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wmf 2 hours ago [-]
I tune out at this "what Steve Jobs would have done" talk. A thing needs to stand on its own without borrowing Steve Jobs (or Jeff Dean as I saw someone do the other day).
For something so complex like a PC or desktop experience, having a bunch of oppositional goals (like ad pop ups) do not serve the user well enough. Often times a committee releases a product, but there is no real consensus or accessibility in mind.
wmf 2 hours ago [-]
That sounds like a false dichotomy. You want opinionated software? Great, so do I. Design the software, own your decisions yourself, and explain your thinking without shortcuts.
cyanydeez 1 hours ago [-]
Also, steve jobs made utterly stupid decisions in a lot of areas. If you're trying to revolutionize something, try not to use someone who was clearly flawed in many aspects. Otherwise it sounds like you're just building a facade.
initramfs 1 hours ago [-]
Yes, and Seward also made a Folly. I suppose he missed out on some things, but his success rate at predicting features that are now standard was higher than most in that era.
wombat-man 1 hours ago [-]
Yeah, reading his biography was interesting. He had the problem of tech not quite being where he wanted it to be over and over. But eventually things really hit.
thwgrw 2 hours ago [-]
I mean can't get a more incestous tech cliche! There is a world out there too folks.
bigyabai 2 hours ago [-]
The VC Approved™ Software Validation Lifecycle:
→ What would Steve Jobs do? \
/ |
| ↓
What would Steve Jobs do? What would Steve Jobs do?
↑ |
| /
\ What would Steve Jobs do? ←
initramfs 2 hours ago [-]
You're listening to WWSJD, the Los Altos FM station where Apple pilgrims tune in to the station that Steve Jobs did!
zokier 2 hours ago [-]
I'm struggling to understand what the concrete proposal here is.
> So what is Thinnernet? Imagine a fiber optic bundle of undersea cables- maybe a hundred or so 10Gbps cables comprising....
and the question goes unanswered. is it a protocol? physical layer? guideline? no idea.
initramfs 2 hours ago [-]
It's all of the above, integrated with a maximum latency for each tier level. Not a new protocol, but adopting the best of the best, like QUIC over UDP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUIC#Client_support
Apple is a vertically integrated company, so the idea is that a mobile carrier/ISP could help ensure the middle trunk from server to client arrive in a timely fashion. Often that involves good QoS and limiting streaming to 720p. But there are a lot of other things that can be done to limit slow page loading. For example, I tried loading Reuters on a slow data connection, and it took much longer than BBC. https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm
MrDOS 22 minutes ago [-]
> There is a funny email that had been released after before Jobs's passing where a user complained of a spotty signal, and his advice was basically to not hold the phone in that direction (or with his hand over the top part where the antenna was positioned).
Is this a reference to “antennagate”[0], when Jobs dismissed an affected user telling them to “just avoid holding it that way”[1]?
> because 3G technology at the time wasn't robust, and one shouldn't have expected him to have all the solutions that were out of his control
If so, this is an incredibly bad take. Lots of other phones had implemented good 3G connectivity at the time, including Apple's own prior iPhone. Apple made a mistake here, and the takeaway should be that corporate hubris is real and companies aren't your friends, not some cockamamie prattle about how we should accept bad products because technology is hard, boo hoo.
> had Jobs lived to 70 or 80
Jobs' own death is another fine demonstration of his arrogance. Very ironic to refer to it in this paragraph.
Core idea from this: we do need something that discourages web page bloat. The last try at this was Google AMP, which didn't go over well with either site operators or users. Any better ideas?
arjie 1 hours ago [-]
To be honest, one thing I've been interested in is a totally markdown-only web. You leave everything the same, you just use a Markweb browser as the only thing and it only accesses text/markdown. Then I build Yet Another Protocol Bridge for my blog and no one visits it ever again. That sounds like fun.
Animats 1 hours ago [-]
The trouble is, people keep extending Markdown to add HTML features. There's even Javascript embedded in Markdown.[1]
You'd just create churn, not a fix.
There is no "adding HTML features" to Markdown. Markdown is a superset of HTML. You can simply put HTML tags (including script tags) in your Markdown.
frogperson 51 minutes ago [-]
Check out the gemini:// protocal. There are browsers, search engines, and the whole thing is basically markdown.
its a cool idea, but lacks content. Discoverability is kinda bad as well. All fixable problems. I think it could take off given some good content.
t0mas88 2 hours ago [-]
Adblockers. On a lot of sites a significant portion of the bloat is from third party ads and tracking.
dnautics 2 hours ago [-]
gemini gave it the old college try
blfr 2 hours ago [-]
The coordination and discipline required to build it is quite simply not there (or here, or anywhere). We will sooner have multi-gigabit space internet or 7G.
mjs06 3 hours ago [-]
Agree with many of your points (especially on how Steve jobs would have obsessed on this topic), but how do you think it reaches the masses?
milleramp 2 hours ago [-]
Through a series of tubes.
initramfs 3 hours ago [-]
by train. The internet train. :)
card_zero 1 hours ago [-]
That would be high bandwidth and high latency, which might be the opposite of what's being proposed in the article. (It's difficult to be certain what's being proposed in the article. I'm fairly sure the article is about internet, beyond that point all is guesswork.)
initramfs 1 minutes ago [-]
I wrote a number of articles that try to address the many stacks of the application, transport, and OS layers. The best platform I can think of are the mid 2000's Symbian S60 phones, which were Real Time Operating Systems and used J2ME:
https://inavoyage.blogspot.com/2026/06/how-about-new-java-ba...
There are new Java'based platforms that could build upon that, but chips today have so much processing power that they might think it's easier to develop a higher level language with more dependencies. But that leads to more maintenance if some package gets lost or broken.
I'm waiting at the station. Tell me when you arrive.
sottol 2 hours ago [-]
I've sort of been thinking about this as well. Personally, I'd like to re-capture the era of personal blogs and niche knowledge discovery of the earlier web I experienced - crossed with something easy to host/publish and not requiring a browser.
I don't really have any coherent picture but I would like to see these ideas I think:
- Anti-commercial/anti-tracking: maybe requiring some sort of open-source license for all published content that makes it harder to commercially exploit the information, ideally this would be by and for the community, especially in light of recent aggressive LLM-training crawling. I would also like to exclude advertisement and tracking.
- Browser-less: The idea would be to do away with the complexity of the modern web (as people say, browsers are basically operating systems), back to more of its hyper-text roots. Simple documents, mostly textual information. I could imagine a mix of basic markdown and some pre-wired complex/interactive views like "forum" or "blog" and so on (differences in how data is loaded, presented, ...) - the idea would be to implement the "app" part in the browser-replacement and not in the web-page itself if that makes sense. This would lead to more uniformity but that might be a good thing. I'm not even sure if/how images would fit in or videos.
- Peer-to-peer?: Hosting should be as simple as hitting a "publish" button on an article. I like the idea of decentralization, so maybe there could be some sort of peer-to-peer federation where users could "host" content that they've read, liked or general content that's part of a certain (sub-) community. This might require some ranking like HN or a similar mechanism to (unfortunately) censor certain content if the community would not believe it to match their values - so not ultimate freedom. P2P would be more about decentralization, and maybe anti-tracking than pure censorship-resistance.
A session might look like opening the "non-browser" app - it would be fast and require very little memory. Then you'd select or type a community/site and you view of all the content with filters and sorts, depending on the community/site's "template" (again, this is not JS/HTML - basically a native form rendered directly if you will). When you feel like it, you click the "create" button, a text-area + preview pops up and you write your post or article in markdown. When happy, you "publish" and it gets slowly disseminated through all the P2P nodes of your community. This could encompass communities like HN or reddit even if the voting mechanics are worked out, personal blogs, ... but would probably exclude e-commerce stores or video sites because the engine would be potentially too simplistic - and that's fine by me.
Modern smartphones could implement more Data Saver features, but websites could opt-in by using less data. For example, https://marcusb.org/hacks/tinyblog.html
dccoolgai 59 minutes ago [-]
I've been thinking more lately about how to get "Basic Web" - just like normal HTML and maybe a little bit of CSS (No Service Workers, Background Sync, DRM, etc.) and make it work over a LORA/Meshtastic rig somehow.
13415 2 hours ago [-]
Personally, I think Reticulum is the parallel Internet. It could even replace the Internet Protocol, and whatever the IP protocol connects is in my view the Internet.
numpad0 1 hours ago [-]
...may I suggest "Intelligent Software-Defined Network" as an acronym for the sake of giving it one
For something so complex like a PC or desktop experience, having a bunch of oppositional goals (like ad pop ups) do not serve the user well enough. Often times a committee releases a product, but there is no real consensus or accessibility in mind.
> So what is Thinnernet? Imagine a fiber optic bundle of undersea cables- maybe a hundred or so 10Gbps cables comprising....
and the question goes unanswered. is it a protocol? physical layer? guideline? no idea.
Is this a reference to “antennagate”[0], when Jobs dismissed an affected user telling them to “just avoid holding it that way”[1]?
> because 3G technology at the time wasn't robust, and one shouldn't have expected him to have all the solutions that were out of his control
If so, this is an incredibly bad take. Lots of other phones had implemented good 3G connectivity at the time, including Apple's own prior iPhone. Apple made a mistake here, and the takeaway should be that corporate hubris is real and companies aren't your friends, not some cockamamie prattle about how we should accept bad products because technology is hard, boo hoo.
> had Jobs lived to 70 or 80
Jobs' own death is another fine demonstration of his arrogance. Very ironic to refer to it in this paragraph.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone_4#Antenna
1: https://www.macrumors.com/2010/06/24/steve-jobs-describes-ip...
[1] https://www.markdownlang.com/advanced/javascript.html
its a cool idea, but lacks content. Discoverability is kinda bad as well. All fixable problems. I think it could take off given some good content.
There are new Java'based platforms that could build upon that, but chips today have so much processing power that they might think it's easier to develop a higher level language with more dependencies. But that leads to more maintenance if some package gets lost or broken.
As for the internet speeds themselves, It is similar to net neutrality but a voluntary guideline by the website developers: https://inavoyage.blogspot.com/2026/06/the-sierpinski-triang...
I also explore QUIC, but it's already implemented and not everything needs it, except higher bandwidth: https://inavoyage.blogspot.com/2026/06/5-things-to-lighten-d...
I don't really have any coherent picture but I would like to see these ideas I think:
- Anti-commercial/anti-tracking: maybe requiring some sort of open-source license for all published content that makes it harder to commercially exploit the information, ideally this would be by and for the community, especially in light of recent aggressive LLM-training crawling. I would also like to exclude advertisement and tracking.
- Browser-less: The idea would be to do away with the complexity of the modern web (as people say, browsers are basically operating systems), back to more of its hyper-text roots. Simple documents, mostly textual information. I could imagine a mix of basic markdown and some pre-wired complex/interactive views like "forum" or "blog" and so on (differences in how data is loaded, presented, ...) - the idea would be to implement the "app" part in the browser-replacement and not in the web-page itself if that makes sense. This would lead to more uniformity but that might be a good thing. I'm not even sure if/how images would fit in or videos.
- Peer-to-peer?: Hosting should be as simple as hitting a "publish" button on an article. I like the idea of decentralization, so maybe there could be some sort of peer-to-peer federation where users could "host" content that they've read, liked or general content that's part of a certain (sub-) community. This might require some ranking like HN or a similar mechanism to (unfortunately) censor certain content if the community would not believe it to match their values - so not ultimate freedom. P2P would be more about decentralization, and maybe anti-tracking than pure censorship-resistance.
A session might look like opening the "non-browser" app - it would be fast and require very little memory. Then you'd select or type a community/site and you view of all the content with filters and sorts, depending on the community/site's "template" (again, this is not JS/HTML - basically a native form rendered directly if you will). When you feel like it, you click the "create" button, a text-area + preview pops up and you write your post or article in markdown. When happy, you "publish" and it gets slowly disseminated through all the P2P nodes of your community. This could encompass communities like HN or reddit even if the voting mechanics are worked out, personal blogs, ... but would probably exclude e-commerce stores or video sites because the engine would be potentially too simplistic - and that's fine by me.
Modern smartphones could implement more Data Saver features, but websites could opt-in by using less data. For example, https://marcusb.org/hacks/tinyblog.html