Currently private users and enthusiasts. As networks grow, there will probably be universities joining. Eventually corporations will start marketing plug and play equipment while selling access to server space and long distance connections. Other businesses will join and finance their services by selling subscriptions, advertising, and user data. Various government agencies will add hardware they can also use to track traffic. Someone will inevitably bring in bots, AI models, and internet connected devices. After that someone will coin the term “dead mesh network theory” and all the nerdlings will start developing the next knitted network or something.

Well, users for users. There was a co-op teleoperator iirc.

Add to these “very rare moments” every single time I use the FOSS, offline speech-to-text engines handy.computer and Whisper+. They’re awesome, down to the automatic punctuation!

I think it was when we started organizing into walled cities surrounded by agricultural lands… that was really conditioning to a miserable way of life (for most, benefitting only a few) that carries through all the way to today.

When we developed culture, it began the uncoupling of our abilities from the capacity of our brains. All other problems stem from this!

In the beginning the Universe was created. This had made many people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move. – Some Hoopy Frood

It’s complicated.

In short, yes.

Once upon a time, a bunch of primates came down from the trees and now we have unstoppable climate change.

Some would say it was coming down from the trees.

We let people become rich without eating them when they did bad things.

We gave normies access to the internet at anytime.

Everyday we do not stop the profit incentive.

Their techno fascist overlords, not for consumption, just to keep the propaganda space up so their have a space to control the narrative.

You are conflating micropayments (sufficient to pay creators) with gateway monetization, which would need to be small enough you could still use the internet (lets say thousands of pages a month) but high eough to dissuade scraper bot operators. I am not sure such a price exists. Maybe for some bot operators, but the various AI companies have more money than all regular internet users.

I’m with you. My concern is that I haven’t yet figured out how it’s gonna be ruined for private consumers by corporate consumers yet, so can’t know how to prepare lol.

Yeah, my shareware did real well - 800 hours in development, $500 in income across the past 30 years. Oh, and it cost me $400 for the compiler tools back then - so my net profit is rolling in at $0.12 per hour invested. Warning: $440 of that $500 came from an extreme niche product you’re unlikely to find such a lucrative vein anymore. My game only netted $60 in return for 400 hours of development, but you could say I got the compiler “for free” off that niche product’s income.

I’ve tried that before, but barely anyone donates. People expect the world for free.

It’s the same way that taxes work. Rich people contribute more than poorer people, but everyone can use things funded by public money (parks, police, fire fighters, public transport, schools, health care outside the USA, etc).

I actually wonder if there should be more taxpayer-funded online services. Lemmy’s development was partially funded by government money (NLNet Foundation via the European Commission) for example.

You are absolutely right!

Genious

Lemmy compared to reddit is a great example of this

Most of that money is imaginary. It’s about the potential for an unobserved metric to yield a predicted dividend and subvert an over-hyped trend.

I have started going back to forums and RSS feeds when I can find them. Most of the forums though are pretty dead. I have even started using Usenet again for actual text newsgroups.

I am hoping for a bit of a resurgence as more people move away from algorithmic social media but I won’t hold my breathe on that.

There’s no “LLM native language” to convert to for efficiency.

Yet. With 1000x as much bot-content being generated on the web as human generated content, the “bot spoken” training set will grow rather quickly, and I see no reason for it not to evolve in a similar way to how human spoken languages evolve.

Example of something I had to lookup to understand: (/hj)

Back when I was in school, Autism was a 1/10,000 Dx. 20 years ago it was crashing down from 1/100 to 1/50, checking now… 1/31 today. They’ve lumped so much into the Autism diagnosis that it’s meaningless anymore; it covers so many varied conditions and severities, and the stereotypes don’t fit most recipients of the Dx anymore.

Not too keen on the ableism, but a handjob is a handjob ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

And beans

It feels a bit like in Cyberpunk, where the wild Internet has become unusable or even dangerous and only big corpo controlled parts are still accessible to the masses.

The other topic you mentioned, LLM’s are going to hit a wall and they’ll do so hard. Training will be increasingly relegated to information predating large scale use if LLMs to avoid rapid degradation of the models by training it with LLM output. That in itself creates a huge problem the more time passes. Nothing is safe btw, analog media are increasingly just as tainted.

Ha ha. Traffic will move to let billionaires through quickly.

Regular folks will be stuck in endless traffic trapped in driverless cars that charge them $5 a minute for the privilege all while playing the same loud and obnoxious audio video ads on repeat for hours on end.

I don’t believe we will ever get coordinated autonomous vehicles. You will never be able to absolutely trust the information you are getting, whether it’s because wireless sucks, auto manufacturers couldn’t agree to or properly implement a universal standard, software bugs, or malicious behavior. If we want it to be safe, then the cars will have to drive cautiously and be prepared for behavior that was not properly communicated. This will not be a form of driving that is fundamentally different to what we have now.

And even if you could implement perfect coordination between autonomous vehicles, how would you be able to take advantage of it in the real world? Ban all human drivers? What about pedestrians and bikes? You still need crossings and traffic lights for an area to be livable by humans. You still need to drive slowly next to a pavement where someone could eg trip and fall onto the road.

Traffic congestion will always be a thing. The real world is too unpredictable. You can’t pack a highway full of cars and expect them to drive highway speeds. One animal jumping on the road and you’ll have a massive accident because nobody can avoid anyone

Traffic congestion doesn’t happen because of lack of coordination. Coordination prevents collisions. Our success rate could be a lot better but the system does pretty well with coordination limited to blinking lights, a noise that says “fuck off”, the mutual knowledge that we all got the same training and the private knowledge that everyone else on the road is a suicidal idiot who slept through the training.

Congestion is a physical property of the road network. There’s a physical limit to the number of cars you can push through a road in a given time period. Drive the cars too fast and they fly off the road when it bends, or cars slam into each other when a deer tries to commit suicide.

Traffic is well modeled as an incompressible slightly non-newtownian fluid, like runny oobleck. If you apply more pressure/increase vehicle volume the fluid starts to bind up as it becomes harder for the cars to maneuver without collision, regardless of coordination.

You reduce traffic by taking cars off the road, or scheduling utilization. Self driving cars won’t help, and we can do both of those without them. Long term they’re likely to make collisions worse because humans don’t know what they’re going to do, so the primary mode we have of coordination, “the theory of mind” will break down. Right now they’re so uncommon that you assume any car is a human who reacts and prioritizes like you.

Tear down the freeways and replace them with trains.