I believe Americans are naive to the bad deal they're currently sitting with. It is the most materially wealthy place on earth, yet with terrible distribution – this is not a technical problem, it is a cultural problem.
My favorite example is to describe a suburb. A lot of people in the world do not know how dystopian an American suburb is: many residents do not know their neighbors, acquiring food requires driving a car or paying someone else to drive, there exists a strict separation from nature/outdoors, depression and other preventable illness rates are high, life expectancy in some regions is declining, there is no plaza/piazza/"downtown." And yet, there are all of these buildings with concrete and glass (and vinyl siding) and more, with plumbing and electricity and often natural gas. The suburb despite its immense resources is simply not subject to a design process and not well-implemented.
This is the deal that Americans unwittingly signed up for. It is not a very good deal, and if we were willing to more intelligently engage our political processes we could — as the article suggests — have a much more favorable arrangement. However, if Americans writ large remain ignorant to how good it could be, the healthy political engagement will not materialize.
So here is a contrasting perspective, shared in hopes of spurring some healthy negotiation from my fellow Americans -> Imagine walkable residential neighborhoods with cafes/restaurants/shops where neighbors interact and by interacting reduce premature mortality, education is not just free but comes with a humble stipend, more than half the population commutes via passive transit, retail businesses are allowed to operate at almost any size, there is a guaranteed basic income for anyone disabled or simply unlucky, neighbors share resources like food and tools, police are trained and police officer candidates are screened to prevent those with exceptionally low IQ's from entering the field, administrators go to prison for violating laws, traffic systems are routinely redesigned and upgraded for safety and efficiency... And if any of this sounds like a pipe dream then I urge the skeptics to travel – every example above has been successfully implemented somewhere, in Thailand or Switzerland or Japan etc.
Naivety is the common trait that currently holds America back from what it really quite easily could accomplish.
But who are you to decide whether suburban Americans are living the right kind of life? Surely if they wanted to they could move to an apartment in a dense inner-city area. It would be cheaper than living in a large house in the suburbs and save them from spending more on heating, maintenance and cars. It would save them time as well, because they could be located close to their office. Despite all these downsides they still prefer to buy large suburban houses, drive everywhere, not know their neighbours and so on. Perhaps they just like it that way.
You — like other reactive commenters — missed the point. You are welcome to like suburbs, I don’t care. But you would be a fool to believe that the current state is optimal and that an awareness of better designs would not impact the prospects of fulfilling those better designs. (You’d also be a fool to believe American suburbs are anywhere near the best neighborhoods in the world on any metric.)
Don’t be distracted by the shiny suburbs — pay attention to the ideas contained within the broader comment.
It is the job given to low status men who cannot qualify for other jobs. Every society deals with its low status men in some form or another — in many US regions it is becoming a cop, in Russia it is being sent to war, historically it was being sent to the mines.
No? It's significantly harder to become a police officer than a truck driver or a skilled tradesperson, and, in particular, in most departments there's an actual higher ed requirement.
In Sarasota FL, if I remember correctly, since about 2009-ish, Police need either a two-year degree, or military service. Judging from my personal observations and encounters, more than a few had/have well deserved degrees. The prior Chief had a masters, I think from the FBI National Academy. Did a lot of good for the city, compared to what they had before. I know the criteria does vary wildly though, throughout the country. But in many places, one can find some seriously sharp officers, and a few mighty good ones here and there too. Things are a wee bit different a few miles south in Port Charlotte though.
Also, I was, for unknown reasons, under the impression tptacek had taken hiatus around here. Half glad I was mistaken.
Ja man. We had enough trouble with a small handful of HN monsters chewing up perfectly innocent threads. Now we have LLMs on the loose too. Soon mortals won't be able to leave a comment anywhere without risking limbs. Life is getting tough for lowbrows. Half is generous.
Is that really true? It's not super high status, for sure, but many police departments in the US require every officer to have a bachelors degree. And the pay is higher than average.
I grew up in "walkable residential neighborhoods with cafes/restaurants/shops where neighbors interact" outside the US. Thank you, but no thank you. Crowded, nosy judgemental people, noisy and small properties with constant fights with neighbors.
You're projecting you personal tastes onto others and thinking everybody else is getting a bad deal.
So the stereotypes are true. My friend in elementary school told an amusing story about his friend, in a Swedish family, who moved from our nice suburb to a suburb in another state, one like the grandparent is describing. They didn't understand why there was such a vast difference between the two. It seemed obvious to me, but I guess it's not obvious to foreigners.
You ran right past the GP's statement too:
> yet with terrible distribution
applies to the quality of a suburb too. Obviously. You wouldn't catch me dead in a Texas suburb or Florida suburb.
You can apply the same argument to wealthy dense neighborhoods in affluent areas full of designer coffee and organic produce vs dense neighborhoods in poor areas of a city with monthly food poisoning at local restaurants. Vast difference, go check Latin America for examples of terrible dense neighborhoods.
My argument is that not even nice dense neighborhoods are that nice compared to nice suburbia.
It's a matter of the person's life values and I believe the majority wouldn't necessarily pick the nice dense neighborhoods over nice suburbia. Also, I'd pick bad suburbia over bad inner cities.
I'd pick the worst version of suburbia over the best downtown city in the world. I've lived in many of each. Suburbs came into existence for a reason! People like them! I've never been closer to ending it all than when I lived in a Seattle highrise surrounded by bodegas and "things to do".
There's considerable cynicism in these comments and I have to suspect a puritan bent in most of them. No, no one is watching you. No, these cameras are not here to catch you doing bad things.
The purpose is very clear: reduce roadway mortality by reducing distracted driving. Frankly, I want OTHER PEOPLE to have this system in their car, while they are driving around me. Half of the cars I've driven over the past 3 or so years feature this system, and it is a good one: only occasionally invoked, and effective at observing driver attention. I'm very glad that my family members drive cars with this system.
Now to the privacy concern – yes, that is absolutely a concern. While generally my solution is to have no cameras at all, surely there are other solutions. Car makers have an incredible ability to spy on their customers, and rather than making that impossible by dumbing down the cars, I'd hope lawmakers and public advocates can devise solutions that allow both safe cars and secure data practices. This is not a case where safety in one domain needs to be traded for safety in another.
> I'd hope lawmakers and public advocates can devise solutions that allow both safe cars and secure data practices. This is not a case where safety in one domain needs to be traded for safety in another.
The reason for the cynicism is that this has never happened. Can you think of a time in tech when a new method that could be used for tracking and spying was devised and then everyone was sensible about it, developed reasonable regulations and it has never come back to bite us since?
It's always extremely easy to argue for anything that increases safety, because then the proponents can propose anything with the justification that their metric isn't zero yet, and then argue that anyone opposing them supports death or crime. But frankly, everything is safe enough. If the status quo was frozen in terms of tracking technology, no one would notice it and decry the lack of safety. Deaths in traffic accidents in the EU are down dramatically since the year 2000. So yes, I don't mind stopping for a bit if that prevents us from descending down a winding path to a place where every single object is always connected, permanently tracked and is mandated to collect, analyze and send out a thousand different data points to keep a tight grip on everything.
> “ Can you think of a time in tech when a new method…”
1. Apple/Google exposure notifications during the latest pandemic.
2. The Signal Protocol.
3. Differential Privacy (DWork et al) deployed by the US Census and Apple/Google.
4. Examine David Chaum’s body of work.
5. PIR motion sensors.
6. Elder care monitors.
7. Cities selecting lidar over cameras in traffic applications (motivated by privacy).
8. Retail foot-traffic counters.
9. Stickfigure/silhouette masking in Japanese elder care recordings.
10. Those traffic signs that read, “your speed is X.”
11. On-air or active-session indicators in recording studios.
Jeez it turns out that when you go looking for examples of designed-for-privacy monitors they are EVERYWHERE. Sounds to me like it is a completely reasonable expectation.
I’m seeing a lot of misplaced cynicism in the comments, much of which fails to deal with the subject matter of the article.
The US really does have a capitalism crisis with declining competition — it does not require any form of special intelligence to see that.
Switzerland really does have vastly superior infrastructure — it does not take some stroke of brilliance to see that.
The essay elegantly articulates the why. Even if the anti-public commentariat doesn’t like Switzerland’s strong governance, even if there is a varying spread of speeds/competition or whatever else is being measured, even if one small country is out-performing a big one on many metrics… it doesn’t change the underlying insights of the essay, insights that the US desperately needs to understand.
It is an essay not a scientific paper. As such it's more an opinion peace. The first question in my head why it does not compare with Rumania and South Korea.
It might be they had a more free market approach (I don't know really). Poland has a strong wireless connection infrastructure and it has there a market approach e.g.
The reason the essay from Switzerland compares to Germany as both counties are part of the German speaking world and to the US as Americans are very loud on HN , Internet so you need to canter this audience.
That's why I don't like this essay. This very specific sound from "we know it better". This essay doesn't want to find the best way for this type of infrastructure. Ironically I know this sound only from Germany.
The author is Swiss – your ad hominem attach fails twice. And again, I'll direct you to original point of my above comment and a point made in the essay: if you want to be effective you'll need to look past ideology to see the actually working dynamics of the system. There is no doubt that the Swiss internet service provision system is superior to the US and Germany – no doubt. The essay explains why, an essay you are welcome to read.
Ok and you couldn't get my argument: Why not Rumania, South Korea? These countries have also a great quality of internet. On mobile Poland, France and Austria?
This is also a difference between an ideologicopinion piece with a "Ive told you so" and "Markets are bad " to an scientific review.
I'm sure the analysis could be expanded – why don't you give your try at an essay? If you write it, I'll read it.
How much should the essay be expanded? Surely we don't want a 1:1 scale model of reality. We probably should not factor in the conductivity of water and compare against the cost of 1 liter of milk; although if I wanted to attack the integrity of the essay I might lament those factors' absence.
Snark aside, I like that the author chose to compare Switzerland, Germany, and the US. It elegantly illustrated the similarities and differences.
Population of Switzerland is around 9 million people. Slightly larger than NYC.
Comparing a country with the population of a single city in America is disingenuous. There are probably some cities in America that have faster internet than Switzerland.
I'll briefly reiterate the essay's primary point, for your convenience, which is agnostic to population size: when a natural monopoly exists, the best solution – regardless of ideology – is to make the underlying infrastructure at once singular and public while fostering competition at the level of servicing that infrastructure. That is how Switzerland accomplished its highly functional fiber-optic network, a system that is at once cheaper, more reliable, and more performant than its US and German peers.
This is a perfect example of my earlier comment: you are talking around the subject, cynically dismissing the point of the essay without even addressing it.
The US has fantastic fiber optic internet that's why this is total BS. I have multi-gig symmetrical fiber in UT, so does family have access to it in New Hampshire, and my friends who live in the Southeastern US.
The only places that have shit internet are states like California and New York. That's not an "America" or a "Capitalism" problem. That's a problem of living somewhere with a dysfunctional government that doesn't allow anyone to build new infrastructure.
Look, as mentioned in the prior comment there are varying spreads of performance across geography (including in Switzerland), and while you might be experiencing one expression of that variance (good internet connection in Utah) you need to look beyond that anecdote to trace the bigger picture and observe performance/cost/reliability beyond your narrow environment.
> "That's not a capitalism problem"
It literally is a capitalism problem, as clarified by the essay; capitalism requires competition to work, and the essay eloquently describes how to accomplish competition in internet service provision.
(Also, what are you talking about, California with "shit internet"?)
There really is this bias — it’s crazy. Not just the name “Swiss,” but allusions to the Swiss flag, Swiss typography, other Swiss branding. It almost looks like some of the products are state run.
(Also, the internet connection actually is phenomenally good.)
Swiss law does require an overwhelming majority of the value of a product be made in Switzerland to use Swiss flag branding, or even Swiss landmarks or other signifiers of Swiss-ness. That's why Toblerone had to remove the drawing of the Matterhorn they've had since forever on the side of their triangular tubes, because some production has been shifted to Poland.
“Already lost” — Culture doesn’t move towards an end state that is homeostatic, it keeps on evolving. The web will keep on evolving, digital tech and communications will keep on evolving. And as documented in the essay, there has in the past been a role for both identification and proof of personhood, and at present it continues to play a role, and in the future it will continue to play a role; this role shifts and changes, and good designs do emerge.
(I share your cynicism/pessimism regarding the state of the web right now, but as a realist I insist on recognizing continuous change and try to personally overcome the common “end state” fallacy/delusion.)
I think your model of open/closed is incomplete and thus misleading. There are more states to a process than "active" and "inactive," and it is not optimal for the system to simply move processes between those two gross states. The obvious example is non-foreground apps during multitasking. A less obvious example is an app during a background refresh.
"Fully closing" a process is not necessarily cleaner than letting the system allocate intelligently, despite what one's puritanical upbringing might make them believe. (Consider how artists often need a messy space to optimally hold their processes.)
I think my point is that minimizing the process doesn't free the ram it's using. Closing it, even if it stays running in the background, should free up resources
As information flows abundantly, and as information processing flows more abundantly, where will the bottlenecks in the system emerge? It surely won't be in design and production. It probably won't be in chips, infrastructure, and energy (already commodities, increasingly competitive). So... what's the bottleneck? Political will? Human discernment/taste? Raw materials?
Let's imagine that Anthropic/OpenAI fail to manufacture scarcity by villainizing Open Weight models (a sincere probability). What is left for these corporations to prop up their prices, or any margin at all? I expect scaffolding around tool use, supporting bespoke implementation and driving risk down for institutional adoption. (They might even build an insurance tool to protect accountants/lawyers from errors in compounded probabilism!)
A question for economists... It seems plainly clear to me that information and information processing is commodifying (for the first time in human history?). Without the age-old bottlenecks at the top of the value chain, capital will surely flow downwards, right?
> It seems plainly clear to me that information and information processing is commodifying (for the first time in human history?). Without the age-old bottlenecks at the top of the value chain, capital will surely flow downwards, right?
Isn't this the thing people have said about every new technology since the printing press? And it has been mostly true, but it has also been the case that the incumbents have fought hard to lock things back up again. Newspapers and radio stations buy each other up, the open web gets locked inside Facebook (which, 30 years ago, people were already worried about with AOL), people have computers in their pockets they can't run their own programs on anymore.
Interests are going to want to lock the new information thing behind a gate so they can charge a toll and censor what they don't like, same as it ever was. You don't win by default, you have to fight to stop them.
I don’t think that comparing LLM’s to the printing press (and radio, film, TV, etc) is an apt analogy, and I don’t think that people have said the same things about the two technologies; the prior technological changes in information dealt with distribution, while this one deals with processing and production.
Recall the notion of a bottleneck, and this distinction will become clear. Those prior technological changes never inverted a bottleneck, and this one does.
> the prior technological changes in information dealt with distribution, while this one deals with processing and production.
Computers and the internet did a lot to make production easier in addition to distribution. Anyone today can use a photo editor to superimpose text over an image in any font in seconds like it's child's play. That used to require knowledge of calligraphy. Film production used to require very expensive equipment that everyone now has built into their phone.
> Those prior technological changes never inverted a bottleneck, and this one does.
Before the printing press, copying books had to be done by hand. If you wanted a million copies of something made you had to be the church or a government. Today there are independent pundits who get a million impressions on their shitposts, and that's with consolidated platforms being largely against them.
We still have an entire edifice (copyright) which is structured around copying requiring a sufficiently centralized apparatus to serve as a useful chokepoint for imposing restrictions and collecting royalties, which is correspondingly under increasing distress as
OpenAI, though they seem to backtrack it lately, have been slowly pushing forward of their launch of ads which would be a supplemental way to support cheaper use of their models. This is currently not as great a fit as the modern day banner ads, but it will be interesting to see where they go with that.
Author here. I chose the biology references for two reasons. 1) I love nature 2) It seemed to provide the most distant examples of IR from what most of us are familiar with.
Of course compilers are probably the most obvious example of Intermediate Representation and form the basis for much of the computer science we draw on any time we compose an IR in code. That, to me, made it less compelling for a feature in this brief essay. I like that my example of an IR in Swift was designed, while the biology examples of IR are not deliberately designed but rather landed upon during extremely chaotic evolution. That contrast compelled me to reference biology, instead of the more immediately adjacent body of work around compilers. Of course I’m not the best author… maybe I chose poorly.
Regarding Notion and blocks — I suspect Notion chose the block architecture because it is maximally agnostic (it is kind of an IR in its own right), allowing for rapid development of anything upstream or downstream of those blocks. Maybe one of their early team members was inspired in some way by the field of IR, or otherwise intuited this design.
My favorite example is to describe a suburb. A lot of people in the world do not know how dystopian an American suburb is: many residents do not know their neighbors, acquiring food requires driving a car or paying someone else to drive, there exists a strict separation from nature/outdoors, depression and other preventable illness rates are high, life expectancy in some regions is declining, there is no plaza/piazza/"downtown." And yet, there are all of these buildings with concrete and glass (and vinyl siding) and more, with plumbing and electricity and often natural gas. The suburb despite its immense resources is simply not subject to a design process and not well-implemented.
This is the deal that Americans unwittingly signed up for. It is not a very good deal, and if we were willing to more intelligently engage our political processes we could — as the article suggests — have a much more favorable arrangement. However, if Americans writ large remain ignorant to how good it could be, the healthy political engagement will not materialize.
So here is a contrasting perspective, shared in hopes of spurring some healthy negotiation from my fellow Americans -> Imagine walkable residential neighborhoods with cafes/restaurants/shops where neighbors interact and by interacting reduce premature mortality, education is not just free but comes with a humble stipend, more than half the population commutes via passive transit, retail businesses are allowed to operate at almost any size, there is a guaranteed basic income for anyone disabled or simply unlucky, neighbors share resources like food and tools, police are trained and police officer candidates are screened to prevent those with exceptionally low IQ's from entering the field, administrators go to prison for violating laws, traffic systems are routinely redesigned and upgraded for safety and efficiency... And if any of this sounds like a pipe dream then I urge the skeptics to travel – every example above has been successfully implemented somewhere, in Thailand or Switzerland or Japan etc.
Naivety is the common trait that currently holds America back from what it really quite easily could accomplish.