A symbolic fine, some Casablanca-style reprimands, perhaps a expiatory goat... but they will continue to have the support from the government.
What about tech? What real benefit has GDPR brought to the people? Nothing! It made only the small business owners scared of violations, got them out of running their own sites and into siloed Facebook/Amazon pages, and with their "social Media presence" on Twitter/Instagram. Tell me with a clean face how that "regulation" was in your favor and not of the status quo?
Don't read what is not there. I did not say that all regulations are bad.
With that in mind, please tell me which part of "haven't we learned already that any government regulation always ends up favoring the status quo?" or "regulations only get to be enacted when they don't threaten the status quo" is goalpost-moving...
While you are at it, take your time to think about the question I asked you in the first response. What kind of policy do you believe could have any chance of being enacted and offer a serious change for Big Tech?
> haven't we learned already that any government regulation always ends up favoring the status quo
Not at all. A ton of government regulation is to fix an ongoing problem by changing the status quo. Meatpacking regulations after "The Jungle". The EPA, Clean Air and Clean Water act. Mandatory seat belt laws. The list of "government saw problem, fixed with regulation" is huge.
In particular, with FB/Google, the status quo might crumble without ads. Or maybe they'll go to less targeted ads and only make a ridiculous amount of money instead of an insane amount.
All the examples you brought are from things where the "changes" did not threaten the industries involved or helped consolidate the market into an oligopoly. They pretty much favored the status quo.
You are going at this backwards. Ask yourself why were these requirements established in the first place, and who was in condition to meet them.
Also, do realize that even these requirements never translated into any kind of service guarantee. It does not solve the overall issue.
Case in point: "clean water requirements" in the US did not stop mega corporations from turning bottled water into a multi-billion dollar market, and it only pushed "dirty" manufacturing to China.
Clean water requirements have to do with the delivery of water to my house not bottling it.
>It does not solve the overall issue.
It makes it a whole lot better then it would be otherwise. Power companies can and do get fined for not doing what they should, a power that would be beyond the ability of an individual to do.
Because of things like the USPS damn near anyone in the US can mail something to anyone else for a decent price which is a net positive for society.
The point that you are so unwilling to accept is that regulations only get to be enacted if they don't hurt the corporations.
> Power companies can and do get fined for not doing what they should.
Yet, they still manage to be profitable and in some cases even get government assistance when they fail, when the long-term, "systemically healthy" solution would be to have a framework that allows more diversity in service providers and that does not depend on the survivability of any single entity.
Look at Texas and the winter brownouts. Their grid fails whenever it gets so cold to the point that generating energy is not lucrative. Paying the fines is favoring the status quo.
"Being a net positive for society" is at best an accidental side effect, not the point of any regulation that gets to be enacted. And there are other ways where we can get the societal benefits without giving away power to these corrupt institutions.
>The point that you are so unwilling to accept is that regulations only get to be enacted if they don't hurt the corporations.
My local non-profit power company is a data point against that position. There are many others.
>Look at Texas and the winter brownouts. Their grid fails whenever it gets so cold to the point that generating energy is not lucrative.
The portions of Texas not on the ERCOT grid which are connected to the federally regulated grids preformed much better than the ERCOT grid because they have regulations, with punishments if they don't follow them, the government requires.
>And there are other ways where we can get the societal benefits without giving away power to these corrupt institutions.
> My local non-profit power company is a data point against that position.
Was "your local non-profit" responsible in the elaboration of any of the regulation? Are they in any condition to threaten the status quo? Can they disrupt the market at a global scale or are they just sticking to being a "local, non-profit" entity?
It seems we are talking about two different things. You want to defend regulatory action as a valid mechanism for societal progress. What I am saying is that these mechanisms historically only worked when the status quo could benefit (or at the very least not threatened) from it.
The problem is that I am feeling like I am arguing a strawman (regulations are always bad!) when my point is that calling for regulations for Big Tech will do jack-shit to actually solve any of the issues affecting society, and more likely than not it is just going to help Big Tech cement their dominance.
> Second, what happened with personal responsibility?
This breaks down when some body else's lack of personal responsibility impacts me. For example, a drunk driver colliding head on with me on the highway. In this case, it's everyone else gravitating to "free" services which in turn make them so ubiquitous that it's near impossible to escape. Even though I don't use Gmail, I'm still impacted when all my contacts use it to send me email.
Sure, I guess I could be personally responsible by disowning those contacts, but that's in the extremes.
That's probably an even better example but for some reason that's still a political issue, and I didn't want to get into that. At least when talking about drunk drivers, everyone can agree it's real, bad, and not the victim's fault.
> Even though I don't use Gmail, I'm still impacted when all my contacts use it to send me email.
No, you are not. Even if you wanted to treat it as such, you could drop all incoming email from google, or auto-respond to people saying they need a different email address to reach you.
And if you think that doing that is a bad idea at the individual level, ask yourself why would it be acceptable at the global sphere.
Yes, personal responsibility and the free market have done so well on this subject, how dare we try something else??
/s
Seriously, the free market and personal responsibility have not worked. Let’s try something else. At this point, I’ll take some potential negative externalities over this shitshow.
It worked pretty well for me and anyone else that is willing to understand "There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch".
Wherever I get to maintain a proper "digital hygiene"*, I don't have any of these issues that people love to complain about. But I would bet that whatever regulation gets to be approved, it would not only be ineffective to solve the issues that affect the majority, it would make it harder for the minority that still manages to get away from them.
* a simple set of rules to live by.
- prefer free-software solutions for all use cases that satisfies your hard requirements, even if they miss on the "nice-to-haves".
- self-host as much as possible: see all services you are paying currently and look for existing open self-hosted alternatives. Get an old computer or laptop and run these. Invite your friends and family. If you are not technical, find someone in your close circle that is and ask if they are interested in doing it, offer to help with the costs.
- If you don't want to self-host, find service providers that offer these open source services.
- use Brave: complain about crypto all you want, it is the only web browser that gives control to the user and that promotes a business model where creators are rewarded directly by the consumers.
- use the received BAT to be as generous as possible with open source developers. 5 bucks a month might not mean much, but if 10% of internet users did that I guarantee we would kill all the app stores and their abusive practices.
- Do not rely on streaming services. I'd rather pay for a private tracker to download what I want than finance Disney/Comcast/HBO/Amazon/Apple to increase their cultural dominance even further
- use alternative frontends whenever you have to access youtube, twitter, medium.
so now you’re creating a bunch of extra work for yourself so you can host a bunch of content that most people won’t see
telling a bunch of software engineers to do things themselves is never going to solve the problem, it’s like telling the pope to go to church
the problem is everything else happening to the average people in the world around you - you’re subject to it whether you like it or not. As long as you live in a society problems that facebook twitter and other social media platforms you dont use are causing are going to be your problems too, no matter how deep you bury your head in niche web browsers and self-hosted blogging platforms.
> everything else happening to the average people in the world around you
Did you read the part where I said "invite your friends and family", or you just jumped to write such a thoughtful response?
My parents don't care about Facebook, Twitter or whatsapp. They care about being able to see and talk with their grandkids. If I tell them that they can do that by using a different app, they will install the app without second thought.
If they want to continue using Facebook/Google, they can. But the important thing to me is that now they are less dependent on Facebook and they have an option.
This solution is one that maybe 1% of the US populace can implement or take advantage of via family.
It's always worth remembering that only 5% of the adult US populace can complete a task like finding and applying for a job using only web technology†. Being able to self host is a skill that maybe 0.1% of the populace can do, being generous.
An important life lesson is knowing that just because you can do something doesn't mean everybody, or even a majority of people can.
What you're proposing won't work for any but the technological elite.
It requires too many technical skills to work.
Alternatively, it requires too much money to hire the technical skills to work.
If it doesn't work for the majority (even a reasonably sized minority) of people, regardless of being borne of the best of intentions, it's not a viable alternative. Period.
What is about Mastodon that requires technical skills that Facebook or Twitter do not? The fact that they are required to know the name of the instance when setting up a client?
Just like they learned (conditioned could be a better word) into putting all their data into their shiny smartphones, people can learn something like "to use this you need your username and the server name, like email addresses". And if you tell me that some people don't even know that and had someone else setting up their facebook for them, why can't this "someone else" set up an ActivityPub client as well?
> Alternatively, it requires too much money to hire the technical skills to work.
I don't think I charged anything from my friends and family that asked to get access to my matrix server. I also don't charge anything from those that got an account on the Jellyfin box I run. I also didn't send an invoice to my wife or parents for helping them setup Element on their phones.
"Ah, but this doesn't scale!"
Sure, if it's just me doing it won't. But there are already other people that learned once and managed to teach others.
> it's not a viable alternative.
Do us both a favor. Instead of making absolute statements based on incomplete information and your prejudices, find a way to prove me wrong.
Get one of your current vices (Twitter? Instagram? TikTok? WhatsApp? iMessage?), and do your best effort to use the open alternatives that exist. For the social networking stuff, you will quickly see that the only "problem" is that the people you are used to seeing are not there. Instead of shrugging your shoulders and going back to the old ways, see how many people you can bring along with you.
I'm not even asking you to delete your current application. I'm just asking you to try to use the open alternative and help as many people as possible to join you. If you find any reasonable justification that prevents you or your peers to adopt the open alternative, then I will believe you.
what i’m saying is that you’re ignoring societal problems by removing yourself from them, and this will not fix anything… and you will still be subject to side-effects as long as you wish to interact with people outside of your parents (ie, society)
I’ve been on my local school board for 20 years and the changes happening due to social media are staggering (for children and adults). My lack of participation hasn’t changed anything. Telling people not to participate will not work because you’re rivaling companies that pay experts tons of money to get people addicted to these things. As individuals we’re massively out-gunned.
I’ve started working with and donating to advocacy groups looking to regulate these companies because I haven’t seen anything else even begin to work.
I'd rather say that I am weakening the grip that some corporations have over society at large, and that the more people did the same, the less of a problem it would be.
I am also saying that there are a good number of people that think this is not a problem, so I don't want to waste my time and energy trying to convince them otherwise.
Understandable, my perspective is that most people simply don’t realize how much of a problem it is, because there are massive amounts of money and expertise keeping them from it.
I think it is more. I see people who make a simple website for a small family guesthouse voluntarily add all kinds of scripts that give them not a lot but send a ton of data to the big players.
Typically the reason is, that they don't know how to do it any other way.
I was paging through a fansite’s concert listings archives this morning trying to find a particular show. Used to be a time when a simple page like this [0] would load just about as fast as you could click the “previous page” link. Now it’s a few seconds each time.
I have some old machines for retro purposes, including some Pentium 2s running Windows 98. Things take longer to load, that's for granted, but once something runs it just feels infinitely more snappy than a modern desktop. This is not rose-tinted glasses misremembering how things were like 20 years ago; this is actually turning that machine on in the current decade and observing how an older version of the same software behaves on that machine vs on a modern Windows 10 machine.
Just for experimental purpose, you can try disabling all UI animation to make ui interactions instant [1], and perhaps disable ALL antivirus and their filesystem filter drivers as they make all disk access slower [2] (including windows defender, you can re-enable it again after you're finished messing around). See if those tweaks can actually make your computer as fast as the old machines.
I did something similar a while ago by explicitly adding a call to disable all theming in an app. That way you can even make the window decorations look like old Win9x borders in Windows 10. Disabling theming makes window creation measurably faster, by a lot. That includes lack of animations for that specific app, of course.
Try to use windows 10 on a laptop with teams and office 365. You will underestand.
20 years ago software was running locally. Now, it must communicate with mothership for every action you make.
Tools running in the browser are slow, because they use the browser to get user input or to display information.
There should definitely be more exploration of latency in the software that we use. Here's a really nice article about it from a while back, about typing in particular: https://pavelfatin.com/typing-with-pleasure/
> These are tests of the latency between a keypress and the display of a character in a terminal
People noticed that the windows built-in terminal app has noticeable latency, and when the WSL1 team implemented their own terminal app, they ended up with much better latency [1]. I wonder if this input lag test was done using the built-in terminal or this WSL1 terminal.
For the time being, there have been no need for updates. Gorhill has t updated it for like a year before he discontinued support. It's not likely to preemptively fork, but probably will once it's needed.
Indeed. People who repeat this absurd meme either have a terrible memory or are just flippantly cynical. Computers 20 years ago were very slow compared to how things are today, this is especially true of professional software like compilers, digital audio workstations, video editing, photo editing, 3d modeling as well as common utility software like file compressors, codec converters, disk searching tools etc, but also gaming, video playback, and don't even get me started on internet speeds. It's just flat wrong.
Try testing startup time (yes it matters) of old software (on current machines) compared to new stuff... even web pages are slower than that most of the time.
Can’t tell if that was sarcasm or not. I still have hardware from the DOS era. For example, Microsoft Works starts up almost instantly. That is definitely not the case with Office 365 in 2022. Latency is far lower back then too. I could go on and on.
They're talking about post start up. Yes, disk speeds are much faster now. Other than startup however, everything feels slower. Heck, now the limit on my speed is often internet, not disk.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30875539