Comment by wolpoli
4 days ago
The personal computing era happened partly because, while there were demands for computing, users' connectivity to the internet were poor or limited and so they couldn't just connect to the mainframe. We now have high speed internet access everywhere - I don't know what would drive the equivalent of the era of personal computing this time.
> We now have high speed internet access everywhere
As I travel a ton, I can confidently tell you, that this is still not true at all, and I’m kinda disappointed that the general rule of optimizing for bad reception died.
> the general rule of optimizing for bad reception died.
Yep, and people will look at you like you have two heads when you suggest that perhaps we should take this into account, because it adds both cost and complexity.
But I am sick to the gills of using software - be that on my laptop or my phone - that craps out constantly when I'm on the train, or in one of the many mobile reception black spots in the areas where I live and work, or because my rural broadband has decided to temporarily give up, because the software wasn't built with unreliable connections in mind.
It's not that bleeding difficult to build an app that stores state locally and can sync with a remote service when connectivity is restored, but companies don't want to make the effort because it's perceived to be a niche issue that only affects a small number of people a small proportion of the time and therefore not worth the extra effort and complexity.
Whereas I'd argue that it affects a decent proportion of people on at least a semi-regular basis so is probably worth the investment.
We ignore the fallacies of distributed computing at our peril: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacies_of_distributed_compu...
It's always a small crisis what app/book to install on my phone to give me 5-8 hours of reading while on a plane. I found one - Newsify, combine it with YT caching.
Usually it reduces not adds complexity. Simpler pages without hundred different js frameworks are faster.
Moving services to the cloud unfortunately relieves a lot of the complexity of software development with respect to the menagerie of possible hardware environments.
it of course leads to a crappy user experience if they don't optimize for low bandwidth, but they don't seem to care about that, have you ever checked out how useless your algorithmic Facebook feed is now? Tons of bandwidth, very little information.
It seems like their measure is time on their website equals money in their pocket and baffling you with BS is a great way to achieve that until you never visit again in disgust and frustration.
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I work on a local-first app for fun and someone told me I was simply creating problems for myself and I could just be using a server. But I'm in the same boat as you. I regularly don't have good internet and I'm always surprised when people act like an internet connection is a safe assumption. Even every day I go up and down an elevator where I have no internet, I travel regularly, I go to concerts and music festivals, and so on.
I don't even travel that much, and still have trouble. Tethering at the local library or coffee shops is hit or miss, everything slows down during storms, etc.
> everything slows down during storms
One problem I've found in my current house is that the connection becomes flakier in heavy rain, presumably due to poor connections between the cabinet and houses. I live in Cardiff which for those unaware is one of Britain's rainiest cities. Fun times.
Yeah British trains are often absolutely awful for this, I started putting music on my phone locally to deal with the abysmal coverage.
Not true because of cost or access? If you consider starlink high speed, it truly is available everywhere.
Access. You cannot use Starlink on a train, flight, inside buildings, etc. Starlink is also not available everywhere: https://starlink.com/map. Also, it’s not feasible to bring that with me a lot of time, for example on my backpack trips; it’s simply too large.
Because of many reasons. It's not practical to have a Starlink antenna with you everywhere. And then yes, cost is a significant factor too - even in the dialup era satellite internet connection was a thing that existed "everywhere", in theory....
Privacy. I absolutely will not ever open my personal files to an LLM over the web, and even with my mid-tier M4 Macbook I’m close to a point where I don’t have to. I wonder how much the cat is out of the back for private companies in this regard. I don’t believe the AI companies founded on stealing IP have stopped.
Privacy is a niche concern sadly.
I believe Apple has made a significant number of iPhone sales due to a perception of better privacy than Android.
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> I don't know what would drive the equivalent of the era of personal computing this time.
Space.
You don't want to wait 3-22 minutes for a ping from Mars.
I'm not sure if the handful of people in space stations are a big enough market to drive such changes.
Privacy, reliable access when not connected to the web, the principal of decentralizing for some. Less supply chain risk for private enterprise.
Centralized only became mainstream when everything started to be offered "for free". When it was buy or pay recurrently more often the choice was to buy.
There are no longer options to buy. Everything is a subscription
Between mobilephone service including SMS and an ISP service which usually include mail I don't see the need for any hosted service.
There are FOSS alternatives for about everything for hobbyist and consumer use.
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I think people have seen enough of this 'free' business model to know the things being sold for free are in fact, not.
Some people, but a majority see it as free. Go to your local town center and randomly poll people how much they pay for email or google search, 99% will say it is free and stop there.
> We now have high speed internet access everywhere
This is such a HN comment illustrating how little your average HN knows of the world beyond their tech bubble. Internet everywhere, you might have something of a point. But "high speed internet access everywhere" sounds like "I haven't travelled much in my life".