Re: Heat Death of the Internet

Fascinating how different experiences and life choices can be! Let me contrast this with some clips from my own life. Obviously this is based
on where I live in northern europe so of course my experience does not
apply equally to yours.
On Thu, 2 May 2024, Ben Collver wrote:

Heat Death of the Internet
==========================
4 April 2024
>
You want to order from a local restaurant, but you need to download a
third-party delivery app, even though you plan to pick it up
yourself. The prices and menu on the app are different to what you

For app only restaurants I don't go to them, because I don't have a
smartphone. I have my favourite restaurants and there I can either call
to order, or order through their web site from my laptop.
If app-only restaurants become too common, the market will makes sure
that phone+web order/delivery will capture the remaining niche.

woman behind the counter says they have to contact the company who
designed the site for changes, which will cost them, but most people
just order through an app anyway.

I've experience a few of those, and never bothered. Eventually they
disappear.

You want to watch the trailer for an upcoming movie on YouTube but
you first have to sit through an ad. Then you sit through a preview
for the trailer itself. Then you watch the trailer, which is
literally another ad. When it ends, it cues up a new trailer, with a
new ad at the start of it.

I block all ads, so never see ads on youtube. I often think about how
the world would be if everyone has adblockers installed. How would
google & co try and smash that, since their economy would be threatened?
As for videos, I frequent torrent sites, and yt-dlp enables me to
download videos from many streaming sites, including public tv-stations
who have online tv from all over the world.

The first page of Google results are links to pages that have scraped
other pages for information from other pages that have been scraped
for information. All the sources seem to link back to one another.
There is no origin. The photos on the page look weird. The hands are
disfigured. There is no image credit.

I stopped using google. I use ddg.com and startpage.com. Adblockers in
the browser of course, but the occasional bad web site slips through. I
find that the most useful web sites are spread by word of mouth, and
less so, stumbled upon.

Your coworker sends you a PowerPoint pack to support a presentation
you are giving to the executive committee, but you can't make heads
or tails of it. You call them over Zoom and they tell you they used
ChatGPT to write it. You point out that it is near-unreadable, and
they ask what specifically is wrong with it. You mention that, for
starters, there are too many words on each slide. They tell you
they'll take care of it. They send you a new pack within the hour
saying they asked ChatGPT to remove 30% of the text. It makes even
less sense. You tell them you'll just rewrite it yourself.

Fortunately never happened. I have heard horror stories of 2 people at a
company trading gpt texts each feeding the output of the other into gpt
responding.
I have used gpt for nonsense-documents like environmental and gender
plans which just need to be there to tick a government box, but are
never read or acted upon. I find that gpt excels as writing walls of
text that no one ever reads, but that the government requires
(sometimes) for public tenders.

A billionaire got mad, bought your favourite social media site and
ran it into the ground. A different billionaire got mad, bought the
magazine site you liked to read on your lunchbreak and shut it down
completely. A third billionaire did what they do best, bought the app
you use for networking and sold it off for parts.

Don't have any social media except mastodon and usenet. Couldn't care
less that mad billionaires spend their dollars on. If people leave
social media I would actually see that as a net benefit for society.

You want to watch a TV show from your youth so you check a streaming
service, but it is not there, so you check a second streaming service
but it is not there, so you check a third streaming service and it is
not there. You search for it on Blu-ray but it doesn't exist, so you
search for it on DVD but it is out of print. You find a seller on
eBay who has it, but the listing reads ambiguous as to whether it is
the real thing or a burnt copy. You message the seller and they reply
with an automated response thanking you for your interest.

Here I find youtube and local public tv channels online to be good
sources. But this is an interesting point. Sometimes I think about if a
campaign to rescue old dvd:s and blueray:s would be successful? The idea
is to ask people to send me dvd:s and bluerays they no longer want and
build up a library. Where I live it is legal to lend out dvd:s as long
as its for private use and no money is involved. Imagine an Alexandria
of old dvd:s and bluerays which people could borrow, rip, and return.
Would anyone be interested?

You can't read the recipe on your phone because it prioritises the
ads on the page. You bring your laptop into the kitchen and whenever
you scroll down, you have to close a pop-up. You turn AdBlock on and
the page no longer loads, then AdBlock sends you an ad asking for
money.

I read recipes from recipe books, alternatively I have textfiles or
scanned recipes on my laptop.

The Airbnb charges you a $150 cleaning fee, but insists the place
needs to be left spotless. There will be a fee if the bedding hasn't
been stripped and the dishwasher hasn't been emptied.

Oh yes... I avoid the airbnb scam. It was great in the beginning but
somewhere they started to add a lot of extra fees, and the quality
dropped dramatically. Nowadays it's hotels only.

Your Uber driver is lost because his app hasn't updated and keeps
telling him to turn down streets that no longer exist. You still give
him five stars.

Uber is probably my biggest pain. I don't have a smartphone so I have to
order taxis the old fashioned way, and that means I have to pay 2x-3x
the amount compared with Uber. Either someone I travel with has an app,
or I pay 2-3x and take it as the extra cost of my mental health and see
it as well invested money. ;) There are also services that enable you to
order a taxi online, through your web browser, but they are also more
expensive and not as common. It depends on the country.

Your mother sends you a link to a breaking story, but the article is
behind a paywall, so you switch to the website where you do pay for
news but there's no mention of it.

I share a mainstream news subscription with other familymembers, so
there's no paywall and I mostly read the news in the form of a
downloadable pdf.
In addition I watch the free news of the government public television
and the TV-text pages.
Overall a goal I have is to minimize my news consumption down to zero,
because the older I get, the less I find that I care and I also find
that it does not affect my life positively.

You buy a microwave and receive ads for microwaves. You buy a
mattress and receive ads for mattresses.

Yes, this happens.

Strangers on social media assume you are American and get mad when
you correct them.

Never happens.

Your Gmail is approaching storage capacity.

I pay for my email and download all, so never any capacity problems.

Your smart TV needs new firmware.

I never upgrade and I don't have TV. My TV is basically a monitor for my
computer or my TV-computer in the form of a radxa zero running kodi.

Your phone schedules an update.

No smart phone, web based calendar only.
Sometimes I struggle to understand the every day of people who are not
working with technology and even young people who are brought up on
social media and slck/discord.
My life seems more calm, and less exposed to ads and generally more
peaceful than most people.
I wonder if people in general will rediscover old school technology, or
if things will become worse?