I’m really liking this, thank you for the suggestion.

@[email protected] has whored his karma already, he isn’t answering these additional questions which call into question his false assumptions.

Yes, we could have an internet without businesses. See here.

This sounds like the kind of thing a Zoomer who has no memory of life before the Internet – or the Internet of the '90s before the advertisers got a hold of it, for that matter – would write.

To clear that up, I’m coming up on 40. We got our first family computer with a 56k modem in 1995. I’m not saying ads are a good thing, I’m telling you that 99% of websites are ad-powered.

Back then companies had websites as a novelty, or way to find information about their company. All the newspapers that had websites were simply putting their major articles on the internet as a bonus, and as a business strategy to push subscriptions for their physical paper. Most everyone still purchased a subscription to their physical newspapers and magazines. Now, basically nobody has a newspaper or magazine subscription unless it’s online, but most people still don’t… The tech savvy use archive.ph and similar, and the old and non tech-savvy use their 3-article limit and might buy a month subscription to read an article they really have to read, or maybe even a year like the old days, but most don’t pay for a subscription at all, and that’s where the ads come in.

However, since social media has become the dominant news-spreading mechanism, many or most don’t even read articles. They read headlines and talk shit or ask questions in the comments section, of things which were answered in the article. In the 90s those people would be reading the articles as something to do, and to stay somewhat informed. Today, their smartphone would ding or buzz before they finished the first article.

P.S. I’m Degoogled and use Graphene without GSF on my main profile so I use Aurora, Neo Store, and F-Droid. Currently using Boost installed with Aurora. What’s a good recommendation for a good, fast, FOSS Lemmy client that doesn’t show ads that I can get with F-Droid?

Those are not businesses. They are free projects which a dedicated person (or group of people) donate their time and energy to produce.

Wikipedia has their semi-annual donation drives and many (not most, but enough worth mentioning) FOSS devs are salaried by companies like Google and Microsoft and are allowed to work on patches to out-of-scope projects on company time provided they’re still fulfilling their main roles. There are also Liberapay, Open Collective, Ko-fi and such but for the majority of FOSS devs not funded by large corps, just developing a large and widely-used program because they want to, donations rarely ever cover as much as they would make at a 9-5. There are also nonprofits that distribute donations to FOSS devs. For most it is a money pit, but to them the passion is worth more. They do it for the love, not the money.

These are not businesses.

What are your suggestions besides ads and subscriptions, professor?

That’s a nice thought.

Then you suddenly realize no one knows up from down or down from up. Society would shift on such a massive scale people would probably just stick their smartphones in a drawer and only use them to message people they already know personally and check them a few times a day like an answering machine.

Then suddenly you realize you haven’t heard about Ukraine, Russia, Israel or Palestine in months. It’s November 28th and you heard someone mention a ‘new president’ but you didn’t even vote. Shit, you forgot to vote. There were no social media or news websites reminding you about the election and you didn’t have it on your new wall calendar yet! Ah that’s what all those “Vote Now!!!” yard signs were about, fuck…

It’s a nice thought, but the internet is powered by ads. (Almost?) Every subscription-supported website is also ad-supported. The internet would basically go under. AFAIK all the Lemmy apps have ads too. It’d be a nice change to get back to get a force shove back to the early-mid 90’s. Maybe we’d do things differently. People would certainly be outside talking to each other a lot more.

I noticed my main VPN and backup VPN failing to connect the other day, but that was 3-4 days ago. Haven’t tried since, because I switched to Pop!_OS in that time.

At the time I thought it was just my ISP being my ISP.

E: Both with Wireguard and OpenVPN, across multiple servers.

Every wild dog will chase and eat prey and their own poop, and attack any dog that challenges them or their pack.

Every wild cat will chase and catch their prey, and then play with it while keeping it alive for a while until it ultimately dies.

Humans are basically dogs or cats that have 1000’s of societal incentives not to chase and play with prey, drilled into most of us from the beginning, but everyone still has that innate ability that will come out under the right circumstances. If civilization ended today, who you think you are, and what you think you are not capable of today, ends today.

you never had any dark thoughts? Never did anything bad?

Yes, you might not be doing this particular bad thing.

You: Yeah sure, but I never did this particular bad thing.

Welcome to the species, bud. We’re all a little mad here.

New features get released into the developer preview. It’s basically beta test windows. It’s what the tech sites watch to see what new features/etc have been added/removed/changed. Usually they end up making it into the release builds, but sometimes they end up not doing it, or the change doesn’t apply to certain regions.

He’s not being cloak and dagger. He’s an old guy (double spacer spotted) who works in the military or private sector under NDA and can’t talk about it.

Or he’s LARPing. But the double spaces make me believe him.

I manage a large network and ads are blocked at the edge of the network.

You must MITM all traffic and do some magic with stripping/injecting JavaScript then? Because every time I’ve tried with pihole, its just threads and threads of people saying its not possible with DNS blocking because the ads are served from the video servers.

And when they add 3 feet of plastic, use archive.ph

AIM/MSN/Yahoo chatrooms. GeoCities. Neopets. Limewire, KaZaa, listening to Art Bell on the radio next to you while you search for the latest alien news and read ancient texts. Webrings. Message boards. NSA hadn’t partnered with Microsoft for the first version of PRISM.

It was more decentralized, but even in the centralized parts there weren’t yet entire industries dedicated to stealing every last bit of dopamine from you to sell to the highest bidder.

It was an amazing time. RIP 1985-2010

ETA: The 4 billion people in the 80s was still growth. Infrastructure has been scaled up, and it will take a ton of work to scale down - work which we will be hard-pressed to find enough skilled laborers for. Also overpopulation isn’t the main driver behind climate change, overconsumption is. We are a society of consumers, we buy convenience, and evil corporations force planned obsolescence on us to make us buy more. Many of us will scoff at high-priced long-lasting items yet still buy a new iPhone every 3 years.

If you reduce the population as fast as its decreasing now, lower than replacement rates, all modern conveniences including infrastructure and faith in the economy are going to take a hit. That includes the internet and hospitals and all internet-dependant companies. Public utilities like trash, shipping - we already saw how many products were discontinued and companies went out if business because of the inability to get parts, over a 6 month (at first) brief shortage of truck drivers, which is still recovering 4 years later. If you think the economy is bad now, wait until faith in the market completely collapses and we have a full-on crash, not just a recession. It’s been showing signs for years now, and things aren’t improving.

Throw in experienced power plant operators, people that install and maintain pipes and lines, water treatment plants, public transit, the people that make parts for the machines that installs the infrastructure, the vehicles, etc. Everything you can think of will be affected, along with many things most people never think about.

Immigration is a way to slow it down, but almost every country on Earth has falling birth rates at the moment. Immigrants coming from, say, Mexico and Canada to US will only delay the problem, and cause a larger problem for those allied countries we rely so much on.

You can find pros and cons, and it’s been a while since I did heavy research into the subject, but my takeaway was that once we reach a certain point, mass deaths will start to occur, especially in population centers. Rural communities won’t be affected as much provided they have plenty of weapons and systems for defense, livestock, agriculture and close community. Knowledge will need to be retained - on disease, birth complications, fixing nuts and bolts technology, etc. Authoritarian countries who decide to force birth (whether by force or accommodations - see USSR support and metals for mothers with greater than X number of children) will become a serious threat.

There are many variables and moving parts, but one thing is for certain: there will not be mass population decline without major hurt for everyone.

I agree that a Phoenix will rise from the ashes, but make no mistake, there will be many ashes, you and I and most of us posting here likely included.

But we are long overdue for a reset. Maybe this time we can just skip the internet infrastructure during rebuild, and develop near-peer networks instead.

She knew full well, she was just playing ignorant since she knew it would be printed. better to play dumb while you think of something to say than to give ammunition to your opponents

I also liked this bit:

[Reporter] But again, you think that’s unfair because of who your mom is. Because she suffers. Something about her suffering catalyzed in you the desire to end suffering in other people. Does that make sense?

No, that doesn’t make sense. Unfortunately, not all disease is genetic. There will still be disease and suffering. We are not that much of an optimistic fantasy.

Like she knows it’s partly optimistic fantasy that will eventually work if she just keeps it going, but let it slip. E. Holmes thought the same thing… just a little more time and we’ll have it.

I’m very glad I found the link to read the full article. She really does come off just like Elizabeth Holmes. When there isn’t a viable product to sell, you really have to sell yourself. There are plenty female tech CEOs that stay out of the media, just like the majority don’t know the names of most male tech CEOs, besides the few largest.

The way she reacted to the question of “your company is basically using exactly the same style of claimed technology as Theranos” as “Ugh. You’re a meanie. Women shouldn’t only be slaves!” is really quite telling.

As long as you either have many tens of millions, or you don’t care about electricity, water, food, and you’re extremely physically isolated and/or hidden very well and armed to the teeth, it shouldn’t affect you much.

For the rest of us it’s something to worry about. Infrastructure needs a lot of trained people to operate. Once the train gets going it doesn’t stop, and that means as time goes on it gets worse and worse until it reaches a point of stability some X years after collapse. And you won’t be able to freely and adaquetely hunt/pick your food if you’re anywhere near a city until point X, because everyone else will be doing the same. Also some idiots will be bathing in the only still good stream near you with whatever leftover chemicals they can find.

Your country can open the immigration floodgates and become a country without borders (i.e. become whatever country is currently your neighbor) but that comes with similar problems listed above.

So as you can see, it’s not an issue for a small privileged few. For the rest of us, its a big fucking deal. I would encourage you to look into it.