You can see it differently: Digital world is almost entirely friction, shoveling useless info into our brains from morning till evening and preventing them from functioning normally. And being offline, lets say stuck in traffic and the phone battery is empty, is a welcome relief.
Is the friction of establishing trust via TLS on the way to consuming all the bandwidth?
One seriously wonders if the cost of zero trust will kill off the open internet, reducing us to walled gardens of SSH connections that can only be obtained by invitation.
We're falling far short of the vision of Sir Tim Berners-Lee, no?
The friction is incompatibility. That's what makes it difficult to interact with the system, and for the system to interact with itself.
Tim Berners-Lee's vision is great, but no one has really figured out how to make it feasible. To make matters worse, the interests of capital have taken over the system, and replaced most interpersonal interactions with an advertising market.
When a participant in the system is able to monopolize interaction in that system, they end up writing the rules that define compatibility for other participants of the system. The effect is not only that people on different platforms are isolated from the people on other platforms, it's also that they must interact with the system through the rules of their chosen platform. Rules don't just define the bounds of interaction: they define the interface, the logic, the goals, etc.
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It's impossible to build a set of rules that captures the entire potential of digital interaction. Objectivity is impossible, because the moment we write down its meaning, we subject it to a specific isolated context.
I'm working on a way to change the perspective that the system has with itself, so that subjectivity can be a first-class feature, and compatibility can be accomplished after-the-fact. What I have so far is still an extremely abstract idea, but I do think it's possible.
Most people visit the same half dozen websites over and over anyways. Websites are eventually going to be an artifact of an old medium as we move to like cybernetics and AR glasses and brain implants and whatever else. All that stuff in websites will be forgotten
I have read that some deaf people do not want cochlear implants because their deafness is part of who they are, their identity. They don't want that taken away.
Because we're a post-competence society. Very little useful data will be gained by the operators of these bots. They don't work, and nobody cares they don't work. We're doing everything cargo-cult now. We're building giant machines that do nothing but spew smoke into the air, because that's what they did in the Industrial Revolution and it brought prosperity, didn't it?
I would argue that’s a driver to my point. How many people are never going to visit the source website when Llama can give me a detailed summary of what I need in a few hundred milliseconds? I would consider that in the same category of forgotten. I could’ve been more clear in my other comment.
If a website is not financially dependent on search traffic, they can block all scrapers with a paywall, and their content will be missing from generic LLMs.
If a website is financially dependent on search traffic, they can go out of business due to loss of traffic to LLMs, and their content will disappear everywhere.
If the majority of websites fall into the latter category, LLMs would be left with old/archive longform content, plus micro content from social media.
If social media (e.g. X.AI) takes their data private for vertical integration with payments and internal LLM, their content will be missing from generic LLMs.
Is the correct response to someone who hates their job, who happens to take a hike and enjoy nature once in a while, "why don't you go live in the woods then?"?
Is it the wrong response? If they hate a job there's actual value in assessing whether they need it, especially if they could live life in a different environment they would enjoy with things made by their own hands.
There is value, yes. However, things are rarely so black and white as the commenter above you sees it wherein one could simply disconnect entirely. The reality of it is within our current zeitgeist the digital world is unavoidable - be it in the workplace, the condensation of our activities (incl. unavoidable ones- banking, etc) into apps on our phones.
Of course this is barring the idea of withdrawing all ones savings and moving onto a farm and living off the land :D.
I think this is true to an extent and it’s good to take a step back and remind yourself that thing you think is making you miserable is ultimately a small square of metal and glass. But the actual situation is more complicated. Clearly phones have utility beyond being skinner boxes, the ability to contact your loved ones, navigate roads and transit systems, translate languages, retrieve information from the web, etc are all extremely useful and their absence would decrease your quality of life. But since that’s all bundled together with the stuff people find harmful you’re left in a constant struggle to only your device in a beneficial way. You can lock down your phone but that’s just a band-aid. If someone can figure out a “smart-ish” phone that does the things I listed above but not the harmful things I think there would be a real market for it.
