I'd defer to telco nerds on that ;-;

Ah yeah. “Community Antenna Television”, I believe it was originally called.

What about ADSL?

@fivetonsflax @futurebird

Hi, I have worked in the ISP space before.

Cable's asymmetry wasn't an intentional choice. But a design vestige of its history. Originally these systems were designed as a one-to-many (and one way) network. Radio waves were blasted down the wire and into the back of TV sets

The lacking upload speed is because the networks were never *designed* with the idea of broadcasts coming back up the pipe. DOCSIS was grafted on to cable TV networks as an afterthought and required major cleanup of the design of the networks to accommodate them

Capitalism connected the overwhelming bulk of the planet to the internet and then ran headfirst into a problem: Nobody had any *money*

Those endless deluges of boner pills and pop up ads for "free money" were a capitalism "pioneer species". Eeking out fractions of pennies at a time. The name of the game was how much sludge you could fling and how many inboxes you could flood with it.

Then, after the turn of the century, they realized that malware could make money. Just turn peoples computers into email relays or DDoS vectors. Weigh the machine down with spyware and adware served up through garbage apps and P2P software (looking at you, KaZaA)

Meanwhile the capitalists looked at services like Geocities and thought "how can we inject ourselves in the middle and extract rent for this?" and we ended up with the "social media era" of "web 2.0". We moved off the free hosting of ISP's and into "the cloud" and started normalizing shovelling ads everywhere on MySpace/Twitter/Facebook.

Then the capitalists realized that they were leaving pennies (or fractions of pennies) on the table by not siphoning every single persons *data*. Surveillance capitalism became the name of the game to sell to advertisers.

Now we're at the final, nauseating junction with the AI slop machine. They've spent 20 years picking away at every shred of flesh, so it's a mad dash to scoop up the bones and dump them all into a giant pot and boil down the marrow and hope that the slop that oozes out of that brew is palatable to force feed to the populus

You mean to tell me there are people who think there's no such thing as inherent value?!

That is seriously not normal. Like, that's one of those rare economic theories where, if you told it to a capitalist and a socialist, they'd *both* say you're nuts. They don't agree on much, but they definitely agree that they want nice things!

@futurebird

Fiber seems to have finally solved that problem. Same bandwidth both ways.

Until now, I figured the bandwidth asymmetry of DSL and cable was some kind of intentional “consume, don't produce” design decision, but…well, fiber ISPs would be throttling upstream if that were the case, so I guess bandwidth asymmetry was nothing more than a technical trade-off this whole time?

Happy to see it, at any rate. Uploading a software build now takes seconds instead of minutes.

@futurebird

Ah, those were the days of promise and possibility. Then it all turned stupid.

When I see something advertised, that usually makes me suspicious of it -- because they're spending money promoting it rather than making it a better product.

I suspect if neurodivergent people were more the norm, "advertisements" as we know them simply would not exist.

https://mastodon.social/@Sadsquatch/116452189790160993

My partner's late mother, just a couple of years ago: "If there weren't advertisements, how would we know what to buy?"

@futurebird

Que es el?

Facebook, Amazon, the people who promoted putting everything in the cloud.

I remember early Ebay;
your search for 'crystal cat sculpture' has yielded 214 results all unique basically the us was an online garage sale before the Power Sellers ruined it. Everything I posted sold. Now I am lucky to get one sale a month.

now your search for 'crystal cat sculpture' has yielded 2,140M results out of which 95% are the same

I miss old ebay.