'Offline' internet can come back, we can put 32g of microsd cards in special locations so we can share content and /etc/hosts without anyone knowing, maybe go online from time to time to get the newest /etc/hosts from your friends and the new locations for microsd cards near you.

Gopher is making a comeback, and gemini is growing.

Pi zero 2W costs 10$ and with 40$ screen you can watch feynman lectures with mplayer -vo fbdev, it boots into vim for 3 seconds (init into openvt -w vim kinda thing).

Soon the-eye.eu will be back (hopefully).

The new phrack is out.

The social networks are eating themselves, same as google is eating itself, the search is garbage, the feed is even more garbage, 99% of the content is anxiety inducing miasma.

The web is eating itself, with gazillions of GPT(ish) generated articles.

Let it go, life always finds a way.

> Gopher is making a comeback, and gemini is growing.

> Pi zero 2W

Another thing you need to keep in mind is that the number of people with the skills necessary to use this is low. Not to mention that new generations have grown up with the current status-quo and seem to be happy enough with it not to search for alternatives.

If things get really bad (a debate for which I'm not taking either side), only a very small minority will be able to use the aforementioned workarounds and can trivially be marginalized and crushed with legislation and its enforcement.

Even though this is true, it is not impossible to expand their horizon. We still have not figured out the pedagogy or even andragogy of how to teach technology.

Check out my progress with my daughter(10): https://github.com/jackdoe/programming-for-kids, We are also making a card game https://punkjazz.org/programming-time/easy.html to play with her and donate to other kids interested in learning.

Spending time with pi zero and arduino and building retropie games, using links2 instead of chrome from time to time, she is making great progress. Make the lights in her room work after few claps, with arduino nano and sound sensor so her code can control the light.

And this is only with 20-30 minutes per day.

You might think that the kids are blind to what is going on, but they do see, they know something is wrong, they know they are being exploited and cheated to buy lootboxes and skins.

:) at least it makes me feel like things are not as bad.

I repeatedly run the experiment to pitch a low-tech solution to a high-tech fund and aim exactly there:

Reduce the required skill to 1) signing a hosting contract and 2) copying a single file to that webspace. Really!

So that's several orders of magnitude more people than today. Instantly.

But got it the 3rd time officially now, that such would have no societal impact and isn't considered innovative, either. The time isn't here yet.

Then maybe the Eternal September will pass, and October will finally come.

1. What is a Pi?

2. Where's the keyboard/mouse/screen?

3. What does "download a file" mean?

4. What does "run it" mean?

And as for using an Android... that immediately defeats the purpose since they're basically Google data vacuums.

You don’t need to do any of this this listen to the Feynman lectures.

For a short while, when sneakernet was still higher capacity than the internet, people used to embed USB drives in trees and other public places. You'd walk up, plug in, and download the content. Things like full wikis of specialized subjects. Or videos of neighborhood events. Ideally, they were always made somehow read-only. I wouldn't want to imagine what would happen if they were read/write. We'd be right back to the internet we have today.

Still, it's something I do wish would have taken off. Maybe we could still do something like that today by setting up miniature web BBSes on hotspots in or near public parks. Not everything in the world should be open to the entire planet. As long as you weren't in a tourist district, you could be pretty sure the content was at least locally generated.

i will put all kinds of public domain data on it, from most of gutenberg books to all kinds lectures encoded with h265

will be so cool to have to go to the middle of the forest to download a book :)

the whole thing should cost no more than 30$ (biggest challenge is to make sure that the battery bursting in flames wont melt the case and set things on fire)

In the meantime, more links about how these things are done will be appreciated.

You can't win, you can't break even, and you can't get out of the game.

ip, tcp and udp are the same, rip ospf and bgp are pretty much the same linux's skbuffs or bsd's mbufs are the same as before, the linux dma api changed a bit, but the ideas are the same.

there are some changes on the disk layers with geom and such, but nothing super fundamental

there are a bunch of layers of indirection now with VMs and cgroups, but deep down things are the same.

> You can't win, you can't break even, and you can't get out of the game.

there is nothing to win :) its just computers, dont take it so seriously

The fat that this website is down and only links to their Discord is very ironic.

- Degoogled for three years now - Voting with my money (such as supporting Pine64) - Self-hosting my website and some services - Self-hosting at work as much as possible - Learning and applying basic tech instead of some black box from some giant corp - Shopping regional as much as possible - Shopping on alternative online stores - etc.

That may seem unrealistic, since billions-scale companies have much greater resources to invest in user experience, but you have to think of this as asymmetric warfare, with their size being a liability rather than an asset.

For example, large services need to justify their expenses by maximising the amount of money they extract from users (just look at the latest controversial feature of Edge[0]). Also, keeping these alternative services running provides an existence proof to regulators about how services don't need to be exploitative, giving them cover to write rules that re-balance the playing field, such as requiring social media and messaging companies to make their services interoperable.[1]

[0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-59492429

[1] https://marketresearchtelecast.com/digital-markets-act-meps-...

Not really "the vast majority" ...

I believe the problem on Google's side is that it is easier to do good services on easy stuff, like mail and simple search querries like "who is the president in Finland" or "when does X close".

So Google prioritizes trivia searches over searches an unsophisticated dentist would querry to look up some procedure.

Programmers just seem to rely more on websearches where other fields have like magazines, workplace courses and conferences.

I know none of the former who have built self-promotion-based $multi-million empires. I wish that were true of the latter.

The magic and evil of software and hardware is that you don’t have to understand it to use it. Elon musk memed people into crypto.

I boycott Facebook, Amazon, and Disney.

How is having and deciding to live by a set of personal principals, even if there isn’t an outcome on “market forces” in any remote way comparable to believing you’re a bird?

I don't see this mentioned enough but it wouldn't be surprising if some companies will want to start owning and running their own IT infrastructure. Buy your own servers and setup a small data-center for a small to medium business. This will be a thing again. The pendulum has to swing, but the question is -- is there money in enabling this for companies that want to go this way? I expect some startups in near future to target this opportunity and help shift towards decentralization (again).

I have 3 spare laptops lying around; weakest of them is with a Celeron J4155 and I have put a web app with no caching on it (it does have a persistent DB) and hammered it with my workstation until it finally started giving up at ~2500 req/s (Elixir/Phoenix stack). Again, that's a Celeron J4155 with a SATA III SSD in an M.2 factor (so disk speed caps at 550MB/s at best; usually 400-460) and 12GB RAM. Most programmers wouldn't touch such a machine.

I imagine I can buy 2 more of these laptops and make a completely replicated 3-cluster of the entire stack of our company and the slowest requests (on admin UI where we have a lot of SQL JOINs) would likely never go above 200ms. That totals at about 600 EUR (yep, I bought the laptop second-hand for 200 EUR). Then 500 more EUR for a good UPS to plug the laptops and my routers to. Boom 1100 EUR and several weekends later I can likely charge my own employer for hosting at 100 EUR a month for their entire infrastructure and I would likely still be ripping them off even with that.

The only real cost is human time and energy invested in making it work. But for most companies that's not a 24/7 fight so that cost is fairly low. You can do it twice a year and you're likely never going to have problems.

So yep, I am completely with you here (if my rant didn't make it obvious). Infrastructure costs are already being heavily optimized by companies out there.

If this were true, what made the cloud providers popular in the first place?

Hosting apps in the cloud was a fair exchange 10 years ago because operational tooling in general was more immature. Nowadays it's much easier to self-host many pieces of software though.

Without a cloud you’re always running up against limits, out of power, out out cooling, out of rack space, out of hardware. You get new resources by adding to wish lists and seeing if the end of quarter budget will agree with your request which might be filled in a few months, maybe next year, often never.

You hoard hardware that ends up doing nothing most of the time so you have it when you do need it. Management spends a lot of time and energy managing the datacenter budget.

With cloud you get what you want without asking too much and management periodically spearheads savings efforts to show off, but ultimately usually spends a lot more than they would have otherwise with less friction.

A big part of cloud adoption, according to my theory, is getting executives out of the way of computing resource needs and freeing up their time to fill with something else like bothering employees for more status updates (which are easier and require less skill).

I grew up in this era and keep hearing this repeated but it simply wasn’t true. Enterprises would plan ahead and buy enough hardware for years and it would work fine until you bought more. The myth that you need to scale your infrastructure 10x in a day doesn’t apply to 99% of enterprises, and even if it did it’s probably a result of bad planning on the part of leadership. As a result of the current paradigm businesses end up renting servers at a substantial markup for fairly obsolete hardware.

Over a given period of time, computers get faster/cheaper by more than most businesses expand. When you need to expand, buying a newer, faster machine may cause you to save money because the faster machine uses less power than the existing one.

This lasted for 11 years and only stopped because two of the 5 senior engineers retired and because the company was bought a few weeks earlier.

So again, don't look at this through Silicon Valley lens. Most of the companies in the world have a very different mold compared to SV.

Professional hardware is expensive and server h/w is a small part of it.

I bet most customers of cloud services are not in a high-growth phase, so this is scenario most organizations aspire to ("What if we suddenly got popular?" is a fantasy that's hard to disabuse someone of internally, if you want to be known as a team player

> Management spends a lot of time and energy managing the datacenter budget. With cloud you get what you want without asking too much...

I fully agree, this is the core reason why most companies gravitate towards cloud: management abdicates control of costs to engineers, resulting in less friction - but its OpEx, not CapEx, so the bean counters are chilled about it. If the same low-friction approach were applied to DC equipment, you'd get similar results, but cheaper.

The cost of these services is not because big tech has to use that much to run them, but because big tech would make less money if they lowered prices. AWS generates tons of profits, why lower that for no reason?

That's not the people we're talking about. Racking a server and setting it up to do virtualization takes maybe a few hours for one person, if that, over a period of years. Maintenance on the host itself is the same.

The real labor cost is in setting up and maintaining applications for your specific needs. None of that goes away by using someone else's hardware.

But AWS does a lot of that for you by offering cloud services and not just hardware. That is why people pay so much more for AWS than other just hosting solutions.

It also doesn't really work. Some textile company is going to have some line of business software to run their textile mill. Amazon doesn't provide that. You still have to do labor to configure it. These are the hard things, because they're custom and don't have a huge installed base of people who already encountered and solved all the problems you're going to have. But for the same reason, they're the things AWS doesn't provide.

What they provide is common things like DNS. But DNS is easy to set up and maintain, because it's common, and so already has smooth edges. That's not where the labor was going.

Also, outsourcing moves the blame to someone else if things go wrong. (and things in infra go wrong nearly constantly).

The problem with this kind of thinking is ofcourse, that there is no risk taking and innovation in suchs an organisation..

It gets really tempting to setup a backup/failover node on one of my spare laptops lately...

My old employer had a strategy which basically boiled down to owning everything inside this company expect for the coffee machines and cleaning crew. His reason being? This made it possible to run on very thight margins when the economy takes a downturn without having to scramble for money because of leased/loaned equipment etc.

In the 2008 crisis, this is how he stayed afloat with his company, and even made a pretty profit during a time of crisis too.

I don't think your salary counts as CAPEX, it's a normal monthly expense for the company.

This has now created an entire ecosystem of developers and "devops engineers" (what we used to call sysadmins) who know little beyond the cloud and have to keep using it for career-related reasons. This in turn pushes companies to use the cloud as finding talent for old-school on-premises infrastructure is difficult.

It's true that cloud providers aren't reliably cheaper as some assumed at one point. But there's something to be said for cutting out the fully burdened costs of some number of employees (especially given everyone is saying tech talent is expensive and scarce at the moment) and just letting AWS deal with it even if you could theoretically do it cheaper yourself.

I had to laugh at someone's comment around re:Invent last week that just because Amazon has to offer 17 types of databases for its customers (or whatever the exact quote was) doesn't mean you have to collect them all as if they were Pokemon.

Where I work right now people don't just quit two days later. They like the company and if they feel they want to go someplace else they're not being difficult about it. They cooperate in passing down their knowledge to colleagues before they go.

It's not a matter of outsourcing culture. Cloud providers really do provide computing in a cost efficient matter since they practically provide IT infrastructure at wholesale, and it produces an anti-trust risk because, as you pointed out, the actual hardware that can make it go is not nearly as expensive.

And we don't have the requirements of most big Silicon Valley companies that you reference. It boggles my mind why so many commenters IMMEDIATELY assumed we're a hyper-growth startup or whatever. We're an expanding data provider and our growth is super predictable, and our set of requirements changes like once a year.

So really, not sure why you and others keep repeating things I already agree with. The cloud wins from one point / scale and on, absolutely; otherwise it wouldn't ever take off. I am saying that people give up way too quickly and run to the cloud long before they need it -- that's all.

Even with the specs you mentioned, you can rent a lightsail server that is comparable on AWS for like 80 usd a month, so I would push back against the idea that using cloud services in pretty much any scenario is a purely technical decision.

Part of the context of discussing things this way is the original article: do the prevalence of service companies signal the end of big tech? I would say no, because the only way to not be reliant cloud service providers is to do what you describe and compete directly with their infrastructure services by forming your own technical infrastructure. But the logical conclusion to doing things this way is that eventually whoever can control more physical infrastructure has an advantage. What if Amazon is able to replicate your service offerings? They would be able to immediately able to offer their version using their cloud services at a fraction of the price because they can amoratize the cost of computing over their cloud business. Then, when they have eliminated you as competition, they can recoup everything by increasing the price. This is a HUGE anti-trust concern, and one that all tech companies should be at least a little bit concerned about in the long term. It doesn't go away because you can have an (in your case more expensive than lightsail) up front investment to own your companies computing resources.

Give me an AWS service with predictable billing and ability to put hard limits so you don't have your credit card charged for surprising amounts if you get bursty unexpected loads, and I'll be all over them without thinking of on-prem hosting.

It would be a lot preferable for there to just be multiple computing resource providers, rather than just three, but the reality is that setting yourself up as a cloud provider is quite inaccessible. Democratizing the industry of cloud services will probably require regulation.

So it pays off to be wary of filter bubbles. The SV way of doing things assumes a ton of VC money to burn, something that, to this day, is still not a wide trend in the EU (even if it happens here and there).

Plus that company's setup is not unusual in any way per se; the only "unusual" thing is "we don't run to the cloud at the first IT problem". A ton of other companies are like this, I'd bet even in the US.

Right now they/we can't do it though, the talent is there but that talent is super busy reworking software that's no longer well-adapted to their new requirements. We'll see if the topic becomes more relevant in the future.

One can rent VMs from Hetzner at 1/3 the price of AWS (and 1/10 the data transfer fees). No managed services, like Dynamo or S3, but will full convenience of on-demand scale-up

Or, for mid-sized corporations - buying a rack of computers, wiring them together, and installing OpenStack to make an internal cloud - that isn't some black magic wizardry either

A lot of these threads end up talking about "scaling" from a pure hardware perspective. Once you start talking about medium-to-large companies, the real scaling headache is people, process, and organizations.

Obviously from one scale and on the cloud is very much worth it. IMO the discussion has to be shifted to "before which point you can easily get away without the cloud?".

My point never was to idolize on-prem; I have agreed in other comments that from one point and on the cloud absolutely wins.

I'm mostly pointing out that there is a lot you can do before bowing your head to Amazon and accept $30_000+ monthly bill for infrastructure that I can fit in my 1 square meter food closet and which would likely cost me (or a few other experienced backenders) 2-3 weekends to setup.

Time will tell but IMO it's super important to reserve the right to take a deeper look if you don't like your costs.

We're not as helpless as big tech wants us to believe.

I don't think that setting it up is main problem here. Keeping it up to date and secure is the hard part.

https://oxide.computer

But most of the problem isn't with infrastructure. Once you start using AWS's services it is the software that is most problematic. And that is why all these infrastructure / cloud provider wants to do serverless.

I hate having to learn all of AWS, GCP and Azure proprietary tech, I’ll take a Linode box any day thank you

Colo is cheap, connectivity is cheaper then it has ever been, and most bussiness don't require massive scaling to do their bussiness.

Also, owning your own infra allows you to innovate and play a game outside of the borders aws, gcp and azure are drawing up for you.

However, Cloudfront, JSDeliver, etc are a pain. I understand the benefits of caching javascript locally to me, but I want to see companies start hosting their scripts all from their own servers.

If FontAwesome isn't already a tracking company, it's only a matter of time. Cringy-cool name, tentacles throughout the web, all for _fonts_. I'm a senior fullstack dev and I get tradeoffs, but the technical-societal-tradeoffs of the web are bewildering.

The major exception for us is S3, scaling storage seems like it would suck terribly.

Not just companies. Web developers love the complexity of their stack. Some monolith written in native performant language and put on a decent hardware can cover needs of the most reasonable size business. This simple fact makes them very uncomfy when presented. Many of them would not be even aware that such things are possible. They'd rather be spoon fed by the likes of the Amazon telling them how to develop their wares. The fact that the more inefficient their software is the more money said Amazon will make is ignored. They'd invent all kinds of largely BS arguments to avoid going a simpler route. One can just read numerous articles on HN describing "our stack". On a client site they have this React atrocity. Sure this thing works well for orgs the size of FB. But they're not FB and never will be.

Distributed redundancy is a good example. There are very, very few situation in which this couldn't be resolved with a simple BGP daemon on a server and anycast.

In some way wish it is ending. As human society, we don't need any more mega big company. Everything ought to kept local and small and diverse, so there is no central control, it is only resilient way to thrive for tech and innovation.

You would not enjoy an iPhone made by your local electrician.

Those are three pretty huge things... For me personally, repairability is secondary to their very convenient modular IO port system.

> Less polished OS UI.

You can have them install Windows without the typical manufacturer bloatware or you can put *nix on it. For me, that's better than macOS.

> worse screen resolution

The resolution on the MacBook Pro 13 and the Framework are nearly the same: 2560 x 1600 vs 2256 x 1504.

Here you've defined "better" to include "can ship very large quantities", which is almost a circular way of defining the answer to be negative, no matter what the company does.

If it can ship very large quantities, it's not a small company.

Imagine what would happen if Rome made those big and long roads all across Europe and then nobody used them out of respect of all the labor that went into them. :D

However, IMO both Apple and Microsoft are at best indifferent to their customers. Not fixing bad UIs even when people complain, putting ads in products you paid for, requiring centralized accounts just to install free apps. You've heard it all before.

I wouldn't enjoy an iPhone made by my local electrician, but I want software to respect me. Linux DEs have genuine flaws and yet I truly miss nothing and gain everything when I move from my work Macbook or my gaming Windows partition to my Linux desktop.

I don't think the decision is between a vertically-integrated big-corp device and a vertically-integrated small-corp device. Even just the current iPhone hardware (which is absolutely incredible engineering) with free software would be a big improvement.

This is a problem that will prevail forever and can't be solved easily. We can experience today too in china the government do crackdown but most of us hate it right? If they don't regulate they grow beyond party.

(Taking example of china because I don't know other country which does crackdown on big giants like this)

It’s a more interesting question to ask if this would be more economically efficient.

it's almost self-evident that it would be more efficient. the more interesting questions are how and why. fair and efficient markets at steady-state would largely be composed of a few medium-sized companies and a bunch of small companies, with new entrants occasionally. that would enable healthy competition that would drive progress while keeping chaotic upheavals mostly at bay. it would also distribute wealth more widely, which means we'd get more diverse ingenuity and more interesting entrepreneurship, rather than having the capable simply stowing away at large companies taking their safe and boring little toll on the income river.

Fab’s are built at such scale in part because finished chips are really easy to ship being both durable and value dense. They also benefit from that scale because of the nature of the lithography process which has many individual steps which need to be done in the same factory, but each step is very fast and operates on a full wafer at the same time. Millions of chips per year is basically the minimum scale that’s in any way reasonable.

That’s a small enough pool that individual failures starts to seriously consolidate the market. It’s already down to a handful of companies that can currently manufacture modern chips and if anything that number is likely to shrink rather than grow.

I was lately thinking about some kind legislative action against network effects. Let's make it easy to migrate to other platforms.

Obvious way to do this is to require big companies to implement "data export" feature with specification.

It is a common problem for data model migration, even outside the context of the big tech companies. I've had cases where the systems were effectively not replicable even though the data was made available because the source system relied on some bespoke piece of data infrastructure software that no one else was likely to replicate. (Even hypothetically open sourcing this infrastructure isn't that helpful because it is usually extremely specific to the operational environment for which it was designed -- you can't drop it into your operational environment.)

All of which adds so much asymmetric friction and cost, which the source provider does not incur, that merely making data models exportable tends to generate limited user value in data models that inherently encode network effects.

Big tech piles up large amounts of cash as it is and they have no idea what to do with it (other than shovel it back to shareholders). They have far beyond the margins they need to keep expanding, even with a 50% income tax. So the first thing it would do is cut into shareholder returns (less cash), their multiples would contract as investors would find them less appealing. Half of America is invested in big tech (in one form or another), and those are by far the most active voters. If they see their portfolios tank due to a huge hike in corporate income taxes, they'll promptly punish the politician/s that are responsible for it. Big tech would keep growing at 50%, so what's the alternative? 70%-80%? It's unlikely to ever have the support required to get it passed, it just plain sounds very egregious as a policy. At very high levels it comes across as: we like to punish success; and that's how it would be run against politically by the other side (Republicans).

Instead you have Americans refusing to go to the doctor because they're afraid of the bill.

> https://www.thebalance.com/u-s-federal-budget-breakdown-3305...

Total Revenue is $4T, Total Spending is $6T, and

> Social Security will be the biggest expense, budgeted at $1.196 trillion. It's followed by Medicare at $766 billion and Medicaid at $571 billion.

That is $1.35T spent on healthcare just for old people (over 65) and poor people. And it is not even the whole amount, since most 65+ people still have to buy insurance. Even if you cut out the 5% profit margins of managed care organizations, or even 15% assuming their function is wholly unnecessary, it still seems unlikely universal health can be offered without increasing tax revenues.

In 2019, total healthcare spend for all of US was $3.9T.

https://www.cms.gov/files/document/highlights.pdf

Aged, blind, disabled, and poor, plus less poor children and pregnant women.

The original claim by smus was that the US could pay for all healthcare, presumably without increasing taxes. I find that hard to agree with. Even if we assume we can cut 25% overhead from the $4T total, the US would still need to come up with $1.5T+ to meet $3T total healthcare spending.

I do not see it happening without increasing taxes. Which may not make any effective difference other than to redudant employees of managed care organizations (MCOs) who get laid off, because presumably the premiums currently getting paid to the MCOs simply get collected as taxes.

The federal share is not the whole public cost; Medicaid is a state/federal cost sharing program.

We already spend more per Capita than countries with socialized medicine, so it stands to reason we should be able to socialize our medicine with a reasonable increase in expenditure on health care.

That extra money doesn't need to come from raising taxes. It can come from our incredibly bloated "defense" budget

IMO the far left challenging free speech is a bit of a trojan horse. Yes, you can use censorship to suppress distasteful ideas, but it's also obvious that if you give corporations the power to censor whatever they want, they will also use it to censor anything you say to criticize them. Look at what the Chinese government is doing, they can basically erase anything that makes China look bad from the internet in less than 30 minutes. Is that what we want here too?

Free speech is not a "far right" idea. It's the basis of democracy.

I don't care if I group up with "lefties" or "righties" to make important societal changes happen. If they are on board with the vision, let them believe in Santa if they need that to sleep better.

In the end the powerful remain powerful, and the weak remain weak. IMO much of democracy is a smokescreen. With apologies to Marx, the opiate of the masses is democracy.

Yeah, and rightwing is a bunch of saints that never deplatformed anyone?

It's no wonder FB is pretty much always positive about this law or that law that will supposedly regulate tech in one way or another.

Big tech is unlikely to attack that way. It's far better for big tech to stop these things via new technology, rather than try a political process which will require expensive brib^W lobbying and is subject to backlash. Big tech have a far bigger advantage on the tech front than the political front.

PiHole could be trivially sidestepped by hardcoding the DNS server and then encrypting DNS in the name of security (Didn't some Androids have Google hardcoded?). Android/iOS could allow some apps to ignore VPNs (this already happened with some Apple software).

Gmail is pretty much a standard right now (even if there's no public technical standard involved; only Google's apps can communicate with Gmail). That's monopoly dressed as "new technology".

In the meantime the pressure in the EU is mounting between the both camps of the encrypted messaging ecosystem.

So yeah, both things are happening in parallel.

> PiHole could be trivially sidestepped by hardcoding the DNS server and then encrypting DNS in the name of security (Didn't some Androids have Google hardcoded?). Android/iOS could allow some apps to ignore VPNs (this already happened with some Apple software).

Yeah, you're sadly correct. I dread the day when this will start becoming the norm. But it's also true that many common citizens can stop using service X or Y and it would cost them nearly nothing (with some prominent exceptions like Gmail or Whatsapp).

Cynically I suspect the lobbyists defeat it before it is even signed (ensuring the legislation has appropriate loopholes, etc).

But they seem particularly apathetic to the privacy considerations, robocalls and all things telemarketing, junk mail, insane product placement, and the blatant manipulation of our dopamine system by such corporations.

Does that sound like something that's going to end the big tech era or just keep driving it further?

That would suck, I hate ads but also just like split up subscription shows, not sure if I'm willing to pay for that either. There's so many I am currently subscribed to 3 different shows and maybe watch 1% of their content. I wanted to watch a movie and I would have had to get Paramount Plus like wtf... at least a lot of things show up on YT where I can rent it there.

My response is primarily about YT and mobile phone usage (where I don't have a browser extension adblocker). On mobile I don't open websites, just scan the suggested articles.